Catchpoint vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Catchpoint and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Catchpoint is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.3. Catchpoint holds a 0.4% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Catchpoint users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Catchpoint

Read 14 Catchpoint reviews

1,020 Views
614 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 42 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,793 Views
2,563 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Catchpoint

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Catchpoint and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor compete in the server and application monitoring category. SolarWinds appears to have the upper hand due to its superior features, despite some users preferring Catchpoint's support and pricing.

Features: Catchpoint users highlight real-time monitoring, extensive alerting capabilities, and a broad range of third-party integrations as its most valuable features. SolarWinds users appreciate its comprehensive monitoring, detailed performance metrics, and ease of troubleshooting. SolarWinds appears to have the upper hand in feature richness and depth.

Room for Improvement: Catchpoint users seek improvements in historical data storage and the accuracy of synthetic monitoring. SolarWinds users desire enhanced reporting features and faster updates. While both products have areas for improvement, SolarWinds shows a broader range of user-requested enhancements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Catchpoint is praised for its support during setup and intuitive deployment process. SolarWinds users find the setup to be straightforward but occasionally require significant manual configuration. Both products have strong customer service, but Catchpoint users rate their support higher.

Pricing and ROI: Catchpoint offers competitive pricing and is perceived to deliver good ROI. SolarWinds has higher upfront costs but users report that its extensive features justify the investment. Catchpoint is seen as more cost-effective, but SolarWinds offers better ROI due to its feature richness.

To learn more, read our detailed Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

April 2025

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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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

40th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (59th), Cloud Monitoring Software (31st), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (9th)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (9th), Active Directory Management (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Carl Funk

Senior Manager at a training & coaching company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Subhajit Nag

Senior Process Associate at Tata Consultancy Services

The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow

SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."

"One of the features, the scatter plot, is very useful. It shows red dots wherever there are issues."

"The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue."

"During business hours, it has worked absolutely fine without any issues."

"Catchpoint provides a great amount of information."

"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 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."

More Catchpoint pros

"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."

"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."

"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."

"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"It would be great if Catchpoint could incorporate its alerting system instead of relying on separate tools like ServiceNow."

"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."

"Catchpoint can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring."

"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."

"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."

"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."

"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."

"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."

More Catchpoint cons

"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."

"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."

"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"

"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."

"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."

"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 price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."

"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."

"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."

"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."

"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."

"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."

"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."

"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

53%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Educational Organization

40%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

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.

See all answers

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%.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Catchpoint?

As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive simila...

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...

See all answers

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Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 12% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint

April 2025

Download Catchpoint product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company™. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs, and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.

Learn more at: https://www.catchpoint.com/

Catchpoint

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

April 2025

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