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SolarWinds NPM vs Versa Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
Versa Director
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
50th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Versa Director is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
PriyankDubey - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly and simpler than its competitors
Versa Director's best feature is the ease of configuration and customer and vendor management. Its UI is also excellent compared to Fortinet and Cisco Versa Director's on-prem SD-WAN hardware and SSL VPN software are not integrated, so you have to buy a separate subscription for the SSL VPN. In…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations."
"Everything has been complete and stable for our needs over the past four years."
"As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning."
"This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
"There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."
"I would rate the overall solution nine out of ten due to its capabilities, however, its complexity is a major drawback."
"The biggest thing for me is that it provided enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information you need."
"Versa Director's best feature is the ease of configuration and customer and vendor management."
"The most valuable functionality is some of the policy pieces that are quite useful."
"The most valuable feature of Versa Director is analytics."
"Versa Director is the fastest engineering tool and is ideal for use without product management."
 

Cons

"The solution's database performance could be improved."
"I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions."
"The market is changing, and people are expecting automation. I think that's a disadvantage."
"Robustness of network element mapping tool could be better"
"Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution."
"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API."
"SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance."
"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"It requires some simplification."
"Versa Director's deployment process is not the best."
"Versa could be more AI-oriented."
"What needs improvement in Versa Director is maturity because, from an operating point of view, it's not mature enough. You'll still need to do a lot of research on Versa Director, so if it could mature faster, that would be very good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Some solutions are open source and free."
"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"When I compare the cost of CA Spectrum to that of SolarWinds NPM, the cost of CA Spectrum is way too high, and the cost of SolarWinds NPM is pretty low."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"Having to buy separate licenses for the on-prem SD-WAN hardware and SSL VPN software makes Versa Director very costly compared to other solutions like Fortinet and Cisco."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
What do you like most about Versa Director?
Versa Director is the fastest engineering tool and is ideal for use without product management.
What is your primary use case for Versa Director?
We use the solution to monitor customer networks.
 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Versa Networks Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Versa Director and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,278 professionals have used our research since 2012.
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