Paessler PRTG Alternatives for Network Monitoring & Bandwidth/Application Analysis

Today we're going to evaluate Paessler PRTG and its look at some PRTG Alternatives for Network monitoring to understand its similarities and differences among its peers and competitors and how they stack up against each other.

Monitoring your environment is critical if you need to ensure maximum up-time, which is why network and application monitoring software is so important.

Here is our list of the best PRTG Alternatives:

1. ManageEngine OpManager – EDITOR’S CHOICE A monitoring platform for network devices and servers that provides real-time visibility into network activity, server health, and virtualization performance. It also includes alerting, traffic analysis, and device management to support infrastructure operations. Available for Windows Server, Linux, AWS, and Azure. Get a 30-day free trial.
2. Site24x7 – FREE TRIAL A monitoring platform that covers networks, servers, applications, cloud platforms, and web assets, while also providing system management functions. Get a 30-day free trial.
3. Nagios XI Monitoring for networks, servers, and applications, with added flexibility through a plug-in library. Runs on Linux or Docker.
4. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor A network device monitoring system with automated discovery and topology mapping. Runs on Windows Server.
5. Pandora FMS Monitoring for networks, servers, and applications, offered as on-premises software for Windows and Linux or as a SaaS service.

These systems are able to detect anomalies and alert the right people before anything major happens that could result in an incident.

This greatly helps to reduce downtime, and is the best proactive approach for you and your team to take when looking to keep an eye on your organization’s infrastructure.

To Start, let's see what PRTG has to offer:

PRTG has long been known for its monitoring and alerting features, and is an essential set of tools for anyone that needs to monitor network traffic and performance.

The system functions in a live state, and lets you see what is really happening on the network in real-time.

It features Network scanning, Auto Discovery, Mapping and Visualization maps. PRTG offers more than just traditional monitoring solutions for computers and servers, but emerging technologies as well. Examples include IoT, Cloud Services and even environmental monitors.

There are standard measuring tools such as packet loss detection, network traffic monitoring, webpage availability, uptime monitors, NetFlow Analyzers, LAN analyzers, Application Monitoring, ping status monitoring, Active Directory monitoring, and much more.

PRTG is a great solution for multiple site configurations, regardless of their geographical location.

This is a really stable tool for modern enterprises, and has made it the popular platform that it is.

PRTG offers a free version for 100 sensors or less, and is even available as a 30 day free trial with unlimited sensors. 500 sensors costs $1,600 , 1000 sensors costs $2,850, 2500 sensors costs $6,150 , 5000 sensors cost $10,500. Unlimited sensors with 1 core server installation costs $16,900 while unlimited sensors with 5 core server installations costs $60,000.

Now onto the Alternatives of PRTG and some of the best ones we've evaluated and used before.

The best Alternative to PRTG

1. ManageEngine OpManager – FREE TRIAL

ManageEngine OpManager offers a comprehensive network management suite for total network monitoring across multiple vendors relating to enterprise grade IT networks.

It has a unified approach that allows it to scale up while still managing distributed resources across the network.

This allows you and your team to monitor fault and performance issues on the network while monitoring all of your network devices, WAN and VoIP links, servers both physical and virtual (Hyper-V and VMWare supported), your Active Directory ad monitoring software, Domain Controllers, MS Exchange, MS SQL and other IT infrastructure components that require serious monitoring.

OpManager also lets you view other critical information such as CPU and memory usage, or even thread count or PGSQL database details. This lets you even track the performance of OpManager itself.

When you encounter server performance issues, you can quickly check the standard causes such as CPU utilization, memory usage and disk activity all from the same convenient application window.

Interested in trying this out for yourself? Download Below and Get Started Immediately! Gain access to a 30-day free trial.

2. Site24x7 – FREE TRIAL

Site24x7 approaches the same problem space from a different structural model. Instead of building monitoring coverage through selectable sensors, it presents a fully formed observability platform that can then be adjusted through interface customization and extended through plug-ins. This shifts the workload from assembling monitoring components to refining how an already broad system is applied to a given environment.

