Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs PRTG Network Monitor comparison

Cisco and Paessler GmbH are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #43 with an average rating of 8.0, while Paessler GmbH is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.4. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in NMS, compared to Paessler GmbH’s 3.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Paessler GmbH users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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1,596 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

PRTG Network Monitor

Read 112 PRTG Network Monitor reviews

9,185 Views
6,338 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

PRTG Network Monitor

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

PRTG Network Monitor and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance compete in the network monitoring category. PRTG Network Monitor has the upper hand in cost-effectiveness and ease of use, whereas Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance excels in advanced features suitable for complex environments.

Features: PRTG Network Monitor supports rapid deployment with minimal customization and a broad range of pre-configured sensors. It's known for its reliable alerting and scalability across different infrastructures. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance provides advanced network assurance tools ideal for managing complex networks, even though it costs more.

Room for Improvement: PRTG Network Monitor could improve with better template management, enhanced mapping capabilities, and more flexible sensor configurations. Users would also benefit from expanded integration features. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance would see gains from a more streamlined interface and faster real-time monitoring.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PRTG Network Monitor offers straightforward deployment across various environments, including hybrid clouds. However, its customer service can suffer from slow responses due to time zone issues. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance excels in timely technical support but has a more complex deployment process.

Pricing and ROI: PRTG Network Monitor is renowned for being cost-effective with a scalable pricing model that benefits smaller setups, providing a high ROI due to low licensing costs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance, while more expensive, justifies its price through features that offer high ROI for large enterprises needing comprehensive connectivity assurance.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. PRTG Network Monitor Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. PRTG Network Monitor

December 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

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

43rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (43rd)

PRTG Network Monitor

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

112

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PRTG Network Monitor is 3.3%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
PRTG Network Monitor	3.3%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
Other	96.0%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Sylvain Germe

Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Highly scalable, responsive support, but lacking new features

This solution is geared towards on-premise setups, and would not be useful if the company plans to move to the cloud within the next two years, such as Google Cloud for example. If the goal is to monitor bandwidth at remote sites and identify performance issues because the network is under the control, this solution is useful. However, if a company primarily uses cloud-based servers and does not manage the internet connection of its remote sites, the solution becomes less useful. I rate Accedian Skylight a seven out of ten. I have a positive opinion of the tool, but it can be challenging to set up. It is also limited in its applicability to certain use cases. I am familiar with the engineers behind the solution and have a good impression of them. However, I am not pleased with the fact that the company removed many features and raised prices after it was acquired by Accedian.

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madhan kumar hs

software engineer at Capgemini

Alerting precision has reduced incident response times and improved department-level network visibility

The auto-pause sensor during the maintenance window is good without any false alerts, and it prevents me from getting flooded with alerts during planned maintenance, helping department heads understand their own network usage better. It has reduced incident response time by giving clearer ownership of each alert, ensuring alerts go to the proper recipient. SNMP testers and auto-pause are among the best features of PRTG Network Monitor, which is particularly useful for different departments such as HR and finance, where alerts can be filtered accordingly. The alerting features and dashboard of PRTG Network Monitor are very helpful, especially in our industry. However, the dashboard can look cluttered on smaller screens, which is one negative aspect. PRTG Network Monitor has impacted us positively; we have stopped getting flooded with alerts during planned maintenance or unplanned outages. Compared to others, this gives specific alerts very quickly and helps department heads understand their own network usage better, thus reducing incident response time so that each alert has clear ownership.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For us, the most valuable feature is something called TWAMP that allows for real-time traffic in a way that is 10 times lighter than things like SolarWinds. It's in the sub-milliseconds of accuracy, and you can divide tasks so that you can literally see things like the tagging for Quality of Service. That had been incorrect with the carrier, but there was no way on this planet you'd be able to tell a carrier that they're wrong. I have dozens of scenarios where we found "No, that's not right," and got it resolved instantly."

"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."

"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."

"If [the problem] is something related to HTTP or VoIP, then I can have a quick look into the protocols, a process which gives me some good ideas..."

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."

"What I like most about Accedian Skylight is that it's a UI application, so using it is easy. I also like that the support for Accedian Skylight is helpful."

