A Device42 alternative for small data centers

At a glance

	Device42 (as listed on its public pages)	DC Sim
What it is	IT discovery, CMDB, IT asset management and DCIM in one product; a Freshworks company	Browser-based data center simulator and 3D twin
Built for	IT teams that need to discover and track assets across data centers and cloud	Small and mid-size data centers and the partners who serve them
Price	Annual subscription based on the number of devices; figures not published	Monitor $5 per rack per month ($49 minimum); Design $490–3,900 one-time per project
How you start	Free trial, delivered as a virtual appliance	Excel template free; walkthrough on your own file
Discovery	Agentless auto-discovery of physical, virtual and cloud resources; application dependency mapping	None of its own; reads inventory from your sheet, NetBox or Zabbix
Asset lifecycle, contracts, spare parts	Listed	Not offered; no asset or change workflows
Room and rack layouts	Drag-and-drop building, room and rack layouts; auto-generated rack diagrams; power, space and weight heat maps; SVG export	3D twin with Floor, Air, Water, Fire, Power, Cabling, Network, Device and Token layers
Power and environment	Power, temperature and humidity readings from supported devices over SNMP, with alerts and history	Reads Zabbix directly and any tool’s readings export; no own sensors
Cabling	Patch panel templates, bulk import from spreadsheets, end-to-end connectivity view	Cabling layer with end-to-end trace from the Cables sheet
What-if	“What-if scenarios” named on its DCIM page; power sources mapped to the hardware that depends on them	Fail any UPS, feed, breaker, switch, cooling unit or manifold; dark, one-feed and overloaded lists; estimated minutes to 27, 32, 35 °C
Design before the room exists	Drag-and-drop modelling of buildings, rooms and racks listed	Design mode with U, weight, breaker and cooling checks and an N−1 audit
Liquid cooling and leaks	Not on the public pages	Liquid sheet: CDUs, manifolds, leak what-if (estimated)
Tokens per kWh	Not on the public pages	Token layer per server and rack
Integrations	30+ listed, including ServiceNow, Jira, Freshservice and Splunk; REST API	NetBox and Zabbix directly; any other tool through the template’s sheets

“Listed” means the feature appears on Device42’s public pages on the date checked; it is not a review of how well it works.

What DC Sim costs at 10, 20 and 50 racks

Device42 does not publish prices, so there is no side-by-side cost table here; ask Freshworks for a quote at your device count. DC Sim at list price:

Racks	DC Sim Monitor (per year)	DC Sim Design (one-time, if you plan a room or row)
10	$600	$490
20	$1,200	$490
50	$3,000	$1,490

When Device42 is the better fit

• You need to find out what you have: agentless discovery across physical, virtual and cloud resources, with application dependency mapping.
• You want a CMDB and IT asset management with lifecycle events, contracts, warranties and spare parts, connected to a service desk such as Freshservice, ServiceNow or Jira.
• You want SNMP power and environmental monitoring with alerts in the same system as the inventory.

When DC Sim is the better fit

• A small or mid-size room, 5 to 50 racks, where the question is what fails with what: a UPS, a feed, a cooling unit, a leak, a switch, and which racks and services go with it.
• Planning before you buy hardware: Design mode checks U space, weight, breakers and cooling and runs an N−1 audit on a room or row that does not exist yet.
• Power and cooling in one what-if: fail a cooling unit and see estimated minutes to 27, 32 and 35 °C at the rack inlets (zonal model, not CFD), on the same model as the power chain.
• A published price you can budget without a sales call, and a 30 % margin for MSPs and integrators who run several small rooms as partners.
• NetBox users who want the racks in 3D: DC Sim reads a NetBox site directly with a read-only token (NetBox, in 3D).

If you only need a free inventory, see the openDCIM and RackTables comparison.

Using both

Keep Device42 as the discovery and asset system. Its documentation lists CSV exports (Tools > Exports) for Rack, Racked Device, Device Hardware Model, Power Unit and Patch Panel Port, among others. Map them to the template’s Racks, Devices, Power and Cables sheets: header names are matched with synonyms, rows that cannot be read are listed instead of blocking the import, and a re-upload shows a change list. The room appears in 3D with its checks, and every failure you simulate uses your data. There is no direct Device42 connector; direct connectors exist today for NetBox and Zabbix only.