Kentik vs SolarWinds Network Device Monitor comparison

Kentik and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Kentik is ranked #29 with an average rating of 9.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.9. Kentik holds a 1.8% mindshare in NMS, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Kentik users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Kentik

Read 16 Kentik reviews

3,784 Views
3,368 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Network Device M...

Read 23 SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reviews

1,914 Views
1,876 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Kentik

SolarWinds Network Device M...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor and Kentik compete in network monitoring solutions. SolarWinds appears to have the upper hand regarding value, pricing, and customer service, while Kentik provides superior analytics and data insights.

Features: SolarWinds Network Device Monitor offers robust monitoring with simplified dashboards and effective alerting, ideal for straightforward network management. It provides real-time device status tracking, customizable alerts, and detailed network insights. Kentik focuses on in-depth traffic analysis and anomaly detection, offering comprehensive network visibility and customizable analytics reports. It provides proactive alerting and real-time traffic dashboards for extensive data insights.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds could enhance its analytics capabilities and integration options, and improve support for larger network environments. SolarWinds may also benefit from expanding its mobile accessibility. Kentik's setup process could be simplified to reduce the complexity of initial deployment. The platform might improve its cost-effectiveness and offer more flexible pricing options. Kentik could also bolster its user-friendly interface for better ease of use.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds provides a straightforward deployment process with excellent customer service, making onboarding smooth and fast. Its support team is known for quick and effective problem resolution. Kentik's deployment often involves integrating with existing systems, requiring a more intricate setup. However, its customer service is responsive and helpful in addressing deployment challenges, ensuring support for complex network environments.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is generally more budget-friendly with a lower initial setup cost, appealing to organizations with tight budgets. It offers a quicker ROI due to its efficient monitoring capabilities. Kentik, though having a higher setup cost, offers a competitive ROI through its advanced analytics features, making it a suitable choice for larger enterprises that prioritize data-driven decision-making. Kentik's enhanced analytical capabilities justify its higher cost.

To learn more, read our detailed Kentik vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

March 2026

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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

29th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

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

SolarWinds Network Device M...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

27th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 1.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor	1.0%
Kentik	1.8%
Other	97.2%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Shubham-Saxena

Network Engineer III at Fortanix

Integrating synthetic tests and network monitoring enhances traffic pattern visualization

The Kentik support team is good. If you want me to rate them on a scale, I would give them eight. I had a call with the Kentik support team for fifteen minutes, so I'm going to give them eight for now. The reason for giving them an eight is that they are good and address our issues. They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us, including what is needed and what is not. However, when we are working on some real issues with Kentik, I sometimes feel there's a delay due to the busyness of their teams. We faced some outages and were not able to get the desired results from Kentik tools, so that took a little time to resolve.

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Sorin Gogean

IT Infrastructure Senior Network Technician at Autoliv

Offers some features but needs better customization and analysis tools

There are solutions that can perform better, but due to pricing for our corporate implementation, we had to stay with this solution. It accomplishes the necessary tasks, but there is room for improvement. The features are not as customizable as we would prefer, but they are workable. If configured properly, you can perform a drill-down analysis. However, I have not used this feature much for our infrastructure on the network side.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support is second to none."

"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."

"In terms of overall vendor partnership, I'd give Kentik a nine out of 10; they're right up there as one of my best partners to work with, amongst all the contracts that I own, and they're very customer-centric, always available, with nothing too small or too big that I can't ask them to help with, and they seem to be willing and able to jump in no matter what."

"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."

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

"Collecting that data and having those metrics first-hand, in real-time, allows us to make an educated decision, versus an uneducated guess."

"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."

"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."

More Kentik pros

"There are vital features of auto-plugin core ports"

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is monitoring."

"In real-time, we know when there's an issue on our network and it helps us to be proactive to solve the situation."

"This product proactively tells us about issues before the users notice."

"Since our devices are spread out across the world, we can see the status of these devices without having to send someone physically to a remote location, which saves money."

"The solution and its interface are elaborate and fully integrate all monitored items for easy analysis and troubleshooting."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is it can alert you when a device is not working."

More SolarWinds Network Device Monitor pros

Cons

"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."

"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."

"Sometimes it's difficult to order the dimensions correctly when trying to make Sankey flow diagrams."

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

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

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

"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."

"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."

More Kentik cons

"The solution lacks in performance monitoring."

"SolarWinds pricing is on the higher side, and in India, every customer is cautious about commercial aspects."

"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could improve the features. We don't have the complete model for the database, and the monitoring for the database is up and down. We expect that we could monitor the blocking items on the database but we don't have that feature."

"The solution lacks in performance monitoring."

"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor lacks the granularity of other monitoring tools like LiveNX."

"The security needs improvement, which is why we are moving away from SolarWinds."

"Integration with different tools, such as ServiceNow and Excel, can be improved."

"It should provide user-friendly page"

More SolarWinds Network Device Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is cheaply priced."

"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 price of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is good."

"I rate the product's price as three to three and a half or on a scale of one to ten, where one means low price, and ten means high price."

"When compared with other solutions SolarWinds is more expensive."

"The enterprise license is good for the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor. However, it is expensive, they should reduce their price."

"Thankfully, it doesn't take a lot of manpower to install and deploy."

"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is not an expensive solution."

"Well, we had a perpetual license and the renewal was $20 to $25,000."

"I find the cost of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reasonable for our company. Though, I'm not aware of the exact licensing cost."

More SolarWinds Network Device Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

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	6
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	14

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

What do you like most about SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

I rate the product's initial setup process a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a difficult phase and ten is an easy process.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

I am not a positive person regarding SolarWinds Network Device Monitor.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kentik

March 2026

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Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

February 2026

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Network Device Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

Network Device Monitor

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

Network Device Monitor is a free tool that makes it easy to monitor the real-time performance and health of a single device on your network with a desktop dashboard that alerts you when your device is in trouble.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

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

Air Rarotonga

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

March 2026

Free Report: Kentik vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

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