We compared Nagios XI and Nagios Core across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Nagios XI received positive feedback for its versatility and adaptability. It offers a diverse selection of plugins and scripts for monitoring needs. Nagios Core is an adaptable solution praised for its integration, customizability, and ability to effectively monitor server availability and network connectivity.
Room for Improvement: Users have suggested Nagios XI could improve integration, simