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Pandora FMS vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 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 Server Monitoring
23rd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (74th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (54th), Log Management (57th), Cloud Monitoring Software (40th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Server Monitoring
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (19th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of Pandora FMS is 1.3%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 2.8%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor2.8%
Pandora FMS1.3%
Other95.9%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Gabriel Glusgold - PeerSpot reviewer
Personalized metrics; simplicity of data
My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…
VIVEK PATHAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring
My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."
"The most valuable features are auto-discovery and automatic detection of the network topology and network monitoring."
"It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. There is a long list of different ones from Nagios. You can just use them, and within seconds, you get yourself a check that is monitoring whatever you need. It is really flexible. I guess that's why they call it Pandora Flexible Monitoring System (FMS). It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. Our network guy just recently asked about a particular protocol to monitor the bandwidth on the network, which is not a common protocol. When I looked it up, and I found that they cover it. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."
"It provides us with proactive monitoring and is very easy to configure and maintain."
"Thanks to its flexibility, I have been able to adapt the tool to our servers and find out quickly how their console works."
"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."
"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."
"The solution has good dashboards and graphics."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
 

Cons

"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."
"The price for Pandora FMS is expensive."
"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."
"This solution requires proper training to get 100% out of it."
"I would like to have a dashboard with all assets displayed, with a quick hover-over status."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."
"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"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."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"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."
"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."
"The price is too high."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Media Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

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 Enterprise8
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

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What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.