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Catchpoint vs Kentik 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

Catchpoint
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
55th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (42nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (30th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (9th)
Kentik
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
39th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kentik is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Carl Funk - PeerSpot reviewer
The UI is well designed, so it's easy to get the visibility you want.
There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing. The other issue is the cost. The more data you collect, the more expensive it becomes. You sell your organization by saying we can get this feature set, but then you have to walk that back because we'll need more money to run every test. This is something hard to get out in your initial scoping. You provide Catchpoint with a series of tests and get a cost estimate, not realizing all the data you might have to collect long term. That was a big deal for us because we partly switched on the promise of saving money.
Ahmad Mohd Fahmin - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes monitoring of operational efficiency an easy process
If there is any integration, it will apply back to the source of information that was creating the delay, for example, a legacy system or because the network's configuration is not correct. My company has not yet used any AI features of the product, but we do plan to use it in the future. I recommend the tool to others. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's most valuable feature is the ability to identify and troubleshoot network issues."
"The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI."
"Catchpoint provides a great amount of information."
"The thing I like most is the tech support in this company, because they have 24/7 chat support. We can chat immediately and ask them about an issue and they keep responding. They create tickets on our behalf and respond."
"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."
"Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn."
"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."
"Catchpoint's customer service and support are valuable."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
 

Cons

"Trending needs improvement. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends."
"There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring."
"We would like the script creation feature of this solution to be improved, as it currently requires a complicated manual process to update the scripts."
"The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats."
"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."
"if we need to do performance analysis, we have to click too many times. For example, if there is an issue that is caught by Catchpoint, we need to understand what the error is and at which step it failed, or which transaction that is impacted. To drill down, we have to click too many things to get the answer."
"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."
"Catchpoint can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring."
"Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."
"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."
"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."
"The tool is cheaply priced."
"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
62%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
Retailer
3%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Catchpoint?
Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?
The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational and cost efficiencies, with time savings estimated between 30% and 40%.
What needs improvement with Catchpoint?
The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats.
What do you like most about Kentik?
It offers a simple yet powerful feature of classifying applications, going beyond basic statistics.
What needs improvement with Kentik?
Sometimes, the tool has complications, so we must deal with the additional support from the tool's end. We have the L3 and L4 support, but we have to get expertise in a different time zone, which i...
 

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Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Find out what your peers are saying about Catchpoint vs. Kentik and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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