Paessler PRTG – The unified alternative to Wazuh

Choosing between Paessler PRTG and Wazuh 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.

Wazuh might be your choice:

• If your primary use cases are security monitoring, compliance, and threat detection
• If you prefer working with open-source technologies
• If you don't require deep customization
• If you're comfortable installing and configuring agents

The short answer: scope. 

Wazuh is a security-focused monitoring platform. It specializes in SIEM, XDR, log analysis, threat detection, and incident response, so it's ideal if you're looking for robust endpoint and cloud workload protection. The trade-off is that it can be somewhat fiddly to set up, and has limited health and performance-monitoring functionality. 

By contrast, PRTG, is an all-in-one network monitoring solution. This means that, alongside endpoint security and threat detection, it can also keep a close eye on other hardware, software, and virtualized component metrics, and even environmental stats like temperature and humidity, giving you a complete picture of your network's health and performance in one place.

PRTG and Wazuh are both highly customizable. But while, in Wazuh, customization is limited to its primary use cases — endpoint and cloud security — PRTG's customization options cover performance monitoring. The list below covers the key customization options in PRTG and Wazuh.

PRTG

• Custom sensors
• User-built dashboards
• Alerts
• Reporting
• APIs and extensibility features covering performance, trend analysis, infrastructure mapping, and so much more

Wazuh

• Custom rules
• Policy logic
• Alerts
• Integrations with external threat intelligence solutions

Don't be fooled by PRTG's significantly broader breadth of functionality and configurability. Setting it up is quick and easy. Download PRTG onto a Windows server (or use our cloud-hosted solution) and key in an IP address range. PRTG automatically detects every hardware and software network component in the provided IP range and assigns the appropriate sensors. You can then leave it as is, or tweak your monitoring environment, performance thresholds, and other parameters to suit using intuitive, drag-and-drop menus. 

Wazuh, by contrast, has a much more involved setup process. You'll need to deploy agents on every endpoint you want to monitor, configure security policies, and fine-tune rules, plus monitor setting on an ongoing basis.

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.