SolarWinds Thinks It Can Pull a Broadcom, but Customers Aren’t Buying the Bluff

# SolarWinds Thinks It Can Pull a Broadcom, but Customers Aren’t Buying the Bluff ## The price hike landed with the wrong kind of confidence SolarWinds customers are angry, but the anger has a very specific shape. It’s not just “software got expensive again,” because everyone in IT has been dragged through that movie before. The complaint is sharper: SolarWinds seems to be looking at Broadcom’s VMware playbook and assuming it can run the same move. Higher prices. Forced multi-year subscription commitments. Less room to negotiate. A sense that customers will grumble, curse in meetings, and then pay because the pain of leaving is worse than the pain of staying. But that’s where the comparison starts to crack. VMware sits deep in the foundation of many environments. Network monitoring, as painful as it can be to replace, doesn’t always have the same gravity. One frustrated customer put it bluntly: SolarWinds is not Broadcom, and SolarWinds does not have a VMware-level product. That’s the part that makes this backlash feel different from ordinary renewal-season rage. Customers aren’t just saying the quote is too high. They’re saying SolarWinds may have misread its own leverage. A company can raise prices when customers feel trapped. It can raise prices when the product is so central that leaving would be an existential project. But if customers believe they can swap the tool in a day, three days, or even a few weeks, the whole pricing strategy starts to look less like a power move and more like a dare. And a lot of admins sound very ready to take that dare. ## The Broadcom comparison is the insult and the warning Broadcom’s VMware price hikes have become a kind of shorthand in infrastructure circles. You don’t have to explain every licensing detail anymore. Just say “Broadcom” and people understand the mood: shock renewals, bundling pressure, subscription moves, and customers trapped between a brutal bill and a brutal migration. SolarWinds getting compared to that is not flattering. It means customers are filing the company into the same mental folder as vendors that decided loyalty was less useful than leverage. But the most interesting part is that customers don’t think SolarWinds has earned Broadcom-level leverage. The original complaint basically laughs at the idea. VMware replacement can be a major architectural event. It touches compute, storage, operations, disaster recovery, automation, staffing, compliance, and the weird habits every company has built around its virtualization stack. Replacing SolarWinds can still be messy, especially in a mature environment with years of dashboards, custom alerts, and reporting rituals. But it doesn’t always require the same organizational surgery. For some shops, network monitoring is important but swappable. That distinction matters. One commenter said they had already ripped out VMware because of Broadcom and would rip out SolarWinds next. That’s a dangerous customer mindset. It means the vendor’s pricing behavior isn’t just creating resentment; it’s creating muscle memory. Once an IT team survives one painful vendor exit, the next one feels less impossible. The first migration teaches procurement, leadership, and engineering that the scary thing can be done. So when SolarWinds comes in with a forced three-year subscription commitment, some customers aren’t thinking, “We have no choice.” They’re thinking, “Here we go again.” There’s also a bruised pride in the response. Customers are basically telling SolarWinds to know its place. That sounds harsh, but in vendor relationships, perceived importance is everything. If a product is truly irreplaceable, customers behave differently. They negotiate, but carefully. They complain, but quietly. They build roadmaps around the vendor’s roadmap. When they start saying “stay in your lane,” they’re no longer treating the company as infrastructure royalty. They’re treating it as a tool that got too full of itself. ## The alternatives are imperfect, but that may be enough The obvious escape route mentioned first was PRTG, described by the original poster as cheap and good enough for their organization. Then came the immediate twist: other customers jumped in to say PRTG had also changed its licensing model and, according to some, tripled prices. That undercuts the fantasy that customers can simply jump from one greedy vendor to a clean, cheap paradise. A lot of monitoring vendors are chasing the same subscription money. One commenter summed it up with weary simplicity: many monitoring tools changed their model because that’s how they make more money. Still, that doesn’t save SolarWinds. The fact that PRTG may also be more expensive now doesn’t mean SolarWinds gets a free pass. It just makes the replacement conversation more complicated. Customers are looking across Zabbix, LogicMonitor, PRTG, Domotz, and other options with the pragmatic eye of people who don’t expect perfection. They’re not always looking for the best tool in the abstract. They’re looking for a tool that gets them out of a renewal trap. Zabbix got a lot of attention because it represents the cleanest emotional break from the subscription squeeze. Someone simply said, “Zabbix is not,” meaning it wasn’t part of the same price-hike club. That’s an incredibly powerful pitch in a market full of vendors trying to turn every feature into recurring revenue. But Zabbix also comes with the usual tradeoff: more manual work, more setup, more tuning, and a greater need for internal skill. One person said it can be a solid option if you’re okay doing the manual work. Another said a proof of concept showed that everything they needed was custom, which meant more spending on support. Free has a cost. It just shows up in a different column. LogicMonitor split the room too. One customer said they moved there because it handled a lot of the manual work and felt better than SolarWinds. Another said LogicMonitor is better but significantly more expensive. Someone else said they hated it because things that were easy in SolarWinds became custom work in LogicMonitor. That’s the real landscape customers face: every exit has friction. The alternatives have their own pricing, their own learning curves, and their own annoyances. But