Kentik vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

Kentik and Plixer are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Kentik is ranked #31 with an average rating of 9.0, while Plixer is ranked #75. Kentik holds a 1.2% mindshare in NMS, compared to Plixer’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Kentik users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Plixer users who would recommend it.

Kentik

Read 16 Kentik reviews

2,300 Views
1,909 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Plixer Scrutinizer

Read 15 Plixer Scrutinizer reviews

1,610 Views
1,191 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Kentik

Plixer Scrutinizer

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Kentik and Plixer Scrutinizer compete in the network analysis and monitoring category. While Kentik stands out for its SaaS capabilities and ease of use, Scrutinizer shines with its integration flexibility and reporting prowess.

Features: Kentik's strengths include real-time data exploration, effective visualization tools, and powerful DDoS alerting. It offers detailed traffic insights with robust customization options. Meanwhile, Plixer Scrutinizer is recognized for its extensive integration capabilities and comprehensive reporting features, providing valuable network traffic context.

Room for Improvement: Kentik could enhance its API usability, providing more actionable intelligence and improving security rights management. Users also suggest improving the user interface and alerting options. For Plixer Scrutinizer, users wish for SaaS availability, improved data management and storage, and better documentation alongside streamlined updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Kentik's SaaS model simplifies deployment, earning positive feedback for ease of use. Its customer service is noted for being responsive and supportive. Plixer Scrutinizer, primarily deployed on-premises, is praised for a reliable technical support team, although initial deployment can be complex.

Pricing and ROI: Kentik is perceived as cost-effective, particularly for larger deployments, with flexible licensing to accommodate diverse needs. Plixer Scrutinizer offers competitive pricing based on device count and flow capacity, with a flexible licensing model valued by users for its adaptability.

To learn more, read our detailed Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

December 2025

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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

Kentik

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

31st

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (16th)

Plixer Scrutinizer

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

75th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kentik	1.2%
Plixer Scrutinizer	0.5%
Other	98.3%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON

Sales Manager at IFX NEtworks

Client experience and cybersecurity have improved with an easy setup

The solution is valuable for client experience, especially in the financial sector. The most important feature is cybersecurity. The pricing is good, but the functionality is the most important aspect for clients. The solution is easy to deploy and requires only one person to set up, making it easy and quick. Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.

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Ira Mulyanti

Sales Director at ARGA SOLUSI

An affordable product with great integration capabilities

Plixer Core Platform is a valuable feature and a good software. Plixer Scrutinizer uses NetFlow analysis to monitor whatever is there in a network. Price-wise, Plixer Scrutinizer is not an expensive product. Basically, Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that can integrate with any other brand or product in the market, so it is not an area of concern.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."

"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."

"The most important feature is cybersecurity."

"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."

"One of the valuable features is the intuitive nature of building out reports, and then triggering actions based on specific metrics from those reports. It has a really good UI and the ability to surface data through the reporting functions is pretty good. That's helped a lot in the security space."

"Overall, I would give Kentik nine out of ten stars."

"Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives."

"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."

More Kentik pros

"The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting."

"There are other tools out there that will do what Scrutinizer does. But what I have found with Scrutinizer is that it does it very quickly. I've taken 25 million individual data fragments from the different sensors, and it has graphed that and mapped it and presented a picture within 30 seconds. It has a very efficient database algorithm that I am really impressed with."

"It shows us the saturation of the network of devices. It gives us a clear view of the flows in the network to understand, for instance, planning upgrades in the network to get an idea of what's going on the network on traffic flows. It gives us insight, for instance, on what's going on on our VPN Client. There are a lot of things where it provides very helpful information. It also gives us our security reports with quite detailed information on what's going on in the network, and whether there are data exfiltrations and so on."

"It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic."

"The solution helps to enrich the data context of our network traffic. It allows me to see what applications are most in use on a slightly historical basis, going back a day or week at tops. It allows me to tune QoS or traffic shaping around what's being used. It saves me from having to unnecessarily upgrade, if I don't need to."

"The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI."

"We have had many requests to understand in the network which devices are connected to others. Most people don't have this information or are able to establish a map of data flow everywhere around the network. Scrutinizer can really help with this. We are using it to understand who is talking to what, how, and which protocols can help us to improve security and analyze flow."

"It's agnostic as far as what your network gear is. As long as it supports an sFlow, JFlow, NetFlow, some kind of flow monitoring, Plixer will support it very well."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pros

Cons

"In recent months, I've noticed that while the industry is trending towards AI, Kentik has room for improvement in this area."

"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."

"The product could strive for more improvements to become closer to perfect."

"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."

"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."

"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."

"Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end."

"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."

More Kentik cons

"In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required."

"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."

"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."

"The visual acuity of how it presents data can sometimes be confusing. It takes a bit for people to spin up how to look at the graphs."

"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."

"Data retention needs improvement. Data retention is a thing where we are looking for a better way to collect flow data for a longer time to do forensic research on security incidents. By default, data retention is quite low. We need detailed data in safe storage for a longer time, e.g., for a couple of months. An improvement would be a way to export data into a secure long-term storage."

"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."

"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."

More Plixer Scrutinizer cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."

"The tool is cheaply priced."

"Our entire solution, amortized over five years, is in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 a year."

"We just renewed. The pricing is 5,000 euro per year. This is the final price. All tax (20 percent) is included."

"The license is per device. We have 50 devices."

"Compared to some of the other tools we have, it's incredibly reasonably priced."

"There is a recurring maintenance fee after the initial purchase or if we want the license upgrade."

"There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus."

"Currently, the license for Plixer Scrutinizer is subscription-based and at a yearly fee. The price would depend on the amount of traffic you pull in. For example, there are several blocks from a 10K flow, a 40K flow, and a 100K flow, and based on the number of devices that you receive the flows from, that's the license, and it is not a per-interface pricing model, so that is a very strong, very competitive pricing feature of Plixer Scrutinizer. Licensing for the product is also not based on the number of storage, compared to some competing products that are priced based on the amount of storage you need, particularly based on the retention and the amount of data. Plixer Scrutinizer licensing is based on the device, and it's more in the direction of $10,000 because, with just $1,000, you don't have anything."

"We have increased the license over time. We have added more licenses as the network has grown."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?

I would say Kentik's pricing is not cheap. From my perspective as part of the technical team, I would not categorize it as expensive, but I know it is not cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Kentik?

There's always room for improvements and better relations when using any kind of product. We faced some issues with Kentik UI and alerting, which we asked them to fix, and they succeeded. They have...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Kentik?

We are using Kentik mostly for synthetic tests, and from one last year, network monitoring as well. We are using it for inter DC BGP tests and server monitoring as well.

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kentik

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer

January 2026

Download Plixer Scrutinizer product report

Overview

Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.

With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.

Kentik

The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

Plixer

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent.

Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

December 2025

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