"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."

"The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to span multiple technologies and multiple vendors."

"The scalability is good. You can improve a remote host or the clustering. This gives it the flexibility to monitor another infrastructure remotely."

"One of the valuable features is the diversity of metrics available to us to monitor. It's all there, it's all in the box. It's all made very easy, by virtue of it being pre-configured."

"The real-time monitoring and alerting are its most valuable features."

"Stable solution for monitoring networks and bandwidth, with multiple functions and features such as NetFlow Collector, graphical monitoring, etc."

"I think net flow is PRTG's most valuable feature because it doesn't cost much for us because the net flow sensor is already included in the PRTG license. We can monitor our traffic in our proxy and router."

"PRTG Network Monitor is easy to set up. Within a few minutes, it is operational."

"The product is simple and easy to implement."

More PRTG Network Monitor pros

Cons

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"Some of the Skylight applications are a little newer, and they're still moving through initial revs. There are certain bugs, but nothing is insurmountable... It will just take a little bit of time for their user interface to get a little bit better."

"For the PVX, they are in the process of getting the results to export to cloud and SaaS for analytics. They told me that this will happen later this year. Right now, for the most part, I create that data myself."

"There should be an option to update and upgrade the solution to the new version without having to re-buy it. I have clients switching to other solutions. The old solution is great, but if you change your license to a new one, you have to almost re-buy it completely."

"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

"I would like to see some improvements in parts of their synthetic transactions, which includes all the latency, jitter, and throughput. I would like to see some Layer 7 analytics in there. I want to be able to do a DNS request, HTTP GET request, or even SIP call point-to-point or via registration."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"PRTG Network Monitor can be improved as there is a lot of manual cleanup needed, which could be reduced."

"The only sort of limitation is the actual probes. So, if you don't have enough probes on there, you can over flip them and cause the WMI sensors and SNMP sensors to sort of overload. Sometimes, they might timeout for a minute, but they do come back."

"In the next release, PRTG Network Monitor should add a backup solution."

"A room for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor is its sensors. Its application technology sensor, such as the IAS, .NET, etc., needs some improvement because it doesn't work as expected. For example, the IAS sensor doesn't give immediate information, and the information you get from it isn't of good value. The web GUI of PRTG Network Monitor also needs improvement because errors keep popping up if it's not been updated to the latest version. What I'd like to see in the next release of the tool is end-to-end topology mapping for the business model, and that should be required. There has to be a technical map. Technical mapping and topological creation are missing in PRTG Network Monitor, so I would like to see those in the future."

"We would like more cloud native sensors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. A lot of businesses are moving in that direction, so having something where we can pull performance stats out of these cloud services would be great for us."

"I would like to see network mapping."

"The database needs improvement."

"PRTG Network Monitor needs to enhance network performance monitoring."

More PRTG Network Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."

"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."

"It provides value and the cost is not huge."

"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."

"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."

"The solution was previously well-regarded, but after being acquired by Accedian, the prices have significantly increased. This has made it challenging to sell the product due to its high cost. It is an expensive solution."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"The pricing of Accedian Skylight is really good. The sensors are low cost. Their model to analytics for sensors is by license, endpoint, or session. With the probes for their analytics, if they get deployed virtually, they are free. The licensing is only based on flows. So, you can effectively deploy probes everywhere in your network. Then, if you want to look at a specific type of traffic, you can enter into it with a very low cost license. You can just use things like spam ports, mirrors, TAPs, and aggregators to optimize what sort of traffic you send to these analysis tools. Then, if you want to start looking at more, you can up your licensed as you go. You are not getting forced into expensive appliances or subscription models."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"The ability to use the base version with 100 free sensors is great. The cost on other packages can be very reasonable."

"PRTG Network Monitor's price is a little high."

"When you buy PRTG, everything comes in one bundle. Licensing is very easy."

"We used a product called SolarWinds in the past, and its cost was high. Whereas, PRTG came in at a third of SolarWind's cost."

"PRTG Network Monitor is cheap."

"PRTG Network Monitor is very expensive."

"I rate the price of PRTG Network Monitor an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."

