Freshping was a website uptime monitoring tool with free and enterprise editions, from Freshworks. The product is no longer available to new customers.
$11
per month, billed annually
N-able N-central
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
N/A
Pricing
Freshping (discontinued)
N-able N-central
Editions & Modules
Blossom - 60 checks (can add more checks)
$11.00
per month, billed annually
Garden - 80 checks (can add more checks)
$36.00
per month, billed annually
Sprout
Free
50 checks (none additional)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Freshping (discontinued)
N-able N-central
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Every additional 10 checks - $8/month billed annually
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Freshping (discontinued)
N-able N-central
Features
Freshping (discontinued)
N-able N-central
Monitoring Tasks
Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Product A and Product B
Freshping (discontinued)
4.8
2 Ratings
48% below category average
N-able N-central
7.4
6 Ratings
1% above category average
Remote monitoring
7.52 Ratings
9.76 Ratings
Network device monitoring
2.01 Ratings
8.36 Ratings
Multiple Server Monitoring
4.52 Ratings
00 Ratings
Multi-device monitoring
2.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Automated alerts and notifications
8.02 Ratings
00 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
Freshping (discontinued)
8.0
1 Ratings
6% above category average
N-able N-central
9.0
7 Ratings
25% above category average
Policy-based automation
8.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Patch Management
00 Ratings
9.07 Ratings
Reporting
Comparison of Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Freshing is well suited for user-facing systems, the systems they directly use. It also serves as nice eye-candy for them to look at. It does not monitor internal IT systems as well as we had hoped, so we use other tools to monitor those systems.
N-Able is perfect for an MSP environment. It gives all the standard functionality an IT professional needs out of the box and can be configured to show almost anything required. For example, we have configured a dashboard to show when our backups need attention for each customer. This is achieved by running a small script on repeat via N-Central everyday/evening, and the result gives us information on the dashboard to help us identify exactly what is working and what needs looking into.
Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.
Customer support just points to online guides and I feel they aren't helpful.
During the trial they turn on a lot of features. In my experience, if you play around with the features, they charge you for them. Keep this in mind if you move forward with N-Able - they will charge for "trialed" services.
In my experience, some services that you're being charged for can't be disabled or monitored by you or your team. You only see them on the monthly invoice.
In my opinion, the "Scripting Automation" doesn't provide value. You're either going to be writing your own batch or Powershell to make scripting work.
In my opinion, monitoring software deployments is painful.
The default monitoring template can't be duplicated, edited, or referenced. You'll find that the default monitors in an unusual way and will throw needless recurring alerts into your ticketing system. To avoid this, you need to create a template from scratch which takes many hours to set up.
In my opinion, they're more concerned about a quick buck than customer service. "Buyer beware" company.
Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.
It's perfectly easy and straightforward to use. There's no need to read documentation, you just register and will surely be able to configure whatever monitor you want to set up. It's also very easy to use other features like the status page, reporting, alerts, etc.
The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.
Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.
We use Uptime Robot, and also some internal health checks, which report directly to our emails and chat applications. They all work "pretty fine," but unfortunately all of them have had some false positives or missed some minor downtime, so as for us, it doesn't add too much overhead, and we prefer to use several. I would say all the ones mentioned are good for the job.
Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.
