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Comparing Solarwinds NPM, SAM and VMAN With Competitors

Hi All,

This thread could potentially be better suited for a product specific forum, but I wanted to obtain the highest level of visibility and because it spans multiple products I felt posting here would reduce spamming.

We are in the purchasing process for NPM, SAM, VMAN, NCM and NTA (to start), with potential additions of IPAM and LEM. Part of our process dictates that we need to go to market for competitive bids and weigh responses accordingly. Ultimately between the three vendors we have chosen, ManageEngine appears most similar in product offerings and functionality to the modules in question from Solarwinds. I am looking for customer specific responses in what differentiates the two vendors from a feature set and usability perspective. Our nod towards Solarwinds is the Orion framework, single pane of glass and integration of modules across the product portfolio, out of the box monitors for critical Microsoft infrastructure services, VMAN has no market competitors (in terms of integration into a single framework in tandem with other modules). That said, we need to provide valid tangible differentiators to score on. I have been a long time customer of Solarwinds in different companies and organizations over the past 10 years, but I do not have any recent experience with ManageEngine's comparable solutions in the past 3+ years. When you view the feature sets, they seem very very close. However we all know there is a lot more to a product than that - like user experience, community/company support, product innovation, regular development updates, clear roadmap, seamless integration of products, experience of customer support and access to developers/engineers, where customer support is located (ease of communication and time zones, etc.) to name a few.

So I am looking to the Solarwinds customer base to help in providing some relevant feedback that will help sway the decision in favor of Solarwinds, but some real life experiences in comparing the two products would be extremely beneficial as well. I simply do not have the time to setup all of the same solutions/components from Manageengine and compare like for like.

Many thanks!

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yaquaholic

I had a similar request a few years back, and I asked SolarWinds for assistance. When i asked if they had any product comparisons, they supplied some documentation detailing where the SolarWinds products match or beat their competitors.

Now this was a few years ago and things might have changed, and I know these documents are not on general release, so you will need to request them.

Reach out to your local Solarwinds sales or the support team and see if they can help.

121x

Good suggestion. Unfortunately I have already gone that route. The problem is the docs are from mid 2017, which is still fairly recent but many of the features they mention and show as not available with OpManager and the others from Manageengime, they do have an equivalents niw, which makes it a bit tricky. thay doesn’t mean they are comparable in terms of functionality, but they have products in the space with similar functionality. that is why I was hoping for some real life user experience feedback or usability related comparison that looks beyond the marketing and check lists.

danielleh

I understand the intent but to get more visibility I am going to move this to the Network Performance Monitor forum. You've come to the right spot for raw, unfiltered feedback from end users like yourself.

Also calling on the #bumpsquad

davidb35467

121x - did you get anywhere with your question?

We are currently undergoing a renewal and have been asked for similar (despite no appetite to move from Solarwinds but its a firm policy to provide evidence.)

121x

Hi David,

Unfortunately nothing more than was posted in the thread. I was forced to take it upon myself to justify the case. We did receive approval for the mentioned modules. We had to contend with going through an RFQ which pretty much show cased Solarwinds as the winner based on price to feature set. A number of the competing solutions were cloud hosted and not something that we are interested in pursuing. For the on-prem, most were much more expensive in comparison, not as feature rich and much more complex to implement, manage and customize.

I know this really doesnt help much.

Good luck and hope things go smooth for you!

davidb35467

Thanks for the reply!

Yes, we are in a similar boat. Renewal of our existing license with Solarwinds is very costs effective and we arent quite ready to move to the cloud for our monitoring either.

Best i get writing that justification from my biased perspective

mesverrum

I have to say my work is obviously biased, but I have in the past been tasked with several "head to head" bake-offs between Orion and other tools, and to date have always been the victor (but it could be related to the fact that our sales team only pulls me away from my other engineering work where they feel like there is a solid chance and clients need us to demo some more complicated scenarios). Typically prospective clients will generate a list of capabilities they expect us to demonstrate, I do so from the Solarwinds side, and some other organization is out there handling the demo for their product. If you go through a software distributor or VAR you may be able to get them to prepare such a demo for you.

I think tick box of features side by side can be misleading, as you say both tools will say they deliver on feature X, but the way they do it can vary dramatically so it can be nice to see how you would execute those feature in both tools to get a sense for the level of effort required and the capabilities/limitations of each technique. The other thing about feature lists is that in many cases a product might be jam packed with features but those features are not actually relevant to your org, having a list of 60 features sounds good in marketing material but many end up unused (I'm thinking of QoE monitors in Orion, for example).

davidb35467

Thanks 121x. We also got approval for a renewal and deemed that this wasnt the correct time to go back to market and do a complete product comparison and review.

Solarwinds is still right for us and meets the business requirements.

rschroeder

We have NAM; I like much about it.

We don't have SAM or DPA, and I miss them. I believe they should be mandatory, and probably bundled with NAM or built into NPM by default.

If / when we move to a different product, Prometheus is currently a top competitor for our attention.