SolarWinds has three main competitor groups:
1. IT teams that don't have professional tools, using free or open source tools like Nagios that require a lot of work and customization and custom scripts.
2. Low-end tools that are often somewhat less expensive but offer significantly less functionality. These are great for smaller teams, who often upgrade to SolarWinds as their needs grow. This category includes WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine and SpiceWorks.
3. Big, complex, monolithic monitoring systems from HP, CA, VMware (VRops), IBM (Tivoli), Microsoft (SCOM) and BMC which are hard to use, expensive to manage and maintain, and cost millions but have been in use for years and the effort to move to something better is too big.
SolarWinds offers over 30 products in different categories including virtualization, storage, databases, systems management, network, security, etc. each of these products has a set of competitive products.
