PRTG vs WhatsUp Gold: pricing, per-sensor vs per-device licensing, and which is cheaper
Short answer: PRTG licenses sensors, WhatsUp Gold licenses devices, so the cheaper one depends on how many things you watch on each box. PRTG 500 is $2,400 a year for 500 sensors, which Paessler maps to about 50 devices. WhatsUp Gold Business starts at $1,229 a year for 50 devices with unlimited monitors per device. At 50 devices WhatsUp Gold Business is 48.8% cheaper, and the gap grows with port-dense switches, where PRTG counts every port. PRTG wins on transparency: it publishes every tier to 10,000 sensors, while WhatsUp Gold quotes anything past 50 devices.
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN
▸ waiting…▌
queued
probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
Simulation, not a measurement of your site: this preview runs entirely in your browser and the latencies are generated from the domain you typed. Real checks on your monitors run from our Frankfurt, Virginia and Singapore regions.
the short version
One counts what you watch, the other counts what you own
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor and Progress WhatsUp Gold are the two Windows network monitors that most US IT teams end up shortlisting against each other. They discover devices, draw maps, poll SNMP, WMI and ping, and alert when something drops. Feature for feature they are closer than either vendor's comparison page admits. What separates the two renewal quotes is the unit each one sells.
PRTG sells sensors. A sensor is one monitored aspect of one device: a ping, the CPU load, one network interface, one URL. Paessler's own guidance is 5 to 10 sensors per server and one sensor per switch port. The license is a ceiling on sensors, sold in five published tiers from 500 to 10,000, subscription only.
WhatsUp Gold sells devices. Progress lists "Aspects/Channels Per Device" as unlimited on every subscription edition, so the CPU, the disks and all 48 ports on a switch sit under one device license. Its own FAQ uses exactly that example: a 48-port switch that needs 48 or more sensors elsewhere is one license in WhatsUp Gold. The trade is that Progress publishes only a starting price for 50 devices on each edition and quotes everything larger.
So the comparison comes down to one ratio in your own estate: sensors per device. Everything below is the arithmetic behind that, plus a blind spot the two products share. All prices are US list, before tax, read from paessler.com/pricing and whatsupgold.com/pricing.
rate cards side by side
PRTG vs WhatsUp Gold pricing, line by line
Rows are matched by what you are buying rather than by product name. AlertPing sits in the third column only for the jobs where it competes, and says so where it does not.
| What you are buying | Paessler PRTG | Progress WhatsUp Gold | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|
| License unit | Sensors (one monitored aspect) | Devices, unlimited monitors each | Monitors (one URL, port or heartbeat) |
| Entry paid tier | PRTG 500: $200/mo, $2,400/yr | Business: from $1,229/yr for 50 devices | Starter: $19/mo, 20 monitors |
| Mid tiers | 1,000 sensors $4,296/yr, 2,500 $8,904/yr | Enterprise from $2,049/yr, Enterprise Plus from $3,469/yr (50 devices) | Team $59/mo, 100 monitors |
| Top published tier | 10,000 sensors, $19,704/yr | Nothing published past 50 devices | Business $189/mo, 500 monitors |
| Perpetual license | Not on the current price list | Premium from $5,089 (50 devices), Total Plus from $14,439 (50 points) | No, monthly or yearly |
| Free edition | Freeware, 100 sensors (about 10 devices) | Free Edition, 10 devices | No free plan |
| Hosted edition | PRTG Hosted Monitor, same price as self-hosted | Priced per installation you run | Hosted only |
| Server you supply | Windows for the core server | Windows Server 2019, 2022 or 2025, 8 GB RAM, quad-core | None |
| Redundant installs | One license key per server | 1 on Business, 2 on Enterprise, 4 on Enterprise Plus | Three regions on every plan |
| Support in the price | Email support and updates | 10/5 email on Business, 24/5 phone and email above | Email on Starter and Team, priority on Business |
| SNMP, WMI, switch ports, maps | Yes | Yes | Not offered |
| Flow and config management | Flow sensors count against the license | NTA+ and config management on Enterprise Plus | Not offered |
| Checks from outside your network | Via remote probes or Hosted Monitor | Internet Connection Monitoring service on Enterprise and up | Every check, from three regions |
| Public status page | Not offered | Not offered | Included |
| SMS alerts | Via notification setup | Email and SMS | Included on every plan |
the break-even
The two licenses cross at 5.12 sensors per device
Put both entry prices on the same unit. PRTG 500 is $2,400 a year for 500 sensors, so $4.80 per sensor per year. WhatsUp Gold Business starts at $1,229 a year for 50 devices, so $24.58 per device per year. Divide one by the other and a device costs the same as 5.12 PRTG sensors. Monitor fewer than about five aspects per box and PRTG's rate is lower. Monitor more and WhatsUp Gold's is.
