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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ThousandEyes

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/ACisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.N/A

    Paessler PRTG

    Score8.4 out of 10
    N/APRTG Network Monitor is the flagship offering from German software company Paessler, for monitoring local and wide area networks (LANs & WANs), servers, websites, apps, and more.

    $2,149

    per year

    Pricing
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    PRTG 500
    $2,149
    per year
    Hosted 500
    $2,149
    per year
    PRTG 1,000
    $3,899
    per year
    Hosted 1000
    $3,899
    per year
    PRTG 2,500
    $8,099
    per year
    Hosted 2500
    $8,099
    per year
    PRTG 5,000
    $14,199
    per year
    Hosted 5000
    $14,199
    per year
    PRTG 10000
    $17,899
    per year
    PRTG Enterprise
    Custom Pricing
    subscription license
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    No, we are the first to evaluate Cisco ThousandEyes. So we haven't evaluated other products so far in this area.
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    More complete and detailed reports and accurate path discover
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    To be honest for our use we utilize both PRTG as well as ThousandEyes for different and unique purposes. ThousandEyes could do everything however it does become a bit cost-prohibitive. We were able to gain access to ThousandEyes from our Cisco licensing on other products and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    A thousand eyes offer more insight into the internet compared to other products. It has really good network performance monitoring and network mapping capabilities. Alerting and reports are much better and the dashboard visual is great. Customer service is very very responsive.
    Incentivized
    Paessler
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    118 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    41 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    40 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    119 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    42 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89 Answers
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    28 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    92 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    38 Answers
    Features
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Network Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Cisco ThousandEyes and Paessler PRTG
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    Paessler PRTG
    7.3
    67 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Automated network device discovery00 Ratings7.260 Ratings
    Network monitoring00 Ratings9.666 Ratings
    Baseline threshold calculation00 Ratings8.657 Ratings
    Alerts00 Ratings8.867 Ratings
    Network capacity planning00 Ratings6.448 Ratings
    Packet capture analysis00 Ratings6.234 Ratings
    Network mapping00 Ratings5.547 Ratings
    Customizable reports00 Ratings5.857 Ratings
    Wireless infrastructure monitoring00 Ratings6.249 Ratings
    Hardware health monitoring00 Ratings9.264 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Auvik
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Catchpoint
    Score8.5 out of 10
    PingPlotter
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nexthink
    Score7.3 out of 10
    Nmap
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (126 ratings)
    8.8
    (68 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (6 ratings)
    9.9
    (5 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    8.3
    (7 ratings)
    Availability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.7
    (6 ratings)
    8.0
    (19 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ThousandEyesPaessler PRTG
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Unified communications real-time analysis is one of the biggest points of the solution. You can see your traffic path and find issues before, during and after the calls. This is very useful for analyzing VoIP and video conferencing problems like in WebEx, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. It helps to see network issues like packet loss, jitter, or latency that can make call quality bad. Another good use case is checking cloud apps and SaaS services. Many companies use external platforms like Microsoft Azure, 365, Salesforce, or AWS. It lets Networking teams see the network path from users to these services so they can find if problems come from the company network, the internet provider, or the cloud service. Also, it is good for companies using mix of on-prem and cloud. It shows how traffic moves between different parts of the network, so IT teams can see where a problem happens and fix it faster. There are different types of agents that we can use in Cisco ThousandEyes. Enterprise agents can be use for a relative big amount of synthetic test. Endpoint agents are install in user PC or MAC laptops to check network quality from the client side. WebEx devices also have built-in agents that help to see performance problems in meetings, making it easy to find what is causing a bad call. Maybe it's not the best solution if what you want to measure is not HTTPs based or hasn't an API. Also if your scenario is Zoom Rooms, you won't have the same level of integration that it has for WebEx and Microsoft solutions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Paessler
    integrates seamlessly with Windows servers via WMI and PowerShell, providing deep insights into resource usage, performance metrics, and system health. It's excellent at tracking CPU, memory, disk space, and event logs, enabling rapid troubleshooting and proactive maintenance. PRTG Network Monitor also effectively monitors Fortigate devices, providing detailed data on firewall health, traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, VPN status, and security alerts. This visibility helps detect and resolve network security issues promptly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • Cisco ThousandEyes does the holistic discovery of the end components, the network components, and it's really fast at identifying where the issue is, which is not normally identified by the classic monitoring tools. So it's quite a fast identifying the issue of the networks and Cisco ThousandEyes also provides a very good real user end user monitoring experience for the end customers. So those are the two real life and also very good examples for Cisco ThousandEyes.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    • Switch monitoring and finding out if there are communication issues or throughput alerts are reached
    • Big picture view of the whole infrastructure and what is functioning and what is not
    • Uptime tracking is great and lets us know for how long a device is down or overall uptime
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • The elephant in the room is going to be cost. ThousandEyes is a great tool, but you will pay for it. There are other services that do a good job at providing a smaller subset of features compared to ThousandEyes. If all you need is that particular subset of features, ThousandEyes may not make fiscal sense for your organization.
