PRTG vs SolarWinds Pricing: What Each Vendor Actually Publishes

PRTG publishes a complete rate card and SolarWinds publishes nothing. Paessler lists every PRTG Network Monitor tier in public, from $200 a month for 500 sensors to $1,642 for 10,000, all billed annually. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor shows no dollar figure anywhere on its product page: the buttons are "Get a Quote", "Start Free Trial" and "Contact Sales". So the honest comparison is not a price-against-price table. It is that one of these two lets you size and budget the purchase in five minutes on your own, and the other requires a sales conversation before you know whether it is in range.

That difference matters more than most feature grids. If you are the person who has to put a number in next year's budget line before anyone will let you run a trial, a vendor that hides the number has already cost you two weeks.

Does SolarWinds publish its prices?

No. The SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor product page carries no pricing tiers, no element counts and no dollar amounts. It offers a 30-day trial, an interactive demo, a quote request and a contact-sales link. The license tier names that circulate in procurement conversations, SL100, SL250, SL500, SL2000 and SLX, do not appear on the page either.

Those SKUs are real, and you will find them in reseller catalogs. Third-party listings for the SL100 tier, described as up to 100 elements, cluster somewhere around $3,000 for an annual subscription. Treat that as a reseller listing rather than a list price: the figures vary between resellers, they change without announcement, and SolarWinds does not confirm any of them in public. If you need a number you can defend in a budget meeting, you have to ask for a quote.

How much does PRTG cost?

Paessler prices PRTG Network Monitor by sensor, and prints the whole ladder. These are the published figures, quoted per month on an annual subscription.

Support and version updates are included in the subscription for as long as it is active. There is a Freeware Edition capped at 100 sensors, which Paessler describes as about 10 devices, and a 30-day trial with no sensor limit at all. Above roughly 1,000 devices Paessler points you at PRTG Enterprise Monitor, which, like SolarWinds, carries no published figure. The full breakdown of what each tier works out to per sensor and per device is in our PRTG pricing analysis, including the finding that the hosted edition costs the same money as running it yourself.

Sensors against elements: both meter something smaller than a device

Here the two vendors are more alike than their pricing pages suggest, and it is the single most common budgeting mistake on either product.

A PRTG sensor is one measured aspect of one device. A ping is a sensor. So is a CPU reading, a single disk, one network interface, one HTTP check. A server you monitor properly consumes ten or more on its own, which is why Paessler's own planning ratio is ten sensors per device and why PRTG 500 is described as about 50 devices, not 500.

SolarWinds counts elements, and an element is similarly granular: nodes, interfaces and volumes are counted separately. A single switch with 24 monitored ports is not one element. Neither vendor is being sneaky about this, but both license names invite the same misreading, and in both cases the first quote comes back two to ten times higher than the buyer's mental model.

The practical advice is identical for both: count what you will actually instrument before you look at any tier name. Interfaces and disks, not machines.

What this means when you are building a budget

PRTG can be sized without talking to anyone. Count your devices, pick a sensors-per-device ratio you believe, look up the tier that fits and read the price. If you are at 40 devices and ten sensors each, you need 400 sensors, which means PRTG 500 at $2,400 a year. That whole exercise takes five minutes and produces a number you can put in a spreadsheet today.

SolarWinds cannot be sized that way. You can estimate elements, but the tier boundaries and the money behind them are not published, so the estimate stops at "somewhere in the low thousands" until a quote arrives. For a large enterprise with a procurement function that is a normal Tuesday. For a 20-person IT team it is genuine friction, and it is worth naming as a cost rather than pretending it is free.

There is a second asymmetry worth knowing. PRTG licenses do not stack: Paessler states that a 500-sensor key plus a 1,000-sensor key does not give you 1,500 sensors, because the software accepts one license key per server. Growth means upgrading the subscription through sales, so the five-minute sizing exercise is worth repeating with your expected headroom, not just today's count.

Which one should you buy

If your estate is large, heterogeneous and already has SolarWinds somewhere in it, the quote process is not the obstacle and the platform breadth usually wins. SolarWinds is built for organizations that buy several modules and run them together.

If you are a small or mid-sized team that wants network monitoring in place this quarter without a procurement cycle, PRTG's published card is a real advantage independent of the software. You can decide, budget and buy in the same week, and the price you planned around is the price on the invoice.

If what is actually failing in your world is not a switch port but a warehouse table that quietly stopped refreshing, neither of these is the right purchase. That is a different discipline, closer to monitoring freshness and schema drift across your data pipelines than to SNMP polling, and buying a network monitor will not surface it.

The check neither one performs well

Both PRTG and SolarWinds are inside-the-network tools, and that is their strength. They see what no external service can: bandwidth, disk space, virtual machines, UPS units, switch ports, temperature probes.

It is also a blind spot, and it is the one customers notice. A monitoring server sitting inside your network is the one place on earth that will almost always be able to reach your website. When DNS breaks, when a certificate expires, when a CDN rule misfires, when your provider's route to a whole region goes dark, the internal probe reports green while customers see nothing. Proving that your public endpoints answer from outside means standing up remote probe machines in other locations and keeping them alive, which is another set of servers to patch.

That external half is cheap to solve separately, and it is metered per URL rather than per sensor, so it does not eat the license you just sized. UptimeHub checks sites, APIs and ports every 30 seconds from six regions with auto-retry, asserts on the response body instead of trusting a 200, watches SSL and domain expiry alongside the endpoint, and includes a branded status page on every plan. Twenty endpoints start at $12 a month, which is inside the rounding error of a single PRTG upgrade step. There is more on why one vantage point is not enough in our note on monitoring from multiple locations, and a vendor-by-vendor view of how this is billed in the uptime monitoring pricing comparison.

Is PRTG cheaper than SolarWinds?

Nobody can answer that honestly, including us, because SolarWinds does not publish a price to compare against. What can be said is that PRTG's entry point is $2,400 a year for about 50 devices, that reseller listings put the comparable SolarWinds SL100 SKU somewhat above that, and that the two meter in different units, so even a matched quote would need translating from elements into sensors before the comparison meant anything. Get the quote, convert both to cost per device per year, and compare that.

Does PRTG pricing include support?

Yes. Paessler includes support and version updates in the subscription list price for as long as the subscription is active, so the monthly figure is the entire software cost. What it excludes is the Windows server the self-hosted edition runs on, the patching and backup around it, and any remote probe machines you deploy to monitor from other locations. Those are real costs that never appear on a rate card, and they land on your side of the ledger whichever of these two vendors you choose.