Lansweeper vs Netdata: Which Is Better For You?

Choosing the right tool to manage and monitor your IT infrastructure is critical. Your decision impacts everything from system reliability and performance to security and cost management. Lansweeper and Netdata are two powerful platforms often considered in this space, but they solve fundamentally different problems. Lansweeper excels at telling you what you have in your IT environment, while Netdata tells you how it’s performing in real-time.

This guide provides a comprehensive comparison to help you understand their distinct capabilities. We’ll explore their features, core use cases, and ideal user profiles, enabling you to determine whether you need an IT asset management tool like Lansweeper, a real-time observability platform like Netdata, or both.

Quick Comparison Table

What Is Netdata?

Netdata is an enterprise-grade, real-time observability platform designed for speed, efficiency, and ease of use. It empowers DevOps engineers, SREs, and system administrators to troubleshoot infrastructure and application issues instantly. By collecting thousands of metrics from every system, container, and application every second, Netdata provides unparalleled visibility into the health and performance of your entire tech stack.

With zero-configuration deployment, you can have Netdata running in minutes. Its distributed, edge-based architecture means data is processed on the node where it’s collected, ensuring maximum security and minimal resource overhead. Netdata’s AI-powered features, including unsupervised machine learning for anomaly detection and Agentic AI for automated insights, help teams move from reactive firefighting to proactive optimization.

Key Features & Benefits:

• Per-Second Granularity: Get instant insights with 1-second metric resolution, eliminating monitoring blind spots.
• Zero-Configuration: The Netdata Agent auto-discovers and monitors all services and applications on a node without manual setup.
• AI-Augmented Observability: Leverage on-device ML for anomaly detection and Agentic AI to automatically investigate issues and find the root cause.
• Extreme Scalability: Monitor thousands of nodes efficiently with a distributed architecture that keeps data at the edge, reducing network traffic and central database load.
• Rich Visualizations: Explore and analyze data through interactive, pre-built dashboards without writing a single query.

What Is Lansweeper?

Lansweeper is a comprehensive IT Asset Management (ITAM) platform that discovers and inventories all technology assets across your network. It scans your entire IT estate—including hardware, software, and users—to create a complete and accurate inventory. This central inventory system is invaluable for IT administrators, security teams, and helpdesk staff.

The platform excels at providing detailed information about your assets, such as hardware specifications, installed software, user information, and network configurations. This data is crucial for security vulnerability scanning, license compliance management, IT auditing, and lifecycle management. Lansweeper provides a single source of truth for your IT assets, helping you manage, secure, and report on your technology environment effectively.

Key Features:

• Agentless & Agent-Based Scanning: Discovers all IT assets, including servers, PCs, printers, routers, and IoT devices.
• Detailed Asset Inventory: Provides a centralized, up-to-date record of all hardware and software.
• Software & Vulnerability Reporting: Identifies outdated software and potential security risks across the network.
• Network Topology Mapping: Visualizes how devices are connected within your network.

Key Differences Between Netdata & Lansweeper

While both tools provide visibility into your infrastructure, their focus and methodology are worlds apart. Comparing them is less about choosing a direct Lansweeper competitor and more about understanding which problem you need to solve.

Features & Functionality: Asset Inventory vs. Performance Monitoring

The most significant difference lies in their core purpose.

• Lansweeper is designed to answer the question: “What do I have?” It creates a detailed, searchable inventory of every device and piece of software on your network. Its strength is in asset discovery, tracking, and reporting for compliance and security. It tells you a server has 32GB of RAM and is running Windows Server 2019 with a specific version of Java installed.

• Netdata is built to answer the question: “How is it performing right now?” It provides high-fidelity, real-time data on the operational health of your systems and applications. It tells you that the same server is currently using 95% of its RAM, its CPU is spiking due to a runaway Java process, and its disk I/O latency is causing application slowdowns.

You can’t use Lansweeper to effectively troubleshoot a live performance issue, as its scheduled scans don’t provide the real-time, granular data needed. Conversely, while Netdata provides some system inventory data, its primary function isn’t ITAM or license compliance.

Pricing

The pricing models reflect their different approaches to data collection.

• Lansweeper typically prices per asset, billed annually. An asset is any device discovered on your network, such as a server, workstation, or printer. This model works well for organizations focused on maintaining a complete inventory count for financial and compliance purposes.

• Netdata prices per node, with monthly or annual options and volume discounts. A node is any system you actively monitor, like a physical server, VM, or container. This model is built for dynamic, scalable infrastructure where the focus is on monitoring active components. For large-scale IoT or network device monitoring, differential pricing is also available. All new users get a 14-day free trial with all business features included.

Integrations & Compatibility

Both platforms offer integrations, but for different purposes.

