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NetBrain vs ThousandEyes comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

NetBrain
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (18th), Network Automation (6th)
ThousandEyes
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (8th), Cloud Monitoring Software (10th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. NetBrain is designed for Network Troubleshooting and holds a mindshare of 3.2%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
ThousandEyes, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 1.7% mindshare, down 3.6% since last year.
Network Troubleshooting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetBrain3.2%
Wireshark18.4%
AirMagnet Survey PRO9.1%
Other69.30000000000001%
Network Troubleshooting
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ThousandEyes1.7%
Zabbix3.9%
SolarWinds NPM3.6%
Other90.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
Shreyans Parekh - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Finance and Operations at Fruitist
Proactive monitoring has transformed digital experience and now optimizes application delivery
With ThousandEyes, there are some configuration and metric screens that are not entirely intuitive with ThousandEyes, so they can certainly improve in terms of the usability of certain metric screens. ThousandEyes can also offer deeper traffic insights relative to specific applications, so detailed analytics on application-level traffic would help in better understanding and managing our network resources effectively. I would say that ThousandEyes can also, in terms of providing more extensibility with other observability tools, offer more out-of-the-box integrations with other observability tools so that ThousandEyes can serve as that single source of truth, so that we don't necessarily need to go to other tools to be able to be that one-source dashboard. I think there's a lot that ThousandEyes can continue to improve on there. The issues that I've talked about, including extensibility with other platforms and the improvement of accessing specific metric screens in order to be able to provide for fuller access and more detailed access to network-level metrics would make the platform feel less complicated to navigate. It wouldn't require as many manual integration inputs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once it's up and running and you don't have the strange requirements I had, and you just want some basic maps, it'll work."
"NetBrain is faster, better and level sets the engineering technical sets."
"NetBrain is very good when it comes to network mapping, as it looks for different assets within the network available, so router, firewall, applications, et cetera, and it gives you the full mapping, asset mapping along with the full range including the firmware software update and all those things."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can click once and have a link test, see your network, and get an overall view of your network and its state."
"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"Other advice to users considering the solution would be: go with NetBrain."
"The installation process is not hard at all."
"The most valuable feature of ThousandEyes is user-friendliness. It has been essential for us to have a solution that is easy to use."
"From our perspective, ThousandEyes stands out as an invaluable tool because of its deep and extensive capabilities."
"ThousandEyes has positively impacted our organization by enabling us to know if a third-party hosted application isn't functioning properly, allowing us to determine what's actually going on and whether the issue lies on our side or with the application provider."
"The company provides excellent service."
"ThousandEyes offers the best features including global internet and cloud visibility from distributed vantage points, application and network performance monitoring, real-time outage detection and incident alerts, end-to-end path visualization for rapid troubleshooting, proactive issue demarcation, and historical data."
"I think the analysis service that Cisco provides is extremely valuable."
"Overall, I would rate ThousandEyes nine out of ten."
 

Cons

"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"It's okay on the value, a bit expensive for just maps, but makes it a lot easier to see things visually and take it from there."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"If you're comparing NetBrain as an NDR, I would rate it as a four or five, however, NetBrain has a different aspect of looking at things within the network."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"I chose eight out of ten because of the lack of objective performance data."
"Once I fully use the tool 100%, I'm sure I would have something to critique, however, for now, I'm happy with it."
"There is room for improvement in terms of customization and user-friendliness."
"They only offer synthetic requests."
"It would be nice if the solution covered other areas like server monitoring."
"Presently, it lacks the ability to integrate with other Cisco products."
"Regarding the user interface, I appreciate dropdowns, but I prefer a guided experience where the interface explains itself instead of requiring extensive searching to reach a point."
"Cisco is the standard for anyone wanting something good, the problem with it is the cost and that means that it's not accessible to many smaller companies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"The solution is cheap."
"In our company, we incur a yearly expense in our company for the licensing part. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten since it is expensive."
"The solution's pricing is cheap; I rate it a five out of ten."
"The solution costs several thousand dollars per year."
"It is a quite expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What needs improvement with ThousandEyes?
ThousandEyes could be improved by unifying the GUI with the rest of the Cisco products since it remains legacy from its original state when Cisco acquired it.
What is your primary use case for ThousandEyes?
My main use cases for ThousandEyes are troubleshooting slow speeds and investigating disconnection issues that users report.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
Wayfair, GitHub, Craigslist, Comcast, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Box, HP, Zendesk, IO Data Centers, Good Technology, NNTCommunications, Proofpoint, Schneider, Crowdstrike, Avera, Pitney Bowes, InstartLogic, Shutterfly, Shutterstock, Condé Nast, Roche, Jive, Actelion, Brocade, Infor, Okta, JLL, DigitalOcean, Zuora, NetSuite, CloudFlare, One, DemonWare, Quantcast, Carbonite, CareerBuilder, Prosper, Oscar, Slack
Find out what your peers are saying about Auvik, Wireshark, NetAlly and others in Network Troubleshooting. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.