LiveAction LiveNX vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

BlueCat and Plixer are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. BlueCat is ranked #52 with an average rating of 7.0, while Plixer is ranked #57 with an average rating of 8.0. BlueCat holds a 0.8% mindshare in NMS, compared to Plixer’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 77% of BlueCat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Plixer users who would recommend it.

LiveAction LiveNX

Read 8 LiveAction LiveNX reviews

1,392 Views
1,016 Comparison Views

77% willing to recommend

Plixer Scrutinizer

Read 15 Plixer Scrutinizer reviews

989 Views
386 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

LiveAction LiveNX

Plixer Scrutinizer

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

LiveAction LiveNX and Plixer Scrutinizer are network monitoring solutions aimed at enhancing network performance and visibility. LiveNX stands out in usability and customer support, while Scrutinizer offers advanced analytics for comprehensive network analysis.

Features: LiveNX provides visual analytics, dynamic path mapping, and efficient flow collection, emphasizing intuitive operation. Scrutinizer delivers extensive reporting, advanced security threat detection, and in-depth network behavior insights.

Room for Improvement: LiveNX could benefit from enhanced threat detection, increased reporting variety, and deeper forensic capabilities. Scrutinizer may improve with simpler deployment processes, user-friendly interfaces, and more streamlined operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: LiveNX offers straightforward deployment with well-structured onboarding and responsive support, facilitating a smooth transition. Scrutinizer has strong customer assistance but requires a more detailed setup due to its extensive functionality.

Pricing and ROI: LiveNX often has a higher initial cost, seen as delivering greater long-term value through improved efficiency and reduced downtime. Scrutinizer has competitive pricing aligned with its features, potentially offering faster ROI with its strong threat detection.

To learn more, read our detailed LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

March 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

LiveAction LiveNX

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

52nd

Average Rating

6.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (49th)

Plixer Scrutinizer

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

57th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of LiveAction LiveNX is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Mahesh Doshi

IT at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

Very good reporting and alerting abilities but inadequate enhancement support

Before choosing the solution, it is important to rank your requirements from high to low priority. The solution has a lot of features but at a high price. If you will only use 30% of the solution to meet your requirements, then it would be better for you to explore other products. Find the solution that best fulfills your requirements. The solution itself is great. If I could use it properly, then I would rate it a seven out of ten. Unfortunately, support is a factor when determining usability or cost effectiveness. We did not receive the needed support so had to stop using the solution. For that reason, my overall rating for the solution is a five out of ten.

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Ronald Jansen

Owner/President at Abraxax

Reporting is extensive, flexible, and can be custom-made in just a short time

In terms of additional features I'd like to see in the next release of Plixer Scrutinizer, I can't think of any because you can do some integration with other monitoring tools that are not strong in NetFlow or don't have NetFlow at all. There are also some integration possibilities in the product, plus there are alerts, too. Plixer Scrutinizer is a pretty complete product. There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point.

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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

"The alerting feature is very good because it allows you to set MOS alerts at various network junctures or data points."

"All in all, LiveAction LiveNX has become an indispensable tool for maintaining and improving our network's reliability and performance, ultimately supporting our organization's goal of providing timely and dependable delivery services."

"The intention and the idea of the filter is great."

"The product has a very good graphical interface."

"Its analytical capability is really good."

"One of the valuable features is the ability to create CLI scripts on the fly to fix any issues. We were using it for QoS modeling to ensure that we were properly modeling QoS, and it basically said here is what you need to fix to get this QoS done, whether it is ACL or something else. It would either push or recommend. If you have the right credentials, you could also push. It is very good if you are a Cisco shop. It gives you reporting, latency, and bandwidth utilization for your applications, so you can do good capacity management planning. There are a lot of pieces that LiveNX can give you. It is a total NPM solution for SD-WAN."

"We don't have any complaints about the software. According to my team, it's a very good tool that's very intuitive."

"We provide a tool for our customers to manage their reports. It's an extremely highly featured platform capable of producing a lot of data. We spent quite a long time working with customers and LiveAction to create template reports, and they're very good and configurable. You get a lot of data if you don't configure them."

"It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic."

"Visualization of the network traffic is the most valuable feature. It allows you to drill into information quite quickly."

"One of the most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer is the reporting, particularly how easy it is to drill down into the reports. Another valuable feature of the solution is its overall visibility. It's great. I also liked Plixer Scrutinizer in terms of deployment time and that it's very simple to set up. Once you get the appliance set up and connected, the customer starts to see results immediately, versus other solutions where that could take a while."

"The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI."

"We have had many requests to understand in the network which devices are connected to others. Most people don't have this information or are able to establish a map of data flow everywhere around the network. Scrutinizer can really help with this. We are using it to understand who is talking to what, how, and which protocols can help us to improve security and analyze flow."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."

"The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting."

"There are other tools out there that will do what Scrutinizer does. But what I have found with Scrutinizer is that it does it very quickly. I've taken 25 million individual data fragments from the different sensors, and it has graphed that and mapped it and presented a picture within 30 seconds. It has a very efficient database algorithm that I am really impressed with."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pros

Cons

"It is not as robust as other NPM solutions. For instance, there is a problem while labeling specific applications. It works well with well-known applications, but when you have to put in new applications that are not very known and set them up with names, ports, URLs, or some protocols, it is not as intuitive."

