Paessler PRTG – The easy-to-use alternative to ScienceLogic

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and ScienceLogic 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.

ScienceLogic might be your choice:

• If you require extensive, granular customization
• If your infrastructure has enough resource capacity for high-frequency data collection
• If you're happy to pay for advanced features as and when you need them
• If you're comfortable setting up agents and configuring integrations

Any network monitoring solution will require some manual configuration if you're dealing with a huge number of devices or have complex monitoring needs. 

That said, we're confident setting up PRTG is as quick and painless as setting up a monitoring environment can possibly be. Key in an IP address range, and PRTG automatically detects every network component within that range, assigns the right sensors, and starts gathering data. Job done. You can leave it as is or tweak the environment (and parameters) to suit your IT environment. 

ScienceLogic also supports auto-discovery, but the interface isn't as intuitive and the monitoring environment requires significant configuration, especially if you want to use advanced functionalities.

ScienceLogic and PRTG are both highly flexible and scalable network monitoring software tools. But we'd argue that PRTG is the better monitoring platform, for three reasons:

1. While you can configure everything to suit — dashboards, reporting, alerts, parameters… you can even create custom sensors — PRTG works right out of the box, with minimal intervention, regardless of whether you run a small local network or have large-scale, distributed infrastructure, for example because you’re a managed service provider. This means you can make the most of it regardless of which stage your organization is in, the resources at your disposal, and the use cases you need it for. 
2. Powerful automations and an Intuitive interface make it easy to tweak your monitoring environment as your IT infrastructure evolves and your needs change. 
3. Our pricing model is more transparent and predictable, so you won't get nasty shocks (or URGENT emails from accounts) at the end of the billing cycle

PRTG uses sensor-based pricing, with all features and functionalities included. Each sensor monitors a specific variable, so our pricing model means you pay for the metrics you want to monitor, never to access specific features or capabilities. Your first 100 sensors are free, for life. 

By contrast, ScienceLogic uses device-based pricing. In other words, you pay for every device included in your monitoring setup. The price per device also varies depending on the capabilities you want access to. They have three packages, each of which has two pricing tiers, one of which is more feature-rich (and more expensive) than the other. Some of the more expensive plans have a free trial, but there's no free version available.

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.