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Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

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

Prometheus-AI Platform
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
Data Scrubbing Software (3rd), ERP (11th), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (3rd)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (22nd), Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Prometheus-AI Platform and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Prometheus-AI Platform is designed for Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and holds a mindshare of 1.7%.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 3.3% mindshare, up 2.5% since last year.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Prometheus-AI Platform1.7%
IBM Maximo15.2%
Oracle Enterprise Asset Management8.5%
Other74.6%
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.3%
Zabbix13.4%
Checkmk6.6%
Other76.7%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities
Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform. It is free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities. It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus. The ability to deploy on any cloud platform or environment, including Kubernetes, is a major advantage.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The resilience of the solution's metric collection is very nice."
"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"Prometheus is a great solution for monitoring."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features of the solution are metrics scraping capabilities and the open source community and support."
"The product’s scalability is valuable."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
 

Cons

"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"The primary area where Prometheus could be improved is in terms of pricing, particularly when used with managed services."
"The initial setup of Prometheus is complex and rated one out of five in ease of setup."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
"The interface is not particularly user-friendly and that could be improved."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"There is a tool called Prometheus Exporter that doesn't work well."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"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."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open-source tool."
"My company uses the open-source version of the product."
"The product is expensive compared to Datadog."
"The product is free."
"The price of Prometheus is good, it is affordable because it is open source and there is no cost to it. You put it on your own server and the costs incurred completely depend on how you set it up."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"The solution is open source."
"Prometheus is an open-source tool."
"The price is too high."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
12%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Prometheus?
The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Prometheus?
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free. Using cloud-native alternatives like Amazon Prometheus would incur charges.
What is your primary use case for Prometheus?
I use Prometheus for monitoring purposes in IT infrastructure. It is particularly useful for environments using Kubernetes, as it monitors ports, containers, instances, and applications effectively.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
 

Also Known As

Utopia Data Quality
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Roche Diagnostics Corporation, Harman International Industries Inc., Hilmar Cheese Company, International Rectifier Corporation, Electrolux USA, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, Rio Tinto Limited, Pertamina Pusat, Petrofac International Ltd, Cintas Corporation, Diyar United Company, Nortel Networks, Verizon
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Prometheus-AI Platform vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
883,896 professionals have used our research since 2012.