Discovery and documentation underpin that model. The platform identifies devices automatically, builds an inventory, and generates topology maps that continue to update as infrastructure changes. That continuous refresh avoids the drift that can occur when network documentation is maintained manually. Device monitoring is handled through SNMP, including the processing of SNMP traps into alerts, which can be forwarded as notifications through email and SMS.

Traffic analysis and troubleshooting tools are included, allowing administrators to examine bandwidth usage, detect bottlenecks, and assess overall network performance. The platform also extends monitoring beyond internal networks to include internet connections, which helps in diagnosing issues that sit outside the immediate infrastructure boundary.

Where Site24x7 moves further than PRTG is in its treatment of web applications, because it includes both synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. This provides visibility into how services perform under test conditions and how they behave for actual users.

The platform also follows virtualized environments, including cloud-hosted systems, virtual networks, and VPNs, which aligns it with modern infrastructure patterns. In these areas, it matches PRTG’s ability to monitor technologies such as voice services and virtual LANs, while adding broader application-level insight.

Site24x7 is delivered as a SaaS platform, matching the cloud deployment model of PRTG but without offering an on-premises equivalent.

Pricing: Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $9 per month, and the MSP edition starts at $35 per month. Get a 30-day free trial.

Site24x7 Start a 30-day FREE Trial

3. Nagios XI

Nagios is a comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring tool that provides you with monitoring for all of the mission critical infrastructure items that you have on your network such as applications, services, operating systems and network protocols.

This allows the system to gather system information and metrics about your environment, and lets you know how the overall health of your network infrastructure is doing.

Add to this the fact that there are hundreds of third party add-ons that have been created to provide monitoring of nearly all software applications, systems and services, and you have a monitoring solution that gives you incredibly detailed views into your infrastructure’s health.

Nagios XI works really well because it has been designed with performance in mind. It runs Nagios Core 4, a monitoring engine that is powerful and efficient, giving the application enhanced performance. This also allows it to scale incredibly well, without too much performance loss.

Perhaps the greatest feature that will be appreciated by your system administrator is the visibility that Nagios XI offers. It provides a central view of the entire IT operations network, as well as the business processes.

This is all displayed via detailed dashboards, which provide an at-a-glance perspective on how things are running at any time. A download link can be found here for anyone wanting to try it out for themselves.

Standard Edition starts at $1,995 but further pricing can be found here.

4. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor has been designed with network administrators in mind, and helps to reduce network outages and downtime.

It offers multi-vendor support for different network hardware, network insights for deeper visibility as well as intelligent maps that highlight problem areas that need to be looked at.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor lets you track all of the most important metrics on the network, and will show you how transfer speeds and connections are currently performing, alerting you if there are any current issues that need your attention.

This lets you stay in control of problems, sometimes fixing them before they become a problem.

NetPath and PerfStack make the troubleshooting process that much easier, while the system is very good at scaling. As with most of SolarWinds applications, the monitoring and alerting system makes up a large part of the functionality on offer, and it works really well here.

NPM has a Fully Functioning Trial that can be Downloaded Now and get your Monitoring within a Couple minutes.  You can start with a 30-day free trial.

5. Pandora FMS

Pandora FMS is an Open-source monitoring solution that seeks to offer similar functionality to commercial monitoring software products. It allows you to monitor most components on the network, including servers, switches, computers, and more.

It can monitor Windows, Unix and Linux servers, and can even monitor your virtual infrastructure as well.

Application monitoring is also possible with Pandora FMS, and configuration is not as difficult as some free and Open-source products.

Perhaps the biggest advantage the Pandora FMS offers its users is compatibility, allowing it to work with a whole host of free tools such as NGINX, docker, MySQL, Apache and more.

Pandora FMS also has performance and availability features that make events, graphs and SLA possible, as well as full reports and dashboards for you to view.

It uses different network technologies to allow it to scan the network such as SNMP v3, SNMP Traps, WMI, Remote Plugin Execution, Network discovery and Network Maps.

There are agent and agentless monitoring tools for Windows, Linux and Unix, as well as Android.

Application monitoring allows you to keep an eye on SAP, Oracle, Tomcat, MySQL, DB2, JMX, IIS, Hyper-V. Those wanting to download this impressive tool can find the link here. Pandora FMS is free and Open-source.