once SolarWinds changes the math enough, those annoyances stop being dealbreakers and start becoming evaluation criteria. ## The customers aren’t just mad. They’re doing math. The most damaging comments are not the angriest ones. They’re the ones with numbers. One customer said a $35,000 renewal turned into $180,000. That’s not a price increase you absorb with a sigh and a little budget shuffling. That’s a meeting. That’s an escalation. That’s a “thanks, but no thanks” moment where the team decides not to renew support while it moves to something else. When a renewal becomes that large, the incumbent advantage starts to collapse. Migration suddenly has a budget. Replacement suddenly has executive attention. What used to be “maybe someday” becomes “start this quarter.” This is where SolarWinds may be making its most dangerous assumption. A company can count on inertia, but only up to a point. Every admin knows the value of not touching something that works. Monitoring stacks are full of local knowledge: weird SNMP quirks, alert suppressions, old maps, NOC screens, device groups, maintenance windows, and reports that exist because one executive asked for them five years ago. That mess is a moat. But a moat can dry up when the renewal quote gets stupid enough. Some customers are now weighing the cost of downtime, migration labor, consulting, support, and retraining against the cost of simply staying. That’s not great news for SolarWinds, because the moment customers run that analysis, the relationship changes. Before, SolarWinds was the default. Now it has to justify itself against alternatives, internal labor, and the possibility of “good enough.” For any mature vendor, losing default status is brutal. You can still win the deal, but now you have to fight for it. And the fight isn’t just technical. It’s emotional. The original poster invoked the SolarWinds hack as part of the reason the company shouldn’t act like it has unshakable leverage. That’s a raw nerve. Customers remember trust failures. They remember ugly incidents. They remember whether a vendor made them look bad internally. When a company with that baggage turns around and pushes a forced three-year commitment, some customers hear arrogance instead of strategy. They’re not just asking, “Can we replace this?” They’re asking, “Why are we rewarding this?” ## There are three camps now, and none of them are great for SolarWinds The first camp is done. These are the customers saying they’ll rip SolarWinds out, skip support renewal, or move to anything that breaks the cycle. They may underestimate the work. They may hit painful gaps during migration. They may discover that the replacement tool is less polished in the exact places they took for granted. But emotionally, they’re gone. SolarWinds can win them back only with a dramatic change in price, posture, or product value. The second camp is angry but practical. These customers know SolarWinds still does some things well. One person said LogicMonitor required custom work for things that were easy in SolarWinds. That matters. SolarWinds has real usability in certain workflows, and for some teams, ripping it out might create more chaos than savings. These customers may stay, but they’ll negotiate harder, demand concessions, and keep alternatives warm. They aren’t loyal so much as temporarily unconvinced that leaving is worth it. The third camp sees the whole monitoring market moving in the same direction. PRTG, LogicMonitor, SolarWinds, and others are all part of a broader shift toward subscription revenue and higher pricing. From that angle, SolarWinds isn’t uniquely evil. It’s just another vendor doing what software vendors do when investors want growth and recurring revenue. This camp is the most sober, but it’s not exactly comforting. If every vendor is raising prices, customers may respond by putting more energy into open-source options, smaller tools, hybrid stacks, or aggressive vendor rotation. That’s the irony. A market-wide subscription squeeze may not make customers accept the new normal. It may make them less trusting of all commercial monitoring vendors. Once buyers decide every vendor is eventually going to pull the same move, they start designing for exit from day one. They avoid deep customization. They keep documentation cleaner. They ask harder questions about data portability. They treat renewals like risk events. That’s not the customer relationship software companies want, but it’s the one they’re training people to build. ## SolarWinds’ real problem is that customers now believe leaving is possible The loudest message in this discussion isn’t “PRTG is better” or “Zabbix is free” or “LogicMonitor is worth it.” It’s this: SolarWinds customers are no longer convinced they’re trapped. That’s the shift. A vendor can survive complaints as long as customers feel stuck. It can survive bad jokes, angry threads, and ugly renewal meetings. What it can’t easily survive is customers realizing the door exists. Maybe that door leads to Zabbix and a pile of manual work. Maybe it leads to LogicMonitor and a higher bill with less hassle. Maybe it leads to PRTG, even if PRTG has its own pricing baggage. Maybe it leads to some mixed setup where SolarWinds stays for one module while everything else gets peeled away over time. The exact destination matters less than the direction of travel. Customers are planning exits. They’re comparing notes. They’re testing assumptions. They’re openly questioning whether SolarWinds deserves the confidence it’s pricing into these renewals. SolarWinds may think forced subscription and multi-year commitments are the grown-up software business model. In a spreadsheet, maybe they are. But customers don’t buy spreadsheets. They buy trust, usefulness, and the belief that the vendor understands its place in their world. Right now, a lot of them think SolarWinds has mistaken installed base for loyalty and inconvenience for dependence. That’s a dangerous mistake. Broadcom could push VMware customers around because the product sits so deep that many organizations had to pay before they could plan. SolarWinds may not have that luxury. Monitoring is important, but for many teams, it is not sacred. And when a tool that isn’t sacred starts acting untouchable, customers start reaching for the pry bar.