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Pulseway 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

Pulseway
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
54th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (18th), Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) (14th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pulseway is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.6%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Pieter Plas - PeerSpot reviewer
A solution with a great monitoring system and ability to control access remotely
The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment depends on the size of a customer. We make the customer in the enterprise server, and there is a download per customer for the installation package. We can also roll it out very easily, and when we install it on one or two systems, it explores the network for more systems. We can then fire a deployment package on the other systems. So in one hour, we can do a lot. Most of the time, 90% of the work is very easy, and the last 10% are the business-critical systems from a customer. Also, we manually install important customer systems, like special applications where we like to monitor specific services in the server itself.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It gives you remote control and has a mobile app."
"It has been very helpful to get notifications about various issues with my servers and network to help me take action to resolve problems before they become major issues."
"The setup is simple."
"The solution has great workflow and server modules."
"We like the patching of the window updates in the client's systems. You can automatically do updates with a single click."
"SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly. The product allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
"The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports."
"SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users."
"The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization."
"As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning."
 

Cons

"The solution does not allow you to make a script for just one customer."
"GUI needs to be improved and the solution lacks a process for monitoring VOIP calls."
"It would be nice if it also had a desktop application, similar to the phone app, which would allow me to monitor and control computers from my desktop."
"They have good technical support but it's not excellent."
"There are some bugs or glitches."
"Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."
"The integration needs to be improved."
"The solution is not always good with new features, so it's take a long time."
"There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better."
"Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"Currently lacks integration with SMS services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"It is expensive."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
"The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Computer Software Company
17%
Real Estate/Law Firm
12%
Educational Organization
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Educational Organization
45%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dell, Canon, Siemens, Harvard University, Northwestern University
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Pulseway vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
853,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.