Paessler PRTG – The straightforward alternative to Opsview

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and Opsview 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 a 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.

Opsview might be your choice:

• If your organization is heavily reliant on Nagios architecture
• If you require extremely granular control over alerting mechanisms
• If you're happy to pay for advanced features as and when you need them
• If you're comfortable configuring your monitoring environment and integrations manually

Both Opsview and PRTG come with the advanced features you'd expect from an enterprise-grade monitoring solution, but they have different strengths. 

If your infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Nagios plugins, Opsview is probably the better option, because it's built on top of Nagios architecture, and also has extremely granular alerting configurations — useful if you work in an environment where you'd expect to receive lots of alerts and need to cut through the noise. The trade-off is that it requires more manual configuration. 

PRTG, on the other hand, is an easy-to-use all-rounder. It's highly configurable and supports unlimited devices, which means it can scale as you grow, but you can also plug and play. It's also more cost-effective and transparent, with all features included on every tier.

Any network monitoring solution will require some manual configuration, especially if you have large IT infrastructure or need complex monitoring capabilities. That said,  setting up PRTG couldn't be simpler. 

Whether you choose PRTG Hosted Monitor — our cloud-hosted solution — or our on-premise solution PRTG Network Monitor (or a hybrid cloud setup), Auto-Discovery will do most of the work. Key in an IP address range and it will detect every device within that range and assign the appropriate sensors. You can start monitoring straight away, or configure the environment to suit. 

And, if you're stuck, you can consult our extensive documentation or chat with our friendly support team. Yes, even if you're on the free plan. 

Opsview is also relatively simple to set up, but, as its built on Nagios, it tends to require more intervention, such as command-line steps, manual data entry, and deployment scripts.

PRTG uses sensor-based pricing, with all features and functionalities included in the base price, even on the free plan. This means you don't pay to access specific features, or depending on whether you want to deploy PRTG’s network monitoring software on-premises or in the cloud. You pay for the metrics you want to monitor. And the first 100 sensors are free, for life, so you can start monitoring at no cost. 

Opsview, on the other hand, uses a host-based pricing model, with a host being a monitored physical device, such as a router, or a virtual machine with a unique IP address. There are also two plans — essentials and enterprise — with the former, less expensive plan having fewer features.

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.