LiveAction LiveNX vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

BlueCat and Plixer are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. BlueCat is ranked #50 with an average rating of 7.0, while Plixer is ranked #54 with an average rating of 8.0. BlueCat holds a 0.7% mindshare in NMS, compared to Plixer’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 77% of BlueCat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Plixer users who would recommend it.

LiveAction LiveNX

Read 8 LiveAction LiveNX reviews

1,355 Views
983 Comparison Views

77% willing to recommend

Plixer Scrutinizer

Read 15 Plixer Scrutinizer reviews

982 Views
376 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

LiveAction LiveNX

Plixer Scrutinizer

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

LiveAction LiveNX and Plixer Scrutinizer are network monitoring solutions aimed at enhancing network performance and visibility. LiveNX stands out in usability and customer support, while Scrutinizer offers advanced analytics for comprehensive network analysis.

Features: LiveNX provides visual analytics, dynamic path mapping, and efficient flow collection, emphasizing intuitive operation. Scrutinizer delivers extensive reporting, advanced security threat detection, and in-depth network behavior insights.

Room for Improvement: LiveNX could benefit from enhanced threat detection, increased reporting variety, and deeper forensic capabilities. Scrutinizer may improve with simpler deployment processes, user-friendly interfaces, and more streamlined operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: LiveNX offers straightforward deployment with well-structured onboarding and responsive support, facilitating a smooth transition. Scrutinizer has strong customer assistance but requires a more detailed setup due to its extensive functionality.

Pricing and ROI: LiveNX often has a higher initial cost, seen as delivering greater long-term value through improved efficiency and reduced downtime. Scrutinizer has competitive pricing aligned with its features, potentially offering faster ROI with its strong threat detection.

To learn more, read our detailed LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

March 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

LiveAction LiveNX

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

50th

Average Rating

6.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (48th)

Plixer Scrutinizer

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

54th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of LiveAction LiveNX is 0.7%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Mahesh Doshi

IT at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Very good reporting and alerting abilities but inadequate enhancement support

Before choosing the solution, it is important to rank your requirements from high to low priority. The solution has a lot of features but at a high price. If you will only use 30% of the solution to meet your requirements, then it would be better for you to explore other products. Find the solution that best fulfills your requirements. The solution itself is great. If I could use it properly, then I would rate it a seven out of ten. Unfortunately, support is a factor when determining usability or cost effectiveness. We did not receive the needed support so had to stop using the solution. For that reason, my overall rating for the solution is a five out of ten.

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Ronald Jansen

Owner/President at Abraxax

Reporting is extensive, flexible, and can be custom-made in just a short time

In terms of additional features I'd like to see in the next release of Plixer Scrutinizer, I can't think of any because you can do some integration with other monitoring tools that are not strong in NetFlow or don't have NetFlow at all. There are also some integration possibilities in the product, plus there are alerts, too. Plixer Scrutinizer is a pretty complete product. 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.

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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

"One of the valuable features is the ability to create CLI scripts on the fly to fix any issues. We were using it for QoS modeling to ensure that we were properly modeling QoS, and it basically said here is what you need to fix to get this QoS done, whether it is ACL or something else. It would either push or recommend. If you have the right credentials, you could also push. It is very good if you are a Cisco shop. It gives you reporting, latency, and bandwidth utilization for your applications, so you can do good capacity management planning. There are a lot of pieces that LiveNX can give you. It is a total NPM solution for SD-WAN."

"Its analytical capability is really good."

"We don't have any complaints about the software. According to my team, it's a very good tool that's very intuitive."

"We provide a tool for our customers to manage their reports. It's an extremely highly featured platform capable of producing a lot of data. We spent quite a long time working with customers and LiveAction to create template reports, and they're very good and configurable. You get a lot of data if you don't configure them."

"All in all, LiveAction LiveNX has become an indispensable tool for maintaining and improving our network's reliability and performance, ultimately supporting our organization's goal of providing timely and dependable delivery services."

"The product has a very good graphical interface."

"The intention and the idea of the filter is great."

"The alerting feature is very good because it allows you to set MOS alerts at various network junctures or data points."

