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NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

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

NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
75th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.6%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.6%
NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG0.5%
Other95.9%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Gideon Genita - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate System Engineer at SMS Global Technologies, Inc.
Easy to set up with good documentation and helpful support
I'm using it for a customer The packet flow switch is the most valuable aspect of the solution.  It's an easy product to set up. We can scale the solution if we need to. It's stable.  The documentation is well-written and quite useful. It's compatible with other products.  Under the pocket flow…
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

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 utilization."
"The product is stable. I have never had any issue where we have lost an InfiniStream, or visibility from that particular InfiniStream, throughout the bank."
"When we have mobile operators who are signal partners, where one is the roaming host and another is the roamer, we are able to see their traffic. Their packets are able to detect if any faults to develop, and at what point they fail."
"The ability to troubleshoot customers' connectivity has been very beneficial."
"An issue that used to take days is now fixed within minutes to an hour."
"We have seen a lot of return on investment: We have been able to recover radios in the field, we know exactly what is going on, we cut down fines from the service commission, and we have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know, cutting troubleshooting down by days as we can now see the issues."
"It has cut our group's troubleshooting time down significantly, e.g., depending on the issue, what would normally take maybe a couple of hours will now take minutes."
"I love the single pane of glass view. It makes it easier to not have to navigate everywhere. It allows more simplistic visibility, without having to go from tool to tool to tool, or from window to window to window."
"SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by proactively indicating if we are low on resources for a particular server."
"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"We use NPM to monitor our enterprise for up/down status on network devices."
"Being a global company with many highly-sensitive manufacturing lines and process control environments, SolarWinds consistently delivers real-time and accurate views into the deepest parts of our environment."
"From the product side, it covers everything; it is perfect."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to use a few custom properties to manage multiple nodes and alerts; thus, saving hardware resource usage."
"In my experience with SolarWinds NPM Quality of Experience dashboard, it fulfilled all of our requirements."
 

Cons

"Only problems that we have had are fiber issues going into the TAPs or vSTREAMs, which are usually local site issues."
"We don't use the single pane of glass view, even though we own it."
"The stability depends on who is using the tool, because you only can get as much out of the tool as you put into it. There are a lot of patches for this particular environment, so you have to keep on them. If you lose track of them, then the product is not useful anymore."
"The monitoring and reporting tool needs improvement. Users want more information, such as the level of detail when doing a packet analysis. They want more detail to be able to isolate down to a specific point."
"I'd like them to make the product more user-friendly."
"The technology goes end-of-life on us every year, which is why I am looking forward to vSTREAM. I don't like when devices go end-of-life on us so quickly. If we can get more of an advanced notice of when an end-of-life is brought up, because our certification process within the organization takes a while."
"The single pane of glass feed still needs work."
"The solution is not great, but it is not bad."
"The product is scalable, but at a cost. Extra modules have to be purchased for each extra server. The initial set up isn't complex, but will require someone who is experienced with the network monitoring system"
"The dashboards for this solution could be improved."
"The cost for monitoring interfaces is ridiculous."
"A need for improvement is in the technical support provided by SolarWinds. Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team, especially during application-level issues."
"They should increase its accuracy rate as SolarWinds's monitoring accuracy is not good if you compare it with other tools, like NNM/ScienceLogic/Zenoss."
"There isn't a great deal of flexibility to create custom metrics that can be discovered easily or custom aggregation schemes."
"The solution's database performance could be improved."
"It has covered everything, so no improvement is required at their end. The only thing is the price."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The scalability is good, but it comes at a cost. E.g., if you need 100 InfiniStream because you are sending gigs or terabytes of data to one InfiniStream, then you will have to purchase another InfiniStream, which are not cheap."
"This product could be cheaper."
"I would like it to be more scalable with less spend."
"The price is a little high."
"To capture more with the solution that we bought, you have to buy another InfiniStreamNG, and there are only four ports in the back."
"It can be scalable. It just costs too much. With a company as big as ours, it gets too expensive to accommodate every single site."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
"When I compare the cost of CA Spectrum to that of SolarWinds NPM, the cost of CA Spectrum is way too high, and the cost of SolarWinds NPM is pretty low."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise86
 

Questions from the Community

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What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Also Known As

InfiniStreamNG, NETSCOUT ISNG, Infinistream
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

U.S. Department of Defense
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.