That rate comparison flatters PRTG at small sizes, because PRTG does not sell sensors one at a time. It sells blocks. A 50-device network running three sensors per device uses 150 sensors and still has to buy PRTG 500 at $2,400, since the only step below it is the 100-sensor Freeware. So at 50 devices the real invoices look like this:
| 50 devices, sensors each | PRTG license needed | PRTG per year | WhatsUp Gold Business, from |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 sensors (150 total) | PRTG 500 | $2,400 | $1,229 |
| 5 sensors (250 total) | PRTG 500 | $2,400 | $1,229 |
| 10 sensors (500 total) | PRTG 500 | $2,400 | $1,229 |
| 14 sensors (700 total) | PRTG 1000 | $4,296 | $1,229 |
At this size WhatsUp Gold Business is $1,171 a year cheaper than PRTG 500 whatever your sensor count, and Enterprise at $2,049 still undercuts it by $351 while adding a second installation and 24/5 phone support. Enterprise Plus at $3,469 costs $1,069 more than PRTG 500, and only pulls ahead again once your network crosses 500 sensors and PRTG jumps to its $4,296 tier. The 14-sensor row is not an edge case: it is Paessler's own worked example of one firewall, with ping, six interfaces, CPU, DNS, UDP and SNMP counters and one HTTP check.
Switches are where the gap stops being a percentage and becomes a multiple. A 48-port switch watched with one ping and one sensor per port is 49 PRTG sensors. At PRTG 500's average rate that is $19.60 a month, $235.20 a year, for one box. In WhatsUp Gold it is one device, $24.58 a year at the Business starting rate. That is 9.57 times the money for the same switch, and it is why access-layer-heavy networks tend to land on WhatsUp Gold once someone does the count.
above 50 devices
The per-device price a WhatsUp Gold quote has to beat
Past 50 devices this stops being a comparison of two price lists, because only one of them exists. Paessler publishes every tier to 10,000 sensors. Progress prints "starting from" and a 50-device figure on each edition and asks you to contact sales for the rest. We will not guess at a quote we have not seen. What we can do is turn PRTG's published list into the per-device number your WhatsUp Gold quote needs to come in under, so you walk into the call knowing it.
| Devices | 5 sensors each | 10 sensors each | 14 sensors each |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | PRTG 500, $2,400: $48.00 per device | PRTG 500, $2,400: $48.00 | PRTG 1000, $4,296: $85.92 |
| 100 | PRTG 500, $2,400: $24.00 | PRTG 1000, $4,296: $42.96 | PRTG 2500, $8,904: $89.04 |
| 250 | PRTG 2500, $8,904: $35.62 | PRTG 2500, $8,904: $35.62 | PRTG 5000, $15,600: $62.40 |
| 500 | PRTG 2500, $8,904: $17.81 | PRTG 5000, $15,600: $31.20 | PRTG 10000, $19,704: $39.41 |
| 1,000 | PRTG 5000, $15,600: $15.60 | PRTG 10000, $19,704: $19.70 | Enterprise quote on both sides |
Read your row, then your column. If you run 250 devices at about ten sensors each, PRTG costs you $35.62 per device per year, so any WhatsUp Gold quote under $8,904 for 250 devices on the edition you need is the cheaper license. At 1,000 lightly monitored devices PRTG's big-tier discount bites and the bar drops to $15.60, which is below WhatsUp Gold's own 50-device Business rate. That is the one place in this comparison where PRTG's published list is hard to beat.
Two PRTG quirks change these numbers. Licenses do not stack: one server takes one key, so a 500 and a 1000 do not make 1,500. And the step from 5,000 to 10,000 sensors costs only $4,104 more for double the ceiling, so anyone near 5,000 and growing should price the 10000 license first. The full PRTG price breakdown walks through both.
own it or rent it
Only WhatsUp Gold still sells a license you keep
Paessler's current price list is subscription only. Progress still sells two perpetual editions: Premium from $5,089 for 50 devices, and Total Plus from $14,439 for 50 points. Both include the current version plus one year of updates and support. After that year, support and upgrades are a separate renewal that Progress does not price publicly.
The arithmetic is simple enough to do before the quote arrives. Premium costs 4.14 years of the Business subscription at 50 devices, and Total Plus costs 4.16 years of Enterprise Plus. If you expect to run the same network monitor for more than about four years and are comfortable budgeting a maintenance renewal, perpetual can come out ahead. If you expect to re-evaluate inside four years, it will not. Note also that on the perpetual Premium edition, log management, application monitoring, virtualization, distributed mode, scalability pollers, traffic analysis and configuration management are all listed as add-ons rather than included.
