Paessler PRTG - The all-in-one alternative to ThousandEyes

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and ThousandEyes 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.

ThousandEyes might be your choice:

• If you want to focus exclusively on digital experience and synthetic monitoring
• If you have dedicated resources for Enterprise Agent deployment and management across providers
• If you primarily need advanced network path analysis and internet performance monitoring
• If you have budget for enterprise-level pricing starting around $50,000+ annually

PRTG offers transparent sensor-based pricing with a free version for up to 100 sensors, making it accessible for organizations of all sizes. ThousandEyes uses unit-based pricing that typically starts around $50,000 annually for enterprise deployments, with additional costs for endpoint agents ($72-$175 per user annually) and specialized features like Internet Insights packages, making it significantly more expensive for comprehensive monitoring.

Yes, PRTG provides comprehensive network visibility and troubleshooting capabilities through multiple monitoring technologies including SNMP, WMI, packet sniffing, flow monitoring, and synthetic monitoring. While ThousandEyes specializes in network path analysis and synthetic monitoring with global vantage points, PRTG offers broader infrastructure monitoring capabilities alongside network performance monitoring, helping you correlate network issues with application performance and identify root cause more effectively.

PRTG includes synthetic monitoring capabilities through HTTP sensors, ping sensors, and custom scripts for monitoring applications and services. For end-user experience monitoring, PRTG provides real user monitoring through endpoint sensors and application performance monitoring. While not as focused as ThousandEyes is with synthetic monitoring, PRTG offers these capabilities as part of a comprehensive monitoring platform that also covers infrastructure monitoring, helping you optimize overall performance metrics.

PRTG supports distributed monitoring through remote probes that can be deployed across unlimited locations, providing comprehensive network visibility across distributed environments. ThousandEyes provides global Cloud Agents but requires Enterprise Agent deployment for internal network monitoring. Both approaches provide distributed visibility, but PRTG's model eliminates per-location costs and provides more flexibility for monitoring across different IT environments and dependencies.

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.