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Netplot vs Auvik for network documentation

Short answer: Auvik is a network monitoring platform that discovers your topology automatically and bills per device, per month, forever. Netplot is a network documentation tool you buy once. If you need continuous alerting across many client networks, Auvik does things Netplot does not. If you need a document you hand over and keep, the cost difference is two orders of magnitude.

What Auvik does well

• Automatic discovery — point it at a subnet and it finds devices and draws the topology for you, continuously.
• Continuous monitoring and alerting — it watches, pages you, and keeps history.
• Config backup for supported devices, with change tracking.
• Built for MSPs — multi-tenant by design, with per-client separation.

If what you need is "tell me at 3 a.m. that a switch died at a client site", that is Auvik's job and it does it. Netplot's live wallboard alarms on a link going down, but it is not a paging system.

Where the model differs

Auvik is priced per billable device per month. The published figure works out to roughly $1,200 a year for a 50-device site — and that charge continues for as long as you want the documentation to stay accessible, because the documentation lives in their cloud.

That is the structural difference, and it matters most at the end of a job:

• You stop paying, you lose access. The map is a view into a subscription, not a file you hold.
• The client cannot be handed the result. They would need their own seat.
• It requires an agent and outbound cloud connectivity. On an isolated or air-gapped network — industrial, medical, government — that is often not merely inconvenient but prohibited.

What Netplot does instead

• One file, one payment. €79 once. The file keeps working with no account, no renewal, no vendor.
• Port-level documentation — every port, what is connected to it, and its VLANs, in a model rather than in a text box.
• An engineering PDF with title block, revision table and full port tables, generated in one click. This is the artefact that justifies an invoice.
• A read-only viewer for the client — the same map, editing disabled, theirs to keep.
• Runs offline. Open the HTML file on a laptop with no network at all.

Netplot's optional Live package adds an SNMP collector on a small always-on box (a Raspberry Pi is enough) for traffic, link status and a wallboard. It is a one-time €299, not a subscription, and it stays inside your LAN.

Where Auvik is genuinely ahead

Being honest about this is more useful than pretending otherwise:

• Discovery is more complete. Netplot's discovery reads LLDP and forwarding tables over SNMP, which gives you the inventory and some links — but kit that does not publish LLDP leaves gaps the tool flags rather than invents. Auvik's agent does more.
• No alerting infrastructure. Netplot shows a link red on a wallboard. It does not page you.
• No config backup, no historical graphs.

Side by side

The honest verdict

Choose Auvik if you run many client networks, need continuous monitoring with real alerting and config backup, and the per-device subscription is already in your margin.

Choose Netplot if the deliverable is the point: a document you hand over, that the client keeps, that does not expire, and that works on networks which are not allowed to reach a cloud. At €79 once against $1,200 a year, you can also simply have both.

You do not have to take this page's word for it: the demo on netplot.app is the real product running in your browser, and the trial is the full product limited to 15 devices.

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