"This is a horrible solution and I think everything needs to be improved."

"Sometimes the solution does not register devices properly and that is a bug."

"They need to create a more simplified UI."

"The only downside to this software is the price."

"Improved documentation and more responsive customer support can help in addressing issues faster."

"The tool crashes sometimes when we try to pull reports simultaneously."

"The product is weak in multi-tenancy. We have to install multiple instances of LiveAction, whereas we would like to build it once for our customers."

"Though Plixer Scrutinizer has network detection and response, it's an area that needs just a little more rounding out. Another room for improvement in the solution is its lack of SaaS offering which some customers were looking for. My company deals in small to medium businesses, mid-market, and some customers wanted the SaaS feature which Plixer Scrutinizer doesn't offer. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for it to have a SaaS offering because my company also deals with educational spaces and smaller businesses that just don't have the staff that can implement this. If there's either a managed service or SaaS-based offering to just make it a little easier for those types of customers, it would be a great addition to Plixer Scrutinizer."

"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."

"In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required."

"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."

"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."

"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."

"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."

"There is room for improvement around the data that they have on the website about solutions... they should have more templated solutions on their website. Going out and identifying how to do RTP performance with a Cisco router, or how to do application response times in an Arrista data center deployment was where most of the work was... They should spend some more time documenting solutions and putting together white papers."

More Plixer Scrutinizer cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the free version."

"The solution is fairly expensive compared to other products."

"It's very expensive."

"Our entire solution, amortized over five years, is in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 a year."

"The licensing cost for Plixer Scrutinizer is in the middle. It's not the cheapest, but it's not the most expensive. Its licensing model is based on how many exporters, how many devices export information to the system. Plixer Scrutinizer has different modules you could add such as the security module which would cost extra."

"Compared to some of the other tools we have, it's incredibly reasonably priced."

"We pay our one-off cost for the licenses, per device, in blocks of 50. And then we pay an annual maintenance fee of about $15,000 Australian, which is, at this point in time, about $9,000 US, for those 250 devices. The upfront costs for the 250-license use, were about $50,000 Australian, which is about $32,000 US."

"There is a recurring maintenance fee after the initial purchase or if we want the license upgrade."

"It's about €10,000 a year for initial license and yearly maintenance costs. In addition, the hardware costs are about €10,000 once every five years."

"Currently, the license for Plixer Scrutinizer is subscription-based and at a yearly fee. The price would depend on the amount of traffic you pull in. For example, there are several blocks from a 10K flow, a 40K flow, and a 100K flow, and based on the number of devices that you receive the flows from, that's the license, and it is not a per-interface pricing model, so that is a very strong, very competitive pricing feature of Plixer Scrutinizer. Licensing for the product is also not based on the number of storage, compared to some competing products that are priced based on the amount of storage you need, particularly based on the retention and the amount of data. Plixer Scrutinizer licensing is based on the device, and it's more in the direction of $10,000 because, with just $1,000, you don't have anything."

"We have increased the license over time. We have added more licenses as the network has grown."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about LiveAction LiveNX?

The product has a very good graphical interface.

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What needs improvement with LiveAction LiveNX?

The product is weak in multi-tenancy. We have to install multiple instances of LiveAction, whereas we would like to build it once for our customers. Most of these analytical packages have the same ...

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What is your primary use case for LiveAction LiveNX?

Primarily, we use the product for monitoring the standard utilization of circuits. The tool has the incredible ability to provide granular details about the traffic passing through an interface on ...

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What do you like most about Plixer Scrutinizer?

Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plixer Scrutinizer?

I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive.

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What needs improvement with Plixer Scrutinizer?

I don't have deep enough knowledge to comment on what requires improvements in Plixer Scrutinizer. In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required.

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Comparisons

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Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

NetBrain vs LiveAction LiveNX

Compared 8% of the time

ExtraHop Reveal(x) for IT Operations vs LiveAction LiveNX

Compared 8% of the time

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SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 39% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 27% of the time

Kentik vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 19% of the time

LogicMonitor vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 15% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

LiveAction LiveNX

March 2025

Download LiveAction LiveNX product report

Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2025

Download Plixer Scrutinizer product report

Also Known As

LiveNX

No data available

Overview

LiveAction develops IT visibility solutions designed to simplify network management. Initially developed to aid the US Department of Defense in the operation of its networks, LiveNX (Network Experience) features an innovative visual display, real-time big data analytics and deep control of routers and switches for unparalleled network administration. LiveNX accelerates troubleshooting with its QoS control, application-aware, and WAN functionality developed through engineering partnerships with Cisco Systems.

BlueCat

The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

Plixer

Sample Customers

Tampa Electric, Digital First Media, Allscripts, Boxwood Technology

Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker

Buyer's Guide

LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

March 2025

Free Report: LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

Find out what your peers are saying about LiveAction LiveNX vs. Plixer Scrutinizer and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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