"One feature I found most valuable in Plixer Scrutinizer is the very extensive reporting. Reporting is very flexible, though sometimes you need a little bit of support from Plixer Scrutinizer to create custom-made reporting in a very short time. Reporting is a very strong feature of the product."

"Visualization of the network traffic is the most valuable feature. It allows you to drill into information quite quickly."

"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."

"One of the most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer is the reporting, particularly how easy it is to drill down into the reports. Another valuable feature of the solution is its overall visibility. It's great. I also liked Plixer Scrutinizer in terms of deployment time and that it's very simple to set up. Once you get the appliance set up and connected, the customer starts to see results immediately, versus other solutions where that could take a while."

"As a network engineer, the ability to identify what traffic on the link is consuming all the bandwidth at any given time, and provide immediate feedback to the business, is the most valuable feature."

"We didn't experience any bugs."

"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'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

"It is not as robust as other NPM solutions. For instance, there is a problem while labeling specific applications. It works well with well-known applications, but when you have to put in new applications that are not very known and set them up with names, ports, URLs, or some protocols, it is not as intuitive."

"The tool crashes sometimes when we try to pull reports simultaneously."

"Improved documentation and more responsive customer support can help in addressing issues faster."

"This is a horrible solution and I think everything needs to be improved."

"Sometimes the solution does not register devices properly and that is a bug."

"The product is weak in multi-tenancy. We have to install multiple instances of LiveAction, whereas we would like to build it once for our customers."

"The only downside to this software is the price."

"They need to create a more simplified UI."

"They're working on the security areas, so it can provide more insight. What they have is still pretty much IP-concentric. If they were to make it IP and URL, they'd be a little bit ahead on that."

"There is room for improvement around the data that they have on the website about solutions... they should have more templated solutions on their website. Going out and identifying how to do RTP performance with a Cisco router, or how to do application response times in an Arrista data center deployment was where most of the work was... They should spend some more time documenting solutions and putting together white papers."

"For updating the Scrutinizer platform, when we have the actual data, it never happens in one day. Every time we have the data, we are obliged to install a new server in order to integrate the old data, and every time it has a problem. Most of the time, we were obliged to scrap all the data because we couldn't transfer it to the new server. So, it would be very good if they could improve this part."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Plixer Scrutinizer cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the free version."

"It's very expensive."

"The solution is fairly expensive compared to other products."

"We pay our one-off cost for the licenses, per device, in blocks of 50. And then we pay an annual maintenance fee of about $15,000 Australian, which is, at this point in time, about $9,000 US, for those 250 devices. The upfront costs for the 250-license use, were about $50,000 Australian, which is about $32,000 US."

"I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"We recently bought a license upgrade, so we will integrate more exporters. We upgraded from a 25 exporter license to a 50 exporter license. Therefore, there will be more flows, and this will be an extension. I don't know when we will purchase a faster server, because the server that we have is quite new."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about LiveAction LiveNX?

The product has a very good graphical interface.

See all answers

What needs improvement with LiveAction LiveNX?

The product is weak in multi-tenancy. We have to install multiple instances of LiveAction, whereas we would like to build it once for our customers. Most of these analytical packages have the same ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for LiveAction LiveNX?

Primarily, we use the product for monitoring the standard utilization of circuits. The tool has the incredible ability to provide granular details about the traffic passing through an interface on ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Plixer Scrutinizer?

Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plixer Scrutinizer?

I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Plixer Scrutinizer?

I don't have deep enough knowledge to comment on what requires improvements in Plixer Scrutinizer. In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required.

See all answers

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Compared 36% of the time

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Compared 27% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

LiveAction LiveNX

March 2025

Download LiveAction LiveNX product report

Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2025

Download Plixer Scrutinizer product report

Also Known As

LiveNX

No data available

Overview

LiveAction develops IT visibility solutions designed to simplify network management. Initially developed to aid the US Department of Defense in the operation of its networks, LiveNX (Network Experience) features an innovative visual display, real-time big data analytics and deep control of routers and switches for unparalleled network administration. LiveNX accelerates troubleshooting with its QoS control, application-aware, and WAN functionality developed through engineering partnerships with Cisco Systems.

BlueCat

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

Tampa Electric, Digital First Media, Allscripts, Boxwood Technology

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

LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2025

Free Report: LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

Find out what your peers are saying about LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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