Hosting is a cost neither list price includes if you self-host. Both products run their core server on Windows. Progress lists Windows Server 2019, 2022 or 2025, a quad-core 2.6 GHz processor, 8 GB of memory and 25 GB of disk, with SQL Server 2022 Express bundled. PRTG has a way out that WhatsUp Gold's price list does not show: PRTG Hosted Monitor runs your instance on AWS for effectively the same money as the self-hosted license, $2,399 against $2,400 at the 500-sensor tier.
the shared blind spot
Both watch your network from inside it
Here is the failure neither comparison page mentions. A self-hosted PRTG or WhatsUp Gold server sits on the same network, the same power and the same internet uplink as the things it monitors. When the uplink drops, customers cannot reach your website, and the monitor that should tell you so cannot reach its SMS gateway or mail relay either. The outage that matters most is the one most likely to arrive silently.
Both vendors have a partial answer, and it is fair to name them. PRTG supports remote probes and sells Hosted Monitor, which moves the core server off your premises. WhatsUp Gold includes an Internet Connection Monitoring service that watches your connection from outside and alerts by email or SMS, which Progress's FAQ lists from the Enterprise edition up. Neither turns a network monitor into a view of your public site the way a customer in Chicago or Dallas sees it.
That is the narrow job AlertPing does. We check your public websites, APIs, ports and cron heartbeats from three regions outside your network, confirm a failure from a second and third location before alerting, and reach the person on call by SMS, email, Slack or webhook. Covering 20 public endpoints is $19 a month, $228 a year, which is 9.5% of a PRTG 500 license. The usual setup is to keep PRTG or WhatsUp Gold for the switches and servers and put an outside check on everything the public touches.
| What goes down | Self-hosted PRTG or WhatsUp Gold | With their outside-in add-ons | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|
| A switch port or server disk | Caught | Caught | Not seen, no agent |
| Office or data center uplink | Monitor loses its own path out | Caught by remote probe or connection service | Caught, from three regions |
| Public website returns 500 | Caught if an HTTP check is set up | Caught | Caught, with keyword and status assertions |
| Site up inside, unreachable outside (DNS, CDN, firewall) | Often missed | Depends on probe location | Caught |
| Monitoring server itself fails | Silent | Silent unless a second install runs | Not applicable, hosted |
honest scorecard
Where each one actually wins
PRTG wins on
- A fully published price list from 500 to 10,000 sensors, so you can budget without a sales call.
- Large, lightly monitored estates: at 1,000 devices and five sensors each it works out to $15.60 per device per year.
- A hosted edition at the self-hosted price, which removes the Windows server from your budget.
- Freeware that covers 100 sensors and a 30-day trial with no sensor cap for sizing.
- Support and updates included in every subscription tier.
WhatsUp Gold wins on
- Small networks: $1,229 a year for 50 devices against $2,400 for PRTG 500, 48.8% less.
- Port-dense switches, where one device license replaces dozens of sensors, 9.57 times cheaper per 48-port switch.
- A perpetual license option, which PRTG no longer sells.
- Redundancy built into the edition: two installations on Enterprise, four on Enterprise Plus.
- 24/5 phone support from the Enterprise edition up.
Where we fit
- We replace neither. No SNMP, no WMI, no switch ports, no topology map, no agent on your servers.
- We watch what customers reach from outside: websites, APIs, TCP ports, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats.
- Checks from three regions every 60 seconds on Starter, every 30 seconds from Team at $59 a month.
- Nothing to install or patch, and alerts still go out when your own network is the thing that failed.
- A public status page and SMS alerts on every plan.
buyer scenarios
Pick by your inventory, not by the demo
- Under 50 devices, a few switches. WhatsUp Gold Business. $1,229 against $2,400 is the widest gap in the whole comparison, and it holds whatever your sensor count.
- Access-layer heavy: many 24 and 48-port switches. WhatsUp Gold. Per-port sensors are where PRTG bills climb fastest.
- Hundreds of servers with light monitoring each. Price PRTG first. Its published big tiers set a per-device bar that WhatsUp Gold has to beat in a quote.
- No appetite for another Windows server. PRTG Hosted Monitor, which costs the same as self-hosted.
- Capital budget rather than operating budget. WhatsUp Gold Premium perpetual, if you will run it more than about four years and can fund the maintenance renewal.
- You mostly care whether the website and API are up. Neither. A network monitor is priced for switches and servers. An outside-in uptime service does that job from $19 a month.
- An MSP running either for clients. Keep it for the LAN, and add external checks plus a status page per client so the first report of an outage is not a client email.
plainly
What AlertPing does not do
We are the third option on this page, not a replacement for either. If anything on this list is a requirement, buy PRTG or WhatsUp Gold and use us as the outside check next to it.
- No SNMP polling, no WMI, no per-port bandwidth or error counters.
- No device discovery and no topology or network maps.
