N-able N-central vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
N-able N-central
Score 8.7 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
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.
$14.95
per month
Pricing
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Synthetic Monitoring
$10
per month
Real User Monitoring
$10
per month
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
Features
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
Monitoring Tasks
Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Product A and Product B
N-able N-central
7.3
6 Ratings
1% below category average
SolarWinds Pingdom
-
Ratings
Remote monitoring9.56 Ratings00 Ratings
Network device monitoring8.26 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
N-able N-central
8.9
7 Ratings
20% above category average
SolarWinds Pingdom
-
Ratings
Patch Management8.97 Ratings00 Ratings
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N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
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Score 9.5 out of 10
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Enterprises
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User Ratings
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(25 ratings)
4.6
(65 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(4 ratings)
Usability
7.2
(7 ratings)
10.0
(7 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
1.0
(8 ratings)
4.2
(54 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Pingdom
Likelihood to Recommend
N-able
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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
Read full review
Pros
N-able
  • 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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
  • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
  • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
Read full review
Cons
N-able
  • 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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
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Likelihood to Renew
N-able
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.
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SolarWinds
Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
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Usability
N-able
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.
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SolarWinds
Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
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Performance
N-able
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
Read full review
Support Rating
N-able
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.
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SolarWinds
Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
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Implementation Rating
N-able
Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one
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SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
N-able
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.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
  2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
Read full review
Return on Investment
N-able
  • We have lost hundreds of hours on the phone/emailing support with no resolution for any of our issues
  • We had to move all of our services away which was very painful
  • Staff satisfaction was low having to deal with this company
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
  • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
  • Its time to explore other alternatives.
Read full review
ScreenShots

N-able N-central Screenshots

Screenshot of N-able N-central DashboardScreenshot of Remote desktop access with Take Control

SolarWinds Pingdom Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of