No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Catchpoint vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Catchpoint
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (14th), Cloud Monitoring Software (10th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (4th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (7th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Catchpoint0.9%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.0%
Other98.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2867268 - PeerSpot reviewer
Observability Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Proactive synthetic monitoring has reduced major incidents and provides global user experience insights
One thing that is not available is the multi-factor authentication feature concerning monitoring any applications. If an application depends upon MFA for its login flow, Catchpoint doesn't have the ability to bypass or monitor that flow for multi-factor authentication. This is one area where I would like to see improvement in the tool because many applications nowadays use multi-factor authentication, and Catchpoint does lag a bit in providing the end-to-end synthetic observability for applications dependent on MFA. This is one of the major areas needing improvement. Otherwise, Catchpoint has been one of the greatest tools in the synthetic monitoring or digital experience monitoring space, and I don't see anything else right now, but MFA is something that certainly needs some improvement.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"During business hours, it has worked absolutely fine without any issues."
"Catchpoint has impacted my organization positively by speeding up the process in detecting issues much earlier, even before the business reaches out."
"One of the features, the scatter plot, is very useful. It shows red dots wherever there are issues."
"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."
"Overall, my experience with Catchpoint was really great, as it offers monitoring of performance, websites, APIs, and internet services for organizations."
"Catchpoint has positively impacted my organization because we have supported multiple customers and handled many escalations before they became critical issues."
"The product's most valuable feature is the ability to identify and troubleshoot network issues."
"Catchpoint is actually catching issues before customers see them, since it's checking the sites every five minutes or even every minute, via the APIs."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"SAM has altered the way monitoring is being looked at - from just being able to monitor CPU, Mem, Disk and network utilization levels we have moved to the next levels of finding out process related issues, service related issues and specific application related issues to identify root cause of performance issues."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"As I mentioned in one of the other points: "Simplicity at its best"."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The most valuable features of the solution are its real-time node monitoring and Help Desk's feedback."
 

Cons

"There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing."
"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."
"The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats."
"I think Catchpoint can be improved because it is competitively a little costlier."
"Documentation and online indexing are awful but have been improved recently."
"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."
"My experience with pricing, setup effort, and licensing with Catchpoint is that it is not the cheapest product."
"One thing that is not available is the multi-factor authentication feature concerning monitoring any applications."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."
"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."
"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."
"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
9%
Educational Organization
13%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been great. There is always a need to negotiate a bit more to get the best cost for the licenses we plan to buy. We expect better costs fro...
What needs improvement with Catchpoint?
One thing that is not available is the multi-factor authentication feature concerning monitoring any applications. If an application depends upon MFA for its login flow, Catchpoint doesn't have the...
What is your primary use case for Catchpoint?
My main use cases for Catchpoint are synthetic monitoring and transactions monitoring for different applications. We have a lot of critical tier zero applications where there is a need to have synt...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.