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SolarWinds NPM vs Versa Director 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

SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
Versa Director
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
48th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.4%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Versa Director is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.4%
Versa Director0.4%
Other96.2%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
PriyankDubey - PeerSpot reviewer
Product manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
User-friendly and simpler than its competitors
Versa Director's best feature is the ease of configuration and customer and vendor management. Its UI is also excellent compared to Fortinet and Cisco Versa Director's on-prem SD-WAN hardware and SSL VPN software are not integrated, so you have to buy a separate subscription for the SSL VPN. In…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization."
"There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."
"SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable."
"It is considerably cheaper compared to other tools."
"Versa Director is the fastest engineering tool and is ideal for use without product management."
"The most valuable feature of Versa Director is analytics."
"The most valuable functionality is some of the policy pieces that are quite useful."
"Versa Director's best feature is the ease of configuration and customer and vendor management."
 

Cons

"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."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"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."
"It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution."
"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support."
"It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there."
"Versa Director's deployment process is not the best."
"What needs improvement in Versa Director is maturity because, from an operating point of view, it's not mature enough. You'll still need to do a lot of research on Versa Director, so if it could mature faster, that would be very good."
"Versa could be more AI-oriented."
"It requires some simplification."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is too expensive."
"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"Having to buy separate licenses for the on-prem SD-WAN hardware and SSL VPN software makes Versa Director very costly compared to other solutions like Fortinet and Cisco."
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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
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Versa Director?
Versa Director is the fastest engineering tool and is ideal for use without product management.
What is your primary use case for Versa Director?
We use the solution to monitor customer networks.
 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Versa Networks Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Versa Director and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.