"The price of PRTG Network Monitor is reasonable for the features that the solution provides. They charge you per monitoring, not per node, it is per port that you need for a device."

More PRTG Network Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user174738

IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

May 31, 2015

Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor

I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

25%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	59
Midsize Enterprise	19
Large Enterprise	47

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Accedian Skylight?

Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues. I require more tools to file and resolve these issues efficiently.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Accedian Skylight?

I had prepared for COC and the client. I work as a vendor for a client using Flow Mount for network performance monitoring. I focus on resolving client-side issues related to Packy Performance and ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

See all answers

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it avoid the configuring the device in PRTG. It automatically discover the device an...

See all answers

What do you like most about PRTG Network Monitor?

The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PRTG Network Monitor?

The pricing was higher at the beginning, but the recurring licensing cost is affordable and reasonable. Overall, the pricing, setup cost, and licensing is fair for our industry. They have quoted us...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

Grafana vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

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Zabbix vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Centreon vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

Checkmk vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

Nagios XI vs PRTG Network Monitor

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

January 2026

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

PRTG Network Monitor

January 2026

Download PRTG Network Monitor product report

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision

No data available

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is known for its user-friendly approach to network analysis and performance monitoring. It excels in real-time diagnostics, helping organizations quickly resolve network issues and optimize performance effortlessly.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance focuses on comprehensive network troubleshooting and performance monitoring, assisting in identifying bottlenecks and analyzing applications. Real-time data collection and evaluation ensure IT infrastructure efficiency. With active monitoring of latency, jitter, and throughput, users maintain smooth operations across multiple sites and applications. While highly effective, improvements in data handling, protocol support, and dashboard aesthetics are suggested to enhance user experience.

What are the key features of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance?

Flow Matrices: Advanced analysis of network paths and traffic distribution.
SQL and DNS Analysis: In-depth insights into database and domain queries for troubleshooting.
Bandwidth Assessment: Evaluation of network capacity and utilization for performance optimization.
Real-time TWAMP Monitoring: Tracks network performance using Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol.
Application Performance Modules: Monitors the performance of various applications and services.
Customizable Dashboards: Personalized views for tracking critical network metrics and trends.
PCAP Capturing: Detailed packet analysis using tools like Wireshark for deeper insights.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Use: Intuitive design allowing users to swiftly diagnose network issues.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Enhanced visibility of network activity for better control.
Performance Efficiency: Optimization of throughput, reducing downtimes and improving service delivery.
Cost-Effectiveness: Balances features and functionality with competitive pricing for better ROI.

In industries such as telecommunications and finance, where network reliability is crucial, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers critical network performance insights. It supports high-demand environments by providing data-driven decisions, ensuring infrastructures handle increased loads efficiently.

Cisco

PRTG Network Monitor runs on a Windows machine within your network, collecting various statistics from the machines, software, and devices which you designate. PRTG comes with an easy-to-use web interface with point-and-click configuration. You can easily share data from it with non-technical colleagues and customers, including via live graphs and custom reports. This will let you plan for network expansion, see what applications are using most of your connection, and make sure that no one is hogging the entire network just to torrent videos.

To monitor a large IT environment, it's important to be able to scale PRTG up. Paessler PRTG Enterprise Monitor includes all the proven capabilities of PRTG Network Monitor, which are enhanced by exclusive ITOps Board for a service-oriented, central overview of multiple PRTG servers.

Paessler GmbH

Sample Customers

T-Systems, Thomson Reuters, Bordeaux Metropole, CGI, Citadelle Regional Hospital Center, Lorraine Institute of Oncology, Luxembourg Institute of Health, Groupe BPCE, Group S, Splitpoint, Horus-Net, Audatex, Indexis, Province de Liège, EASI, Spie Batignolles, Faymonville

Jameson Bank, Sidnix, RungeICT, MedicalAnimal, Truck-lite, GamingGrids, The Covell Group, Forsythn County Schools, NetMass, Musgrove Park Hospital, Lanes Health, Columbia Southern University, Vodafone, Intrust Bank

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. PRTG Network Monitor

December 2025

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