Paessler PRTG – The end-to-end alternative to Lansweeper

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and Lansweeper 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.

Lansweeper might be your choice:

• If your primary use cases are asset discovery, asset inventory, and IT infrastructure lifecycle management
• If you don't require real-time performance monitoring, configuration management, and alerts
• If you're comfortable paying for advanced features as and when you need them

The short answer is: they specialize in different use cases. 

Lansweeper tells you what's on your network. It excels at detecting and cataloging the hardware and software devices that are connected to your network and tracks their history: what software version they're running, warranty status, and other associated asset data. 

PRTG, on the other hand, tells you how smoothly your network is running, in real-time. That is, it tracks hardware and software health and performance on a continuous basis, and alerts you when there are issues that might impact your network's stability, helping you streamline troubleshooting, vulnerability detection, and incident management, and optimize performance.

The better question is: What's your goal? 

If your main reason for deploying a monitoring solution is to create a hardware and software inventory, have a granular view of the number and type of network devices connected to your infrastructure, and simplify asset lifecycle management, an IT asset management solution should meet your needs. 

But if your goal is to keep a close eye on the health, performance, and availability of your hardware and software devices, quickly detect and address issues, and enable proactive decision-making on resource allocation and capacity planning, you need a real-time monitoring tool. 

The truth is, as your network grows and becomes more complex — and the higher the audit, compliance, and operational demands on your IT team — you'll probably get to a point where you need both: asset discovery and management features, and a tool that simplifies troubleshooting and helps you make informed decisions on optimization.

Yes. PRTG lets you create custom sensors that pull data from Lansweeper and into your PRTG monitoring environment, so you can have a comprehensive picture of your network at a glance and carry out performance monitoring and IT asset management from one place. 

PRTG itself can also automatically discover and categorize the hardware and software devices that are connected to your network, including via remote access, though its main use case is operational assurance, not asset discovery and lifecycle management.

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.