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ManageEngine Applications Manager vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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

ManageEngine Applications M...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
42nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (35th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of ManageEngine Applications Manager is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
ManageEngine Applications Manager0.6%
Other98.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Ossama Arab - PeerSpot reviewer
Anomaly detection maintains the system's health and good for monitoring
The primary use case is for services and incident management.   The anomaly detection feature helps with maintaining the system's health. It is regarding our IT incident center.  ManageEngine is for incident management and monitoring.  The inventory of assets needs improvement. The asset…
VIVEK PATHAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring
My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its price and the flexibility to deploy are the most valuable. Flexibility is very important, and you can scale from very basic to more complex. This solution is a part of a complete suite of management tools. So, it can be integrated with other solutions for monitoring networks, which is very important. You can expand it or interconnect it with many other tools, which is a powerful feature. We have a very good and long relationship with ManageEngine support guys. They provide very good support for us."
"The feature that I have found most valuable in ManageEngine Applications Manager is its dashboard."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to be able to monitor Kubernetes."
"What I like most about ManageEngine Applications Manager is its price point, apart from its technicalities. The solution is cheaper than its competitors. ManageEngine Applications Manager has helpful documentation that makes setting it up straightforward."
"The anomaly detection feature helps with maintaining the system's health. It is regarding our IT incident center."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"I am impressed with the tool's reporting feature which is simple."
"We do not have pricing constraints as an organization, because we do have reservations about ManageEngine being functionally scalable."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
 

Cons

"One area of improvement is the dashboard should be more readable and available."
"The inventory of assets needs improvement."
"I would like the solution to improve the ability to track services."
"The problem is that implementation requires a significant amount of mapping effort."
"They could probably rearrange the UI so that it would be easy for people who are new to the Application Manager to configure things."
"An area for improvement in ManageEngine Applications Manager is artificial intelligence. If AI is integrated into the solution, it'll be a piece of cake. Currently, it's all configured manually."
"The information provided by ManageEngine is not deep-dive like IBM and CA provide."
"Lacks an SIEM solution which can be found in other products."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"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."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs for ManageEngine Applications Manager are around $1,200 per year. For additional monitors, you have to pay extra."
"It is a cost-effective solution."
"The cost of this solution is not too bad, although it could be cheaper considering what you're getting for the price."
"Its price is good."
"Price-wise, it is a cheap tool...The solution's licensing model is subscription-based, in which yearly payments are to be made."
"The solution's licensing costs are yearly."
"ManageEngine Applications Manager has reasonable pricing. It's more affordable than other solutions in the market. My company has an instance-based license for ManageEngine Applications Manager. You can purchase a yearly subscription or a perpetual license. The standard license covers most features, but you can still have some paid add-ons."
"The solution is noted for its cost-effectiveness, a crucial consideration for potential users."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ManageEngine Applications Manager?
The solution is noted for its cost-effectiveness, a crucial consideration for potential users.
What needs improvement with ManageEngine Applications Manager?
The integration process with third party tools poses some challenges; enhancing the robustness of these integrations could greatly improve overall functionality and user experience.
What is your primary use case for ManageEngine Applications Manager?
Our primary application of this solution revolves around IT infrastructure monitoring. We focus on alert consolidation from core network and service levels to enhance our service management framework.
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...
 

Also Known As

Applications Manager
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Certis Europe, Financial Domain, SaaS Office Suite, On Demand TV, Parliament's IT Systems, Sastra Technologies, UniServity
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about ManageEngine Applications Manager vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
870,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.