Paessler PRTG – The scalable alternative to Spiceworks

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and Spiceworks 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.

Spiceworks might be your choice:

• If your primary use case is IT asset management
• If you need an easy-to-use network monitoring solution on a very limited budget
• If your organization is too small to warrant the complexity of an enterprise-grade system
• If you're comfortable setting up agents and configuring integrations

One word: scalability. If you're a small organization with limited and specific monitoring requirements, Spiceworks is ideal. It's easy to set up and use, has a solid set of features, and as a free software tool, it doesn't get any more cost-effective. But that comes with a very important trade-off: if your organization has big ambitions — and, let's face it, most businesses do — Spiceworks may not be able to handle the added complexity this will bring to your IT infrastructure. Or, at least, not without significant manual tweaking. 

PRTG, on the other hand, easily adapts to any kind of network, whether it's a small, local deployment, or a complex distributed network with hundreds of hardware, software, and virtualized components. This gives you the flexibility to start small and upgrade (or even downgrade) at will, without frustrating configuration changes and workarounds or, worse, having to switch monitoring software at a later stage.

Of course, you'll probably say we're biased. But we genuinely think a monitoring environment doesn't get any easier than PRTG to set up. 

With PRTG Hosted Monitor, our cloud-hosted solution, all you need to do is key in an IP address range, and auto-discovery will automatically detect every hardware and software device within that range and assign the right sensors. Of course, you can customize the environment to suit. But the point is that you can get started with almost zero manual intervention. 

If you go for PRTG Network Monitor — our on-premise solution — or a hybrid environment, setup will be a bit more involved. But auto-discovery will still kick in and do most of the work for you. 

Either way, we've extensively documented PRTG's setup process, and our friendly support team is always on hand to help.

Spiceworks is free forever, while PRTG has free and paid plans. This means you can get started with both Spiceworks and PRTG without paying anything. But, unlike PRTG, Spiceworks doesn't have enterprise capabilities, so it'll be difficult for you to scale it as you grow. 

PRTG uses sensor-based pricing: all features are included in the base price, and you pay for the metrics you want to monitor, not to access specific capabilities. The first 100 sensors — more than enough for a small organization with basic monitoring needs — are free, forever. You can move to a paid plan once your organization's network becomes larger or more complex and, so, needs more sensors. You can also scale back at any time, no questions asked. It's the best of both worlds.

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.