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Pandora FMS vs SCOM 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

Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
68th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (26th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (58th), Log Management (60th), Cloud Monitoring Software (41st)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.5%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.5%
Pandora FMS0.7%
Other97.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

MM
Independent Consultant at Maack Consulting
The open architecture is easy to extend and enhance
Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas. They could improve their management console's ability to monitor large environments could be improved. For example, SNMP management is only partially integrated into the management console.
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution has screens that are easy to understand and provide a wealth of information."
"Pandora FMS provides us with a general report (graphical) about all of the connected devices, which helps with planning new stations and tracking them."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"We are consultants and thanks to Pandora can detect a lot of disasters that other companies can't, and we can offer high availability of the system to the client."
"Pandora FMS is a powerful monitoring system that has enabled us to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes."
"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."
"This tool has been of great help because we can manage faster solutions with the problems in our network and it helped us reduce our response time."
"Pandora FMS (the Flexible Monitoring System) is an all-in-one package solution, and we can monitor our whole system with Service perspective."
"The most valuable feature of SCOM is the capability of using classes within your management pack development."
"We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool, preventing various problems and resolving issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, which assists our department in being pro-active in resolving issues with servers and services rather than reactive."
"SCOM will allow you to go from firefighting mode to a more proactive stance when finding issues."
"The solution is scalable. If you want to monitor more you have to buy more licenses, but you can add on. We don't plan to increase usage."
"SCOM's most valuable features are the network path feature, reporting, and integration with business intelligence."
"SCOM is capable of providing full-featured infrastructure monitoring, alerting and reporting, especially for Windows-centric production environments."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.​"
"The most valuable feature is the extensibility, as there are really no limits as to what you can do with it."
 

Cons

"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"In the future, we may have double the number of devices, and we do not want to have any issues with performance in the data display."
"In its versions for Linux, in the beginning, it can be somewhat complicated to configure and implement."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products such as Universal CMDB."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"System Center just provided upgrade and update features for Windows clients, and Windows systems, and did not support Linux, Android, or iOS, and other operating systems. They need to provide better integration with other operating systems if they don't already."
"Very expensive now that you are forced to buy entire System Center suite, although comparable to other monitoring solutions that include basic APM."
"SCOM agents have a heavy footprint. Would like a lighter, more-efficient footprint."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"In a future release, they should add email notification alerts."
"The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved."
"The management of the servers could be better."
"I would like more customized reports. People should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
16%
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
What is your primary use case for SCOM?
My usual use case for SCOM is as an administrator role where I create reports and provide system configuration for Linux and installation of the SCOM agent. I handle deploying and upgrading the age...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.