SolarWinds Price Increase 2026: What Changed, What It Costs, and Enterprise Alternatives

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Shota Kohno
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SolarWinds Price Increase 2026: What Changed, What It Costs, and Enterprise Alternatives
  • Last Updated November 6, 2026

If your SolarWinds rep has called about a “new multi-year contract model,” and the renewal quote that followed is double or triple last year’s invoice for the same modules, you are not alone.

Short answer: Since Turn/River Capital took SolarWinds private in April 2025, SolarWinds has stopped selling new perpetual licenses and moved to multi-year, subscription-only contracts billed annually. Customers report renewal increases of 100–300%. Organizations that want predictable costs can compare that against perpetual-license alternatives such as Nagios XI, which publishes its prices.

Key takeaways

  • SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is subscription-only, sold on multi-year contracts. Published starting rates are $8, $14, and $17.50 per node per month.
  • Analysts report renewal increases of up to 300%. Across 14 renewal figures that customers shared in two public r/Solarwinds threads (April–June 2026), the median reported increase was about 166%.
  • Nagios XI is a perpetual license with optional annual Maintenance & Support. If you stop paying for maintenance, your monitoring keeps running.
  • At 500 nodes, three years of Nagios XI Enterprise costs $26,400 at list price. Three years of SolarWinds Essentials costs $144,000 at its published starting rate.

What changed in SolarWinds pricing and licensing?

SolarWinds changed both its ownership and its licensing model in 2025. The company became privately held when Turn/River Capital completed its acquisition on April 16, 2025, at an enterprise value of about $4.4 billion. The licensing shift followed within months.

DateEventSource
April 16, 2025Turn/River Capital completes its acquisition of SolarWinds, and SolarWinds stops trading on the NYSE.SEC Form 8-K
August 1, 2025New perpetual license sales end, and a default three-year subscription term begins.ManageEngine; Faddom (third-party reports)
August 26, 2025Release notes for SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset 2025.3 state that new customers are issued subscription licenses.SolarWinds documentation
2026SolarWinds’ pricing page lists Observability Self-Hosted as subscription-only, sold on multi-year contracts and billed annually.solarwinds.com (accessed Nov 6, 2026)

How much has SolarWinds pricing increased?

Most published reports put SolarWinds renewal increases between 100% and 300% since the acquisition. SolarWinds does not publish renewal pricing, so these figures come from customers and industry analysts rather than from the vendor.

  • Analyst reports: Netdata and The SAM Club (a UK software licensing consultancy) report renewal increases of 100–300% for many customers. ManageEngine and Faddom cite increases of up to 300%. All stress that outcomes vary by product mix and contract. Netdata also reports annual escalators of roughly 10% built into the new multi-year contracts.
  • Customer reports: We reviewed two public r/Solarwinds threads from April–June 2026 in which customers shared 14 specific renewal figures. The figures are a mix of initial quotes and final negotiated prices. The median reported increase was about 166%, the range was roughly 30% to 334%, and 9 of the 14 more than doubled.
  • A documented case: In one r/Solarwinds thread, a customer reported that a renewal for the same NPM and NCM modules rose from $7,900 to $19,936. The SolarWinds rep attributed the increase in writing to a licensing model change, not a standard annual uplift.
  • Negotiation: Customers who showed a competing quote, or who said their legal team would not approve a three-year term, reported one-year renewals and smaller increases. In one case, a 50% increase on a three-year term became 15% on a one-year term.

What does SolarWinds cost now?

SolarWinds publishes starting prices for Observability Self-Hosted, the product that replaced the individual Orion modules (NPM, SAM, NTA, and others). The listed prices are starting rates, not quotes.

SolarWinds editionPublished starting rateWhat it adds
Essentials$8 per node per monthNetwork, server, and application monitoring; log monitoring; IP address management
Advanced$14 per node per monthEssentials plus flow analysis, virtualization monitoring, ML-based alerting
Premier$17.50 per node per monthAdvanced plus storage and web performance monitoring, SaaS entitlements

All tiers: node-based, subscription only, multi-year contract billed annually. Source: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted pricing, accessed November 6, 2026.

Two other details affect enterprise bills:

  • Enterprise editions. SolarWinds offers Enterprise editions for environments above 500 nodes and requires them above 1,500 nodes.
  • Upgrades can change consumption. SolarWinds’ 2025.1 and 2025.2 release notes warn that newly supported cloud entities may be monitored automatically after an upgrade, which can increase license consumption.

What happens to existing SolarWinds perpetual licenses?

Existing perpetual licenses keep working, but customers report being moved to multi-year subscriptions at renewal, often as Observability Self-Hosted bundles rather than the individual modules they bought before.

The difference matters at the end of a term. A SolarWinds subscription that is not renewed stops functioning. A perpetual license keeps running at the version you own, without updates or support. Customers who have already converted say this bothers them most: under a subscription, everything stops working if you don’t renew, instead of just losing support.

How is Nagios licensing different?

If you stop paying for Nagios maintenance, your monitoring keeps running. You only stop receiving updates and support.

Nagios XI is sold as a perpetual license. You buy the software once. Maintenance & Support is a separate one-year plan, and the first year is included with a new license. It provides:

  • version upgrades and security patches,
  • a dedicated Customer Success Manager,
  • up to 10 support cases with a one-business-day response,
  • XI Premium Features such as Azure AD single sign-on and the Mod-Gearman management interface.

Nagios publishes both prices.

