Swift Fox vs Sonar

Start with the Network Management tier — it requires no billing changes at all. Swift Fox syncs account status with Sonar for disconnects and reconnects, and you get the full monitoring and automation stack immediately. Most operators who eventually consolidate billing do it after a season of running both, once their staff is comfortable in Swift Fox. Some never consolidate, and that's fine too.

For the core WISP workflow — recurring billing, card and direct-debit processing, branded statements, usage-based overages, a self-service portal, and GAAP/IFRS-compliant reporting — yes. Sonar is more capable on enterprise operations: complex US tax jurisdictions, inventory and purchase orders, GPS fleet tracking, and MDU management. If those are central to your business, keeping Sonar for billing and adding Swift Fox for the network can be a solid long-term option.

Yes — Sonar includes ICMP/SNMP monitoring on a 60-second polling cycle with thresholds, on-call rotations, and topology mapping, and it works well. The difference is what the monitoring is connected to. Swift Fox reads radio-level data (signal, MCS, live backhaul capacity) from every major wireless vendor and feeds it into automation: QoE shaping, tier-fair PFO during congestion, MPLS traffic rebalancing, and DDoS mitigation. Sonar watches your network, while Swift Fox also acts on what it sees.

It can be, and a lot of small WISPs run it happily. The thing to work out first is the minimum. Sonar starts at $1.25 per subscriber per month with a $500 monthly minimum on a contract, so below 400 subscribers you're paying for 400 whether you have them or not (at 200 subscribers that works out to $2.50 each). Above that the per-subscriber price is fairly reasonable, and it's lower than our billing tier. What usually pushes the real total higher is what gets bought beside it, since most Sonar shops pair it with a separate QoE shaping appliance and some add a monitoring tool on top. Our Network + Billing tier is $1.50 per subscriber with a $100 minimum and no contract, and it includes the shaping, the radio-level monitoring with paging, and the MPLS balancing, so below about 330 subscribers it comes in under Sonar's minimum on its own. Past that, Sonar is cheaper on billing and the comparison comes down to whether you'd be buying shaping and monitoring separately. If you're already on Sonar and happy with the billing side, the cheaper move is usually to keep it and add our $0.75 Network Management tier beside it.

The usual list is Splynx, Powercode, Visp, UISP if you're all Ubiquiti, and us, and they aren't all solving the same problem. Splynx is the cheapest on billing at $0.55 per subscriber (with a 400-subscriber minimum licence, about $220 a month) and UISP is free, but both leave you finding your own QoE shaping, and their monitoring is the general-purpose ping and SNMP kind rather than reading signal and capacity from the radios. Powercode is quoted after a sales call and you run the server yourself. Swift Fox is $1.50 per subscriber for billing plus the whole network layer, or $0.75 for the network layer on its own beside a billing system you already have, with a $50 or $100 monthly minimum and no contract. If the reason Sonar feels expensive is the $500 minimum, we're a fairly direct fit. If it's the per-subscriber price at a few thousand subscribers, Splynx for billing with our network tier beside it is probably the cheapest combination we'd suggest, and we sync with Splynx so that setup is supported.

Swift Fox was built by operators who founded and ran a multi-thousand-subscriber WISP in southern Alberta for ten years. Every feature was built to solve problems we hit on our own network. When you book a demo, you talk to the founder who wrote the code.