Forward Networks
Forward Networks provides a digital twin platform that models your entire network infrastructure to prevent outages, verify security policies, and automate complex change management tasks effectively.
NetBrain
NetBrain is an automated network management platform that provides real-time visibility and no-code automation to help you document, troubleshoot, and secure your entire multi-vendor hybrid network infrastructure.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | Forward Networks | NetBrain |
|---|---|---|
| Website | forwardnetworks.com | netbraintech.com |
| Pricing Model | Custom | Custom |
| Starting Price | Custom Pricing | Custom Pricing |
| FREE Trial | ✘ No free trial | ✘ No free trial |
| Free Plan | ✘ No free plan | ✘ No free plan |
| Product Demo | ✓ Request demo here | ✓ Request demo here |
| Deployment | ||
| Integrations | ||
| Target Users | ||
| Target Industries | ||
| Customer Count | 0 | 0 |
| Founded Year | 2013 | 2004 |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, USA | Burlington, USA |
Overview
Forward Networks
Forward Networks provides a mathematical model of your entire network, creating a functional digital twin that spans on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. You can visualize every possible traffic path and verify that your network is behaving exactly as intended. By analyzing your network's state against your specific business policies, the platform identifies misconfigurations and security gaps before they cause outages or breaches.
You can use the platform to perform 'what-if' analysis, allowing you to test changes in the digital twin before deploying them to production. This proactive approach eliminates manual troubleshooting and reduces the risk of human error. Whether you are managing complex data centers or sprawling multi-cloud deployments, you gain a single source of truth that simplifies audits and accelerates digital transformation initiatives.
NetBrain
NetBrain provides a specialized platform for managing complex, hybrid network environments through intent-based automation. You can replace manual CLI-based troubleshooting with dynamic maps that update in real-time, giving you instant visibility into your entire topology across cloud, SDN, and on-premises hardware. By capturing the 'intent' of your network, the software helps you ensure that connectivity, performance, and security policies remain intact even as your environment changes.
The platform is designed for large-scale enterprises and service providers who need to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) and eliminate manual documentation errors. You can use it to automate repetitive diagnostic tasks and share live network insights across your NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams. It integrates directly with your existing ITSM and monitoring tools to trigger automated troubleshooting the moment an incident is reported.
Overview
Forward Networks Features
- Network Digital Twin Create a vendor-agnostic mathematical model of your entire network to visualize paths across all devices and cloud instances.
- Path Analysis Search for any traffic path between two points to see exactly how packets are handled by every hop.
- Intent Verification Define your network policies and receive instant alerts if a configuration change violates your security or connectivity rules.
- Change Modeling Predict the impact of planned changes by testing them against the digital twin before touching your production environment.
- Security Posture Blast Visualize the potential reach of a compromised host to identify and close security holes in your segmentation strategy.
- Automated Documentation Generate up-to-date network diagrams and configuration state reports automatically for simplified compliance audits and troubleshooting.
NetBrain Features
- Dynamic Network Mapping. Create on-demand maps of any part of your network by simply entering an IP address or hostname.
- Intent-Based Automation. Define how your network should behave and let the system automatically verify those conditions across all devices.
- Executable Runbooks. Digitize your team's expertise into automated workflows that any engineer can run to solve complex issues quickly.
- Path Discovery. Visualize the exact hop-by-hop path of traffic across multi-vendor environments to pinpoint where connectivity drops occur.
- Change Management. Plan, execute, and verify network changes with automated pre- and post-change analysis to prevent unexpected outages.
- Incident Triggered Automation. Connect your ticketing system to trigger automated data collection the instant an alert is generated.
Pricing Comparison
Forward Networks Pricing
NetBrain Pricing
Pros & Cons
Forward Networks
Pros
- Unmatched visibility into complex multi-vendor network environments
- Drastically reduces time spent on manual troubleshooting
- Simplifies complex compliance audits with automated verification
- Prevents costly outages by catching errors before deployment
Cons
- Initial data collection setup requires significant time
- High price point targets large enterprise budgets
- Requires consistent data snapshots for maximum accuracy
NetBrain
Pros
- Dynamic mapping saves hours of manual documentation work
- Visualizes complex traffic paths across multi-vendor hardware
- Automated runbooks significantly reduce troubleshooting time
- Integrates well with existing ITSM tools like ServiceNow
Cons
- Initial setup and discovery can be time-consuming
- Significant learning curve for creating custom automation units
- Requires high resource overhead for very large environments