Contrail Networking vs. Critical Stack Comparison Chart

Access Server gives you the ability to rapidly deploy a secure remote access solution with a web-based administration interface — all on general purpose computing hardware or virtual machines. Your team will have access to the built-in OpenVPN Connect App and bundled connection profiles. All without adding a ton of extra work to your IT to-do list. OpenVPN Access Server is a full-featured SSL self-hosted VPN software solution that integrates OpenVPN server capabilities, enterprise management capabilities, simplified OpenVPN Connect UI, and OpenVPN Client software packages that accommodate Windows, MAC, and Linux, mobile OS (Android and iOS) environments. OpenVPN Access Server supports a wide range of configurations, including secure and granular remote access to internal network and/ or private cloud network resources and applications with fine-grained access control. OpenVPN also has a cloud-delivered solution called CloudConnexa.

JDisc Discovery is a comprehensive network inventory and IT asset management solution designed to help organizations gain clear, up-to-date visibility into their IT environment. It automatically scans and maps devices across the network, including servers, workstations, virtual machines, and network hardware, to create a detailed inventory of all connected assets. This includes critical information such as hardware configurations, software installations, patch levels, and relationshipots between devices. One of the standout features of JDisc Discovery is its agentless discovery process, meaning it does not require the installation of any software on individual devices, reducing deployment time and minimizing network impact. It supports a wide range of protocols (e.g., SNMP, SSH, WMI) to gather data, making it compatible with diverse IT environments, whether they are Windows, Linux, or Unix-based.

With customers across 70+ countries, organizations of all sizes rely on Device42 as the most trusted, advanced, and complete full-stack agentless discovery and dependency mapping platform for Hybrid IT. With access to information that perfectly mirrors the reality of what is on the network, IT teams are able to run their operations more efficiently, solve problems faster, migrate and modernize with ease, and achieve compliance with flying colors. Device42 continuously discovers, maps, and optimizes infrastructure and applications across data centers and cloud, while intelligently grouping workloads by application affinities and other resource formats that provide a clear view of what is connected to the environment at any given time. As part of the Freshworks family, we are committed to, and you should expect us to provide even better solutions and continued support for our global customers and partners, just as we always have.

FirstWave’s NMIS is a complete network management system that provides fault, performance, and configuration management, performance graphs, and threshold alerts. Business rules allow for highly granular notification policies with many types of notification methods. NMIS consolidates multiple tools into one system, ready for Network Engineers to use. Scalable, flexible, open, and simple to implement and maintain, NMIS is the Network Management System that underpins the operations of over one hundred thousand organizations worldwide – making it one of the most widely used open-source Network Management Systems in the world today. FirstWave enables partners, including some of the world’s largest telcos and managed service providers (MSPs), to protect their customers from cyber-attacks, while rapidly growing cybersecurity services revenues at scale. FirstWave provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for network discovery, management, and cybersecurity for its partners globally.

ManageEngine Site24x7 is a comprehensive observability and monitoring solution designed to help organizations effectively manage their IT environments. It offers monitoring for back-end IT infrastructure deployed on-premises, in the cloud, in containers, and on virtual machines. It ensures a superior digital experience for end users by tracking application performance and providing synthetic and real user insights. It also analyzes network performance, traffic flow, and configuration changes, troubleshoots application and server performance issues through log analysis, offers custom plugins for the entire tech stack, and evaluates real user usage. Whether you're an MSP or a business aiming to elevate performance, Site24x7 provides enhanced visibility, optimization of hybrid workloads, and proactive monitoring to preemptively identify workflow issues using AI-powered insights. Monitoring the end-user experience is done from more than 130 locations worldwide.

NetCrunch is a powerful, scalable, all-in-one network monitoring system built for modern IT environments. It supports agentless monitoring of thousands of devices, covering SNMP, servers, virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V), cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), traffic flows (NetFlow, sFlow), logs, and custom data via REST or scripts. With 670+ monitoring packs and dynamic views, it automates discovery, configuration, alerting, and automates self-healing actions for efficient remote remediation in response to alerts. Its node-based licensing eliminates sensor sprawl and complexity, providing a clear, cost-effective path to scale. Real-time dashboards, policy-driven setup, advanced alert tuning and 40+ alert actions including remote script execution, service restart, process kill or device reboot-make NetCrunch ideal for organizations replacing legacy tools like PRTG, SolarWinds, or WhatsUp Gold. Fast to deploy and future-proof. Can be installed on prem, self hosted in the cloud, or mixed.

Paessler PRTG is an all-inclusive monitoring software solution developed by Paessler. Equipped with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface with a cutting-edge monitoring engine, PRTG optimizes connections and workloads as well as reduces operational costs by avoiding outages while saving time and controlling service level agreements (SLAs). The solution is packed with specialized monitoring features that include flexible alerting, cluster failover solution, distributed monitoring, in-depth reporting, maps and dashboards, and more. PRTG monitors your entire IT infrastructure. All important technologies are supported: • SNMP: ready-to-use and custom options • WMI and Windows Performance Counters • SSH: for Linux/Unix and macOS systems • Traffic analysis using flow protocols or packet sniffing • HTTP requests • REST APIs returning XML or JSON • Ping, SQL, and many more

Since 2004, NetBrain has transformed network operations with its no-code automation platform, helping teams systematically shift left by turning complex processes into streamlined workflows. By unifying AI and automation, NetBrain delivers actionable hybrid network-wide observability, automates troubleshooting, and enables safe change management to boost efficiency, reduce MTTR, and mitigate risk, enabling IT organizations to proactively drive innovation. Get network-wide and contextualized observability across your multi-vendor, multi-cloud network Visualize and document the entire hybrid network using dynamic network maps and end-to-end paths Auto-discover and document hybrid network

Protect your business against damaging data breaches and easily comply with security frameworks like ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA. Our software-only virtual private network easily integrates with your existing infrastructure to provide a flexible and scalable way to protect your organization. With our VPN Professional plan, you can securely access your LAN and SaaS resources by assigning and segmenting permissions to private dedicated VPN servers, allowing employees to access only what they need. With all plans, your network traffic is secured using strong AES-256 or ChaCha20 encryption. You can further strengthen your organization's security with enforced 2FA and seamless login through single sign-on (SSO) with SCIM support for automated user provisioning. Proton VPN's high-speed server network is one of the largest in the world and is part of a suite of open source end-to-end encrypted products from the makers of Proton Mail that are designed to keep your business secure.

ITRS Uptrends helps organizations achieve 24x7 reliability and performance for web services (websites, SaaS, APIs), so mission-critical transactions work from anywhere, anytime. ITRS Uptrends’ intuitive no-code/low-code transaction recorder simplifies the monitoring setup, driving rapid time-to-value even across multi-vendor/domain business services. We continuously monitor multistep user journeys from 368 nodes in 67 countries to provide full visibility beyond uptime. Alongside synthetic monitoring, our real user monitoring captures service usage and adoption to show IT's business impact. Integrating with our real-time observability portfolio, ITRS Uptrends offers end-to-end visibility of business services across hybrid infrastructures. As a SaaS solution, ITRS Uptrends is deployment-free unless private checkpoints are required to monitor from within a corporate network.