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SolarWinds NPM vs SolarWinds ipMonitor 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

SolarWinds ipMonitor
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
76th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
56th
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds ipMonitor is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
IP address management improves network efficiency but licensing cost could decrease
We are using SolarWinds for NPM and NCM, and we use IP address management for IP address monitoring. It helps us track which IP address is live and which is not. It also provides DHCP reservation and allows us to declare IP addresses for our integration. We have been using it for IP address…
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

"The most valuable feature is the availability of end devices."
"IPAM is used for IP address reservation and tracking, helping us easily identify live IP addresses."
"IPAM is used for IP address reservation and tracking, helping us easily identify live IP addresses."
"SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers."
"We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced."
"The alerting and reporting capabilities of the tool are impressive"
 

Cons

"The licensing cost is high compared to open source tools."
"The solution does not include enough features and has some performance issues."
"The licensing cost is high compared to open source tools."
"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."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation."
"The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications."
"The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long."
"It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. The performance is slow."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"The price could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a bit expensive because the annual license does not include new features that are priced as add-ons."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"Price could be improved on"
"It is relatively inexpensive compared to other products in the same category."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
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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
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds ipMonitor?
The licensing cost is high compared to other open-source tools. Being a corporate client, we require corporate licensing, which adds to the cost.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds ipMonitor?
The licensing cost is high compared to open source tools. The state monitoring tools could be improved with AI integration to track IP usage history. There is no local support; we must contact thei...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds ipMonitor?
We are using SolarWinds for NPM and NCM, and we use IP address management for IP address monitoring. It helps us track which IP address is live and which is not. It also provides DHCP reservation a...
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

No data available
 

Also Known As

ipMonitor
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. SolarWinds ipMonitor and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.