All reviews
11 products — network monitoring platforms plus the discovery and packet capture tools that support a purchase — reviewed for the person who has to approve the spend. Each review covers the licence unit, the trial, the costs outside the quote, and who should skip it.
Browse by situation instead: Network Monitoring for Small Business · Enterprise Network Monitoring · Cloud-Managed Network Monitoring · Discovery & Troubleshooting Tools
Paid subscriptions or licences, each with a trial or evaluation you can start from the vendor’s own site.
Paessler · Commercial subscription
Sensor-based infrastructure monitoring sold as a subscription, run on your own Windows server or as PRTG Hosted Monitor.
SolarWinds · Commercial subscription
Enterprise network performance monitoring with hop-by-hop path analysis, sold standalone or inside the wider SolarWinds observability bundle.
ManageEngine (Zoho) · Commercial (subscription or perpetual)
Device-licensed network and server monitoring with a large template library, workflow automation and several editions to grow into.
Auvik Networks · Commercial subscription (SaaS)
Cloud-managed network monitoring that maps topology automatically and backs up device configs, with a small on-site collector doing the polling.
NinjaOne · Commercial subscription (SaaS)
Cloud endpoint management platform whose network monitoring module watches SNMP devices alongside the laptops and servers it already manages.
LizardSystems · Free for personal use; paid business licence
A Windows desktop scanner that lists the shared folders, FTP and web servers it finds across your IP ranges and checks which ones the current user can read or write.
The do-it-yourself baseline: no licence fee for the core product, paid in setup and upkeep time instead. We include them so every commercial quote has something honest to be measured against — and, for the free desktop tools, because an independent device count and a packet capture make any purchase fairer.
Checkmk GmbH · GPLv2 Raw edition + commercial editions
Rule-driven infrastructure monitoring with an open-source Raw edition and commercial editions that add dashboards, agent automation and a SaaS option.
Zabbix · AGPLv3
Open-source monitoring platform with templates and low-level discovery; no licence fee, with paid support and a hosted option from the vendor.
LibreNMS community · GPLv3
Community-built, SNMP-first network monitoring that auto-discovers switches, routers and firewalls across a very wide range of vendors.
Anton Keks · Free, open source (GPLv2)
A small cross-platform IP scanner that sweeps an address range, reports which hosts answer, and exports the list — a quick independent device count for your own network.
Wireshark Foundation · Free, open source (GPLv2)
The standard open-source packet analyzer: capture traffic on an interface you control and decode it protocol by protocol, down to the individual SNMP request.
Written and maintained by ISABELLE, CLAUDINE, CATHERINE, JEANNE ALARY. How we reach a verdict is set out on themethodology page; how the site is funded is on theaffiliate disclosure page.