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

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
N-able N-central
Score 7.9 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 8.5 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
Top Pros
Top Cons
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
5.8
3 Ratings
20% below category average
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
-
Ratings
Remote monitoring5.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Network device monitoring4.83 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
N-able N-central
6.0
4 Ratings
18% below category average
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
-
Ratings
Patch Management6.04 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
8.6
276 Ratings
12% above category average
Application monitoring00 Ratings8.9266 Ratings
Database monitoring00 Ratings8.4230 Ratings
Threshold alerts00 Ratings8.9271 Ratings
Predictive capabilities00 Ratings8.2215 Ratings
Application performance management console00 Ratings8.2239 Ratings
Collaboration tools00 Ratings7.7148 Ratings
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings7.8256 Ratings
Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings8.5216 Ratings
Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings8.9234 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings9.8269 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings9.1250 Ratings
IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings9.0199 Ratings
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N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

ManageEngine Site24x7
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Score 9.7 out of 10
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User Ratings
N-able N-centralSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Likelihood to Recommend
3.9
(22 ratings)
8.8
(278 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.9
(10 ratings)
Usability
2.0
(4 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
In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).
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SolarWinds
For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
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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.
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Cons
N-able
  • Expensive software
  • The support team are terrible
  • Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line
  • Subscription management is tedious
  • Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap
  • Integrations galore - but none of them are effective
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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.
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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
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.
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SolarWinds
It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
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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
  • Reduced time to manage and support servers and endpoints.
  • Provides support dept with more accurate information to assess and resolve issues quicker and more efficiently.
  • The subscription cost associated with N-central, to our clients has a good profit margin for us.
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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