• Lansweeper integrates with helpdesk software (like Jira and ServiceNow), security tools, and CMDBs. Its integrations focus on enriching other IT management systems with its detailed asset data.

• Netdata integrates with hundreds of applications, services, and collectors out of the box, from databases like PostgreSQL to web servers like Nginx. It also integrates with notification platforms like Slack, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie to deliver intelligent alerts. The goal of its integrations is to collect more performance data and streamline the incident response workflow.

Customer Support & Reliability

Both platforms are mature and reliable solutions trusted by thousands of companies.

• Lansweeper provides support through its community forums and dedicated support portal for paying customers. Its documentation is extensive and covers all aspects of asset scanning and reporting.

• Netdata offers extensive documentation, tutorials, and a vibrant open-source community. For business plan customers, Netdata provides dedicated support, with premium support included for free for accounts with over 500 nodes.

Why Engineers Choose Netdata Over Lansweeper for Monitoring

Engineers, SREs, and DevOps teams are tasked with ensuring application uptime and performance. For them, Lansweeper is the wrong tool for the job. While an IT admin might use Lansweeper to find a server, an SRE needs Netdata to find out why that server is slow.

Here are the primary reasons why technical teams choose Netdata for their monitoring needs:

1. Real-Time, Per-Second Metrics: When an application goes down, you need data from seconds ago, not from the last scan that ran an hour ago. Netdata’s 1-second granularity is essential for catching transient issues and performing effective root cause analysis.
2. Automated Anomaly Detection: Lansweeper might tell you if a new service is installed, but Netdata’s on-device ML models will tell you if that service is behaving abnormally. It automatically learns your systems' normal behavior and alerts you to deviations without manual threshold configuration.
3. Zero-Configuration and Auto-Discovery: In modern, dynamic environments with containers and microservices, manual configuration is a non-starter. Netdata’s agent automatically detects and starts monitoring everything on a node, saving engineers countless hours of setup and maintenance.
4. Low Overhead and High Efficiency: Netdata is engineered to be incredibly lightweight, consuming minimal CPU and memory. You can deploy it everywhere without worrying about impacting the performance of the systems you are monitoring. Lansweeper’s network scans, while configurable, can be resource-intensive.

Simply put, Lansweeper is a tool for IT asset accounting. Netdata is a tool for real-time operational excellence.

Lansweeper vs Netdata - Summary

The choice between Lansweeper and Netdata depends entirely on your goal. The two are not direct competitors but rather complementary tools for different teams.

• Choose Lansweeper if your primary need is IT Asset Management. It’s the ideal solution for IT administrators and security teams who need a complete, accurate inventory of their hardware and software for compliance, security auditing, and lifecycle management.

• Choose Netdata if your primary need is Real-Time Observability. It’s the best choice for DevOps, SREs, and engineers who need to monitor system performance, troubleshoot live issues, and ensure the reliability of their applications and infrastructure.

If you came here looking for a Lansweeper alternative for performance monitoring, you now know that a true observability platform like Netdata is what you really need.

Try Netdata! The Best Lansweeper Alternative for Real-Time Monitoring

Ready to see how your infrastructure is really performing? Stop relying on periodic scans and start seeing real-time, per-second metrics. With Netdata, you get instant clarity into your systems' health, AI-powered anomaly detection, and interactive visualizations that make troubleshooting a breeze.

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Netdata vs Lansweeper FAQs

Is it easy to migrate from Lansweeper to Netdata? Migration isn’t the right term, as they serve different functions. You wouldn’t replace Lansweeper with Netdata. Instead, you would add Netdata to your toolset to gain the real-time performance monitoring capabilities that Lansweeper lacks. Many organizations use both: Lansweeper for asset inventory and Netdata for observability.

Does Netdata integrate with my existing tech stack? Yes. Netdata features hundreds of zero-configuration integrations for popular applications, databases, and systems like Kubernetes, Docker, Nginx, Apache, MySQL, and many more. It also integrates with notification platforms like Slack and PagerDuty to streamline your incident response workflow.

Will I lose data when switching from Lansweeper to Netdata? You won’t be “switching” from one to the other. You can deploy the Netdata agent on your systems without uninstalling or changing your Lansweeper setup. Netdata will begin collecting its own high-granularity performance metrics, while Lansweeper will continue to perform its asset inventory scans. The two datasets are separate and serve different purposes.

Which tool is more scalable for growing businesses? Both tools are designed to scale, but in different ways. Lansweeper scales to handle hundreds of thousands of assets for inventory purposes. Netdata is built with a distributed architecture to scale to thousands of nodes for real-time monitoring, collecting millions of data points per second across your entire infrastructure without overwhelming a central database. For performance monitoring at scale, Netdata’s architecture is far more efficient.