N-able N-central vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
N-able N-central
Score 9.2 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 Server & Application Monitor
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.N/A
Pricing
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsSAM pricing starts at $2,995.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Features
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Monitoring Tasks
Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Product A and Product B
N-able N-central
7.4
6 Ratings
0% above category average
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
-
Ratings
Remote monitoring9.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Network device monitoring8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
N-able N-central
9.0
7 Ratings
23% above category average
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
-
Ratings
Patch Management9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
N-able N-central
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
5.9
279 Ratings
25% below category average
Application monitoring00 Ratings6.7269 Ratings
Database monitoring00 Ratings6.3233 Ratings
Threshold alerts00 Ratings6.3274 Ratings
Predictive capabilities00 Ratings5.0218 Ratings
Application performance management console00 Ratings7.0242 Ratings
Collaboration tools00 Ratings4.5150 Ratings
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings6.3259 Ratings
Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings4.7219 Ratings
Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings7.0237 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings6.3272 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings6.3253 Ratings
IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings4.5201 Ratings
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User Ratings
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(25 ratings)
8.8
(278 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.9
(10 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(7 ratings)
8.6
(29 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
1.0
(8 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.4
(2 ratings)
4.5
(3 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
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.
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SolarWinds
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is an excellent tool for keeping tabs on all of your servers, network connections, and applications. It can be configured and customized with dashboards to help your team keep an eye on all of your critical resources and the status of your network. It can also be configured to alert you via email, text, or API hooks to on-call software to ensure your team is notified when something is not running correctly.
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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
  • Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
  • Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
  • It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.
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.
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SolarWinds
  • Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
  • Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
  • More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
Read full review
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
We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
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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
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
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Reliability and Availability
N-able
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
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Performance
N-able
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
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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
I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
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Online Training
N-able
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
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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
Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
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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
Nagios requires far more manual work to configure than SolarWinds does, though that also encourages customization and perfect-fit solutions. Nagios also requires far, far fewer resources to run than SolarWinds: SolarWinds wants great gobs of memory and disk, while Nagios is refreshingly humble. Nagios starts working from the first minute, too, whereas SolarWinds needs lots of set-up time.
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Scalability
N-able
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up
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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
  • Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
  • We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.
Read full review
ScreenShots

N-able N-central Screenshots

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

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

Screenshot of Multi-vendor application performance monitoringScreenshot of Multi-vendor server monitoringScreenshot of Application dependency mapping with AppStack™ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Server hardware health monitoring