Paessler PRTG – The comprehensive alternative to Atera

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and Atera depends on several factors, such as your specific network monitoring needs, budget, and technical resources available in your organization. 

PRTG is ideal:

• If you prefer an all-in-one, easy-to-use solution with minimal setup time.
• If you need sophisticated, customizable visualizations like dashboards and network maps.
• If you want to monitor an unlimited number of remote locations and networks at no extra cost.
• If you prefer high scalability and software tailored to large, complex environments.
• If you want to get real-time alerting, custom notifications, and automated reporting.
• If you want to have the choice between an on-premises or cloud-based solution.
• If you want a straightforward licensing model at a comparatively low price.

Atera might be your choice:

• If you prefer a per-technician pricing model rather than paying based on monitoring needs
• If you're comfortable with installing and maintaining agents on all monitored devices
• If you're committed to a cloud-only deployment with no need for on-premises options
• If you're willing to accept less customization flexibility in exchange for a simplified interface

PRTG offers superior scalability for growing networks with its sensor-based approach that can easily expand from small environments to enterprise-scale infrastructures. You can start small with the free 100-sensor version and scale up as needed. Atera's per-technician pricing may become less cost-effective as your monitoring requirements increase, especially for organizations with complex network environments requiring extensive monitoring beyond basic endpoints.

PRTG provides more extensive and customizable reporting options with over 30 pre-configured report templates plus the ability to create fully customized reports. These reports can be scheduled, automated, and delivered in multiple formats including PDF, HTML, and CSV. Atera offers basic reporting functionality focused primarily on endpoint metrics and technician activities, but lacks the depth and customization options available in PRTG's reporting engine.

PRTG gives you complete flexibility with deployment options including on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid approaches. This allows you to choose the deployment model that best fits your organization's security requirements and IT strategy. Atera is exclusively available as a cloud-based SaaS solution, which may not meet the requirements of organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements or those needing to keep monitoring data within their own infrastructure.

PRTG offers more sophisticated alerting capabilities with multi-stage escalation procedures, notification throttling, and dependencies to prevent alert storms. Alerts can be delivered through multiple channels including email, SMS, push notifications, and custom HTTP requests. Atera provides basic alerting functionality primarily focused on endpoint metrics, but lacks the advanced notification logic and dependency mapping available in PRTG that helps reduce false alarms and alert fatigue..

In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, for example the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, or the free space on a disk drive. On average, you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.