| Feature | Cisco Prime Infrastructure | SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager |
| Fully Manage Non-Cisco Devices | Able to monitor non-cisco devices, Does not allow to manage configurations. | SolarWinds NCM provides out-of-the-box support for all major network devices, including Cisco, Juniper, HP, Huawei, F5 Avaya, Ruckus and many more. This means you can backup, change, monitor, audit, and manage configurations for more devices on your network. |
| Device Lifecycle Management | Does not report native device end of life. | NCM identifies Cisco devices approaching the end of life and notifies admin, so admins can manage the budget and retirement of obsolete devices. |
| Vulnerability Assessment | Does not report native vulnerabilities. | NCM utilizes the NIST CVE repository service and automatically identifies devices with potential vulnerabilities. NCM will even provide the tools to manage the investigation, remediation, or waiver of each vulnerability. |
| Cisco Smart Net Integration | Does not have native access to Cisco Smart Net. | NCM provides an optional, free connector for Cisco Smart Net services. Using this connector, and Cisco account credentials, NCM can help you access Smart Net reports based on your network data, so admins can better manage support contracts, warranty defects, and many more. |
| Integrated Performance Monitoring and Configuration Management | Does not have the ability to correlate Quality of Experience issues to configure changes. | NCM can be combined with a purchased license for NPM to help identify and fix network problems faster. One example of this integration would be NPM NetPath determining that your CRM application is slow due to high egress latency on a router. NCM can also be combined with a purchased license for NTA which would then show that the application requires higher routing priority NCM can help admins to quickly reconfigure QoS settings on the bottlenecked router. |
| Full-Stack IT Integration | Does not integrate with IT management tools for servers, storage, database or applications. | NCM has the ability to be combined and works seamlessly with other essential SolarWinds management tools, including network, server, application, and database monitoring, through a single, integrated console to help the entire IT team work more efficiently across technology to identify and resolve IT problems faster. |