- No NetFlow, sFlow or traffic analysis, and no configuration backup.
- No agent, so no CPU, memory or disk metrics from inside a host.
- No monitoring of private addresses behind your firewall. We check what is reachable from the internet.
- No free plan. Starter is $19 a month at 60-second checks; 30-second checks start at $59.
If you are leaving PRTG rather than choosing between the two, the PRTG alternative comparison splits a PRTG sensor tree into the part an uptime service can take over and the part it cannot. Teams moving off an end-of-life SolarWinds box face the same split, covered in our ipMonitor replacement guide.
questions
PRTG vs WhatsUp Gold, answered
Is WhatsUp Gold better than PRTG?
Neither is better across the board; they license different things. WhatsUp Gold charges per device with unlimited monitors, so it wins on small and port-dense networks. PRTG charges per sensor and publishes every tier, so it wins on budgeting and on large, lightly monitored estates. Feature coverage for SNMP, WMI, ping and maps is similar.
Which is cheaper, PRTG or WhatsUp Gold?
At 50 devices, WhatsUp Gold. Business starts at $1,229 a year for 50 devices, while PRTG 500 is $2,400 a year. On rates, one WhatsUp Gold device costs the same as 5.12 PRTG sensors, so the more aspects you watch per device, the further ahead WhatsUp Gold gets. Above 50 devices WhatsUp Gold is quoted, so compare against PRTG's published tiers.
How much does WhatsUp Gold cost?
Subscriptions start at $1,229 a year for 50 devices on Business, $2,049 on Enterprise and $3,469 on Enterprise Plus. Perpetual licenses start at $5,089 for 50 devices on Premium and $14,439 for 50 points on Total Plus, with one year of support. Larger counts and Enterprise Scale are quoted. A Free Edition covers 10 devices.
How much does PRTG cost?
PRTG 500 is $200 a month billed annually, $2,400 a year. PRTG 1000 is $4,296 a year, 2500 is $8,904, 5000 is $15,600 and 10000 is $19,704. Freeware covers 100 sensors at no cost. PRTG Hosted Monitor costs within a few dollars of the self-hosted price at every tier.
What is the difference between a PRTG sensor and a WhatsUp Gold device?
A PRTG sensor is one monitored aspect of a device, such as a ping, a CPU reading or one switch port. A WhatsUp Gold device license covers one device with unlimited monitors on it. A server watched with ten checks is ten PRTG sensors but one WhatsUp Gold device, and a 48-port switch can be 49 sensors or one device.
Does WhatsUp Gold have a free version?
Yes. WhatsUp Gold Free Edition monitors up to 10 devices with discovery, mapping, alerting and reporting, and upgrades in place to a paid edition. PRTG's equivalent is Freeware at 100 sensors, which Paessler maps to about 10 devices. Both are sized for a lab or a very small office rather than a production network.
Can PRTG or WhatsUp Gold monitor my website from outside my network?
Partly. Both can run HTTP checks, but a self-hosted server tests from inside your network. PRTG adds remote probes and a hosted edition, and WhatsUp Gold offers an Internet Connection Monitoring service from Enterprise up. For a customer's view from several US regions with confirmation before alerting, most teams add a dedicated uptime service.
Do PRTG and WhatsUp Gold run on Linux?
Not for the core server. WhatsUp Gold requires Windows Server 2019, 2022 or 2025, and PRTG's core server runs on Windows. Both monitor Linux machines over SNMP, SSH and ping. If you want to avoid running a Windows server at all, PRTG Hosted Monitor is the option, priced the same as the self-hosted license.
keep reading
Related comparisons
- WhatsUp Gold pricing, every edition, the perpetual math and three worked bills.
- PRTG pricing, the five tiers, the marginal cost per sensor and the hosted edition.
- PRTG alternative for public endpoints, what an uptime service can take off a sensor tree.
- SolarWinds ipMonitor alternative, for teams on an end-of-life Windows monitor.
- Server monitoring from outside, ping, port and heartbeat checks without an agent.
- Best uptime monitoring tools, the full roundup with pricing.
- Uptime monitoring pricing compared across fifteen vendors.
how we page you
Three regions have to agree
A single failed probe never wakes anybody. Frankfurt, Virginia and Singapore all re-check first, so a hiccup on one route is not a 3am phone call.
what a plan covers
SMS is in the price, not in credits
SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts are unlimited on every plan, and each plan hosts status pages. No credit packs, no per-message fee, no per-monitor math.
how setup works
One URL, no agent to install
Paste the address, choose where alerts go, and the first check runs from all three regions. No agent, no config file, nothing to deploy on your side.
The outside view your network monitor cannot give you
Websites, APIs, ports and heartbeats checked from three regions, SMS and a status page on every plan, flat from $19 a month. 30-second checks from $59.