Vitrina Engine compared with WhatsUp Gold
Progress WhatsUp Gold is what a network team installs to watch its own network: switches, routers, servers, virtual machines, wireless and storage, discovered automatically and drawn on a map. Vitrina Engine is a hosted service that watches your systems from outside, from several locations, and from inside through a probe you run. If your problem is which port on which switch, WhatsUp Gold is the better tool and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Checked on 16 September 2026 against Progress’s own pages. Their prices are as published, in US dollars before tax; ours are list prices set per country, so yours may differ.
Where WhatsUp Gold is the better choice
- Discovery and topology maps. It finds what is on the network and draws it, layer 2 and layer 3. We do not do this and are not going to.
- Licensing by device, with as many monitors on a device as you like. Progress makes the point itself: a 48-port switch is one licence rather than forty-eight sensors. For a dense estate that is a real saving against sensor-priced tools.
- Configuration backup and restore for network devices, so you can see what changed last night and put it back. Nothing in our product does this.
- Flow analysis and log management as part of the same console, priced in points on the Total Plus edition.
- Everything stays on your own server. It is installed software with its own database, so no measurement leaves your building.
- A network detection and response product beside it, sold on the same page, for teams who want that from one vendor.
Where Vitrina Engine is the better choice
- The view from outside, which is the one your customers have. A server inside the building cannot tell you the building is unreachable. We check from several locations, rotate between them, and confirm a failure only when consecutive checks fail from different places.
- Status pages. Incident history, components, email subscribers, a custom domain from Starter and white-label from Pro. We found nothing equivalent in WhatsUp Gold’s own material.
- On-call rotas and escalation, from Pro at $19 a month, with hand-over when nobody answers. WhatsUp Gold 360 lists incident management and smart alerting as coming soon.
- Nothing to install or license underneath. WhatsUp Gold needs a Windows Server and a SQL Server database, patched and backed up by you. Ours needs an account.
- A price on a page, and a free plan. Fifty monitors checked every minute costs nothing and may be used commercially; paid plans start at $7 a month.
- Client workspaces. From Pro, an agency’s clients each sign in and see only their own monitors, status page and incidents.
- Checks a network management tool does not make. Mail authentication for SPF, DMARC and DKIM, a full TLS configuration audit, IMAP and POP3, SMPP, SIP, XMPP, domain expiry, blocklists, and heartbeats for jobs that are supposed to run.
- Error tracking and cookie-free web analytics in the same account, on every plan, with an alert when traffic drops — the outage every network check reports as fine.
- An official REST API, an MCP endpoint for AI agents, and native iOS and Android apps.
What each one costs
WhatsUp Gold publishes starting prices, which is more than most products in this category do, and every figure below is a floor rather than a quote. It is sold two ways: a subscription billed yearly, or a perpetual licence that is a one-time purchase with a year of updates and support included.
| WhatsUp Gold | Vitrina Engine | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Business, from $1,229 a year for 50 devices | Free for 50 monitors; Starter $7 a month |
| Middle | Enterprise from $2,049, Enterprise Plus from $3,469 a year for 50 devices | Pro $19 a month, Business $49 a month |
| Top | Enterprise Scale, by quote | Enterprise, by quote |
| Perpetual licence | Premium from $5,089 for 50 devices; Total Plus from $14,439 for 50 points | Not offered: it is a subscription service |
| Free | Trial only | Free plan, 50 monitors every minute, commercial use included |
| What you pay per | Devices, or points on Total Plus | Monitors, by plan |
| What it runs on | Windows Server 2019, 2022 or 2025, with a SQL Server database | Our servers |
The points are worth understanding before comparing anything. On Total Plus, a network device, a server or a virtual machine costs one point each; a flow source, an application and a log source cost ten each; configuration management costs none. So an estate that is mostly switches goes a long way on a point allocation, and one built around flow analysis does not.
Side by side
| WhatsUp Gold | Vitrina Engine | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Installed on Windows Server with a SQL Server database | Hosted. Nothing to install except an optional private probe |
| Where checks run from | The server itself, inside your network; remote polling engines for other sites | Several locations we run, plus private probes inside your network |
| Confirming a failure | From where the server sits | Consecutive failures seen from different locations |
| Discovery and topology maps | Yes, the centre of the product | No. Monitors are grouped by host and by workspace instead |
| Configuration backup | Yes | No |
| Traffic analysis | Yes, licensed at 10 points per flow source on Total Plus | NetFlow, sFlow, J-Flow and IPFIX from Business, on your own private probe |
| Kinds of check | Network and server monitoring, unlimited monitors per licensed device | 30 kinds, including mail, TLS audit, telecoms protocols, databases and Docker |
| Status pages | Not found in the vendor’s material | Incident history and subscribers; custom domain from Starter, white-label from Pro |
| On-call and escalation | Incident management and smart alerting are listed as coming soon on WhatsUp Gold 360 | Rotas with hand-over and escalation, from Pro |
| Several clients kept apart | Roles and device groups | Client workspaces from Pro, isolated per client |
| Error tracking and analytics | Log management, which is a different thing; no web analytics | Sentry-compatible error tracking and cookie-free analytics, on every plan |
| API and MCP | REST API | REST API and an MCP endpoint, on every plan |
| Mobile apps | Not found in the vendor’s material | Native iOS and Android apps |
Watching internal networks and telecoms systems
This is the part where the two products overlap most, and where the difference is easiest to state. WhatsUp Gold is inside the network by design, which is its strength for internal systems and its limit for everything else: what it can see, it sees from one side.
Our private probe runs inside your network too. It leases one check at a time over HTTPS and is never given a database credential, so it can sit beside the systems it watches without being a key to them, and it reports into the same dashboard as the checks we run from outside. The telecoms checks do the protocol rather than the port: SNMP polls the OIDs you name and judges each against a threshold, SMPP binds and unbinds, SIP sends OPTIONS, and XMPP opens a stream and negotiates STARTTLS.
Running both
Plenty of teams should. If WhatsUp Gold is already watching your network from inside, what it cannot give you is the outside view, the status page your customers read and somebody being woken at three in the morning. That is what we would be, alongside it rather than instead of it, and our free plan is enough to find out.
Sources
All read on 16 September 2026.
- WhatsUp Gold pricing: editions and starting prices
- WhatsUp Gold perpetual licensing, and what a point buys
- WhatsUp Gold FAQ: device-based licensing
- WhatsUp Gold system requirements
- WhatsUp Gold 360
- Progress: network monitoring
See pricing for every plan’s limits, the monitors guide for what each check proves, or start free.