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NetBrain vs ThousandEyes comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

NetBrain
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (18th), Network Automation (6th)
ThousandEyes
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (8th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. NetBrain is designed for Network Troubleshooting and holds a mindshare of 3.3%, up 2.8% compared to last year.
ThousandEyes, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 1.6% mindshare, down 3.4% since last year.
Network Troubleshooting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetBrain3.3%
Wireshark18.8%
AirMagnet Survey PRO8.5%
Other69.4%
Network Troubleshooting
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ThousandEyes1.6%
Zabbix3.7%
SolarWinds NPM3.7%
Other91.0%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
Siddumanisria Mindi - PeerSpot reviewer
Network engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Monitoring has transformed internet visibility and speeds up resolving external service issues
ThousandEyes needs to specify unit consumption forecasting or scaling testing and deeper app analytics. It needs deeper out-of-the-box Layer 7 code or database-level insights. Additionally, it should unify the GUI with broader Cisco platforms and flatten the learning curve, adding better correlation with local laptop system metrics such as endpoint depth, CPU, RAM, or processes. ThousandEyes isn't designed to be a full-blown SNMP monitoring tool for on-premises infrastructure. While it tracks network paths effectively, it doesn't provide deep local device telemetry such as switch port buffer utilization, fan status, or power supply health. For full internal device monitoring, you'll still need to pair it with traditional tools such as SolarWinds or Cisco Catalyst Center.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"Once it's up and running and you don't have the strange requirements I had, and you just want some basic maps, it'll work."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can click once and have a link test, see your network, and get an overall view of your network and its state."
"NetBrain is faster, better and level sets the engineering technical sets."
"NetBrain is very good when it comes to network mapping, as it looks for different assets within the network available, so router, firewall, applications, et cetera, and it gives you the full mapping, asset mapping along with the full range including the firmware software update and all those things."
"This tool is exactly what we wanted and needed."
"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings."
"The authentication overall - including to the VPN and LAN - is excellent."
"The historical timeline feature is what I appreciate most about ThousandEyes because when people report that something occurs at a specific time of day, I can set up a test and capture the issue in action."
"From our perspective, ThousandEyes stands out as an invaluable tool because of its deep and extensive capabilities."
"I would advise others looking into using ThousandEyes to consider it one of the best tools for monitoring their network infrastructure."
"ThousandEyes is an excellent product that really provides accurate metrics into network performance as well as the user experience, and I would highly recommend it."
"The company provides excellent service."
"The features I like the most about ThousandEyes are the visualizations that let you see how the call flow went and how many hops it took and everything."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution was the ability to see how the connection quality is between the sites and get an alert if it was turning bad."
 

Cons

"If you're comparing NetBrain as an NDR, I would rate it as a four or five, however, NetBrain has a different aspect of looking at things within the network."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"When I used the installed product before, I wasn't very satisfied with the support."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"Netbrain must get AWS functionality done."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"ThousandEyes could be improved by unifying the GUI with the rest of the Cisco products since it remains legacy from its original state when Cisco acquired it."
"ThousandEyes can be improved by making the installation procedure less time-consuming and enhancing the interface to be more user-friendly."
"Stability issues are present in the solution."
"I feel it needs more holistic integration. It needs more improvement."
"It was kind of a beta experience, I would say. It was not fully developed at that time; it looked like an unfinished project with many gaps."
"They only offer synthetic requests, so they should create an agent for users that can track your request."
"ThousandEyes could improve the dashboards by adding more features."
"ThousandEyes definitely has differentiators versus the peers in the space, as there are other tools that are a bit more user-friendly to configure, especially around enterprise agents; for example, when upgrades are required, it sometimes needs a complete de-installation and re-installation of a newer version, which leads to a bit of administrative overhead from time to time, but overall, it has been an excellent product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"It is a quite expensive solution."
"The solution costs several thousand dollars per year."
"The solution's pricing is cheap; I rate it a five out of ten."
"In our company, we incur a yearly expense in our company for the licensing part. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten since it is expensive."
"The solution is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What needs improvement with ThousandEyes?
I think ThousandEyes can be improved, specifically the licensing model. It's too complex, too expensive, and it takes a lot of time to manage the licensing model. My experience with pricing, setup ...
What is your primary use case for ThousandEyes?
My main use case for ThousandEyes is path monitoring. I use ThousandEyes for path monitoring to see how my traffic is flowing in my network, what the hops are in between, and then see at what hop e...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
Wayfair, GitHub, Craigslist, Comcast, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Box, HP, Zendesk, IO Data Centers, Good Technology, NNTCommunications, Proofpoint, Schneider, Crowdstrike, Avera, Pitney Bowes, InstartLogic, Shutterfly, Shutterstock, Condé Nast, Roche, Jive, Actelion, Brocade, Infor, Okta, JLL, DigitalOcean, Zuora, NetSuite, CloudFlare, One, DemonWare, Quantcast, Carbonite, CareerBuilder, Prosper, Oscar, Slack
Find out what your peers are saying about Auvik, Wireshark, NetAlly and others in Network Troubleshooting. Updated: September 2026.
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