    • As a subset of the cost issue, within the last 18 months or so the pricing on enterprise (local) agents has been modified in a way that seems not to benefit the customer. Previously enterprise agents had a flat monthly cost associated with them with unlimited test usage (the only limit on test usage was based on concurrent tests running at any given point in time). This meant that instead of using a cloud agent and paying per-test, you had the option of spinning up an cheap Digital Ocean droplet and creating your own cloud agent for external testing without using Cloud Agents. When the change was made they eliminated the flat per-agent cost and instead treated the pricing the same as that of the cloud agents but cutting the number of "cloud units" per test in half for tests run from enterprise agents. For organizations with under-utilized enterprise agents, this may be helpful financially, but for organizations that push their local agents to the limit, the cost skyrocketed.
    • BGP monitor peering sessions have been less than reliable. The data doesn't seem to be an issue, but the sessions seem to bounce or fail altogether on a fairly consistent basis. The routers or servers with which your routers peer sit behind some firewalls that have caused issues in the past.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    • Licensing on a per entity basis can be cumbersome for devices which have a ton of monitoring points like network switches\routers. Each sensor may count against a license, which could be a lot of you were monitoring every TX\RX of an SFP for example
    • A better method to easily template\copy monitors across devices
    • The navigation in the web GUI could be a little more straightforward in terms of the hierarchy
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    The software does it's job extremely well and the system makes it very user friendly to get into. When looking for software I prefer to not need a PHD to operate it. Having a great UI and simple setup makes it easy to include more members of our team to get more value out of the platform.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Paessler
    I would renew it because the platform has brought us many technical and economic benefits that make the cost-benefit ratio very good. Additionally, to do so does not require large investments in training, licensing or infrastructure, and at the administration level, extensive knowledge is not required to be able to bear it.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cisco
    There is definitely a learning curve to ThousandEyes, but once you understand how the client deployment works and how to set up monitoring, things go pretty smoothly. I think the initial setting up of clients on endpoints can be a little tricky though.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    The tool is very intuitive to use and it is Windows-based (everybody knows how to use Windows) so it's easy to get into. Every time is setup in a hierarchy so if you have a good initial hierarchy design, it will really reduce administrative effort down the road.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cisco
    The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    PRTG does everything we need it to do and more. Ease of use, ease of management and maintenance and clarity of monitoring of hundreds of different types of device and service gives this a large advantage over other products on the market that I have tried. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a network monitoring product in their environment and even to people who don't know they need a solution yet!
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    Our Cisco reps actually had someone teach us a few things about the functionality of ThousandEyes, and it helped a lot. The training was good and we had follow-up assistance as well when we had questions about the monitoring and reporting functions. Overall, we were satisfied with the training and support.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Our implementation was pretty straightforward, with some issues loading clients on endpoints. We didn't have any notable issues, and I don't really have any additional insights.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    It's very important that de project's teams have different member of the TI. We have learned too late the importa of Security Analyst at the design architecture moment. We have to rebuild part of the implementation for made this big mistake.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    No one is better than the other. I can get different data and sometimes similar data, it's important to compare values and verify the data between the tools. Additionally, there are other functionalities that ThousandEyes has that the others don't, but it is also the other way around. I will always recommend to have available not 1 or 2, all possible available for your job.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    PRTG offers more versatility in monitoring when compared to the other solutions we tested. The other solutions were also limited as far as customization options, which made them less adaptable to our networks. When compared to Auvik, for instance, we prefer PRTG as it offers immediate notifications through the desktop client - not limited to email notifications as with Auvik. We also appreciate the fact that PRTG can be self/on-prem hosted vs Auvik's cloud model. This makes for an easier deployment and less firewall adjustments to allow traffic to cloud-hosted solutions.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    The contract was fair and rolled up into some of our other contracts, so it was no big deal getting it up and running.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Cisco
    I think this product would be infinitely scalable since it's all cloud hosted and can support thousands of endpoints if needed. We are only using it for a limited number of endpoints, so we never really considered scalability.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • Building the trust from our Merchants is core when you come to renewal time. Trust builds partnerships, builds stickiness and allows for easier upsells or contract renewals.
    • Having a champion in IT that touts your service is important to the business, it removes a large portion of friction in the business to get services implemented and working to its peak.
    • Flexibility in pricing can be better. How they measure the number of agents being used can get thorny. When you build and tear down virtual servers a lot it can appear there are more agents running than there are. Once we understood how they measure we were able to better utilize the product efficiently.
    Incentivized
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    Paessler
    • The ability to analyze multiple pieces of information in one place, especially with historical data, has saved our IT department time and headaches. It would be so much more difficult to trace an issue without PRTG, just relying on event logs and an open task manager window.
    • The cost is not cheap, so it's an expense that hits the bottom line like everything else. Figure in hardware costs as well, ideally a server outside of your main environment.
    • I keep saying this, but the historical data piece is worth so much. There's really no good way to collect all of that information in one place without something like PRTG. And that definitely saves time and money in the long run.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Cisco ThousandEyes Screenshots

    Screenshot of Global availability issues for users trying to use Slack application.Screenshot of The path visibility feature pinpointing where in the transit path an outage or event is occurring.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Internet Insights™, which combines a massive data set with algorithmic outage detection to provide near real-time insights into a business's SaaS applications.  and networks. Internet Insights can be used to manage digital experience at Internet scale.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Event Detection diagnosing events as server or network issue.