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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

"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"Other advice to users considering the solution would be: go with NetBrain."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"NetBrain is faster, better and level sets the engineering technical sets."
"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"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."
"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"This tool is exactly what we wanted and needed."
"The solution's most valuable feature is network security."
"The historical timeline feature is what I appreciate most about ThousandEyes because when people report that something occurs at a specific time of day, I can set up a test and capture the issue in action."
"ThousandEyes has provided my organization with invaluable network visibility and insights and incredible ease of use."
"I think the analysis service that Cisco provides is extremely valuable."
"With ThousandEyes, it's one click or one place where I can see all of my public prefixes, how long it takes, when the last update was, where a route was missing from the internet, or is it actually causing a black hole."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward...In terms of ROI, the solution is worth the money."
"ThousandEyes gives companies better visibility, showing effective notes on the network layer and the application's performance for anyone inside or outside the data center, while providing deep visibility on the network, legal support, and user requests."
"The advice I would give to those looking into using ThousandEyes is about the possibilities it offers to the operations teams, as ThousandEyes is an extremely powerful solution that makes operations able to detect issues effectively."
 

Cons

"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"When I used the installed product before, I wasn't very satisfied with the support."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"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."
"They only offer synthetic requests, so they should create an agent for users that can track your request."
"Presently, it lacks the ability to integrate with other Cisco products."
"ThousandEyes should expand its application monitoring to monitor some communication applications."
"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."
"The tool does not provide features for application-level monitoring."
"I would like the product to offer more agility."
"There is room for improvement in terms of customization and user-friendliness."
"It would be nice if the solution covered other areas like server monitoring."
 

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."
"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."
"The solution is cheap."
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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.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.