Nagios XI license levelStandard (one-time)Enterprise (one-time)Annual maintenance (from year 2)
100 nodes$2,595$4,690$2,104 (+$1,066 Enterprise)
500 nodes$8,295$10,390$6,939 (+$1,066 Enterprise)
1,000 nodes$14,995$17,090$11,898 (+$1,066 Enterprise)
2,000+ nodes or SitewideContact salesContact salesContact sales

Prices from Nagios Pricing Plans and Maintenance & Support Plans. Maintenance prices effective January 1, 2026, subject to change. Nagios defines a node as any unique IP address or web URL. Compare XI Standard and Enterprise features.

A monitoring server holds credentials for everything it monitors, so we recommend keeping maintenance active and applying security updates promptly. The difference from a subscription is that renewal is your choice, made one year at a time.

Three-year cost comparison at published list prices

This comparison uses only prices each vendor publishes. It is an illustration, not a quote. SolarWinds figures are starting rates before volume discounts or escalators, and the two vendors define nodes differently.

500 nodes, three years

ScenarioThree-year costPer node per month
SolarWinds Essentials ($8 starting rate)$144,000$8.00
SolarWinds Advanced ($14 starting rate)$252,000$14.00
Nagios XI Enterprise$26,400$1.47
Nagios XI Enterprise + Network Analyzer + Log Server (3-instance)$52,490$2.92

The Nagios figures are the one-time license plus two years of maintenance. For XI Enterprise at 500 nodes, that is $10,390 + 2 × ($6,939 + $1,066) = $26,400. To size your own environment, use the Nagios XI Plan Calculator.

At 1,000 nodes, the same comparison is $288,000 for SolarWinds Essentials against $43,018 for Nagios XI Enterprise.

The comparison excludes hardware, staff time, and migration effort, which apply to either vendor.

Which Nagios products replace which SolarWinds modules?

Nagios products are licensed separately, so you buy only what you need.

SolarWinds capabilityNagios equivalentNotes
Network Performance Monitor (NPM)Nagios XISNMP monitoring and traps, a network switch and router wizard, auto-discovery
Server & Application Monitor (SAM)Nagios XIServer, application, and database wizards; the NCPA agent
Virtualization Manager (VMAN)Nagios XIPremium Wizards for vSphere, Hyper-V, Docker, and Kubernetes
NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)Nagios Network AnalyzerNetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow, and IPFIX analysis
Log Analyzer / Kiwi SyslogNagios Log ServerCentralized log management and alerting; not a SIEM
Enterprise Operations Console (EOC)Nagios FusionA single view across Nagios XI, Log Server, Network Analyzer, and Core servers, with automatic sign-in to remote XI servers
Additional Polling EnginesNagios Mod-Gearman or XI SitewideRemote workers run checks locally and connect outbound to the XI server, so remote sites need no inbound access
NCM, IPAM, UDT, SEMNo native equivalentPair Nagios with dedicated tools

For large enterprises: Nagios XI Enterprise adds Service-Level Agreement (SLA) reports, capacity planning, Business Process Intelligence, scheduled reports, and audit logs. Nagios XI Sitewide covers large, distributed deployments. It includes multiple unlimited-node XI instances, Enterprise features, and a free Nagios Fusion license.

Multi-site organizations can choose among four reference architectures: centralized, federated, Fusion-based, and Mod-Gearman distributed. Many combine elements of each. All four are described in Nagios Monitoring Architecture Solutions for Large Organizations.

All Nagios products are self-hosted on your own infrastructure, and Nagios XI can run in air-gapped networks.

Frequently asked questions

Did SolarWinds raise its prices in 2025 and 2026? Yes, according to customer and analyst reports. Since the April 2025 acquisition by Turn/River Capital, reported renewal increases range from 100% to 300%, driven largely by the move to multi-year subscriptions. SolarWinds does not publish renewal pricing.

Does SolarWinds still sell perpetual licenses? No, not to new customers. Multiple industry reports state that SolarWinds ended new perpetual license sales on August 1, 2025, and its current pricing page lists Observability Self-Hosted as subscription-only. Existing perpetual licenses still work but are being moved toward subscriptions at renewal.

How much does SolarWinds cost per node? SolarWinds lists Observability Self-Hosted starting at $8 per node per month for Essentials, $14 for Advanced, and $17.50 for Premier. These are starting rates on multi-year contracts as of November 2026, and actual quotes vary.

Can you negotiate a SolarWinds renewal? Yes, according to customer reports. Customers who presented a competing quote, or who said legal would not approve a three-year term, reported one-year terms and smaller increases.

Which network monitoring tools still offer perpetual licensing? Nagios XI, Nagios Log Server, Nagios Network Analyzer, and Nagios Fusion are all sold as perpetual licenses with optional annual maintenance. Nagios publishes license and maintenance prices on its website.

What is the best SolarWinds NPM alternative for enterprises? For on-premises enterprise network monitoring with predictable costs, Nagios XI Enterprise covers SNMP device monitoring, traps, SLA reporting, and capacity planning. Add Nagios Network Analyzer to replace SolarWinds NTA for NetFlow analysis. For a full feature comparison, see Nagios vs. SolarWinds.

Next steps

Sources

Disclaimer: SolarWinds pricing information comes from SolarWinds’ published starting rates and from third-party customer and analyst reports as of November 2026. Actual SolarWinds pricing varies by customer, product, and contract terms. Nagios prices are list prices and are subject to change. Request formal quotes from both vendors before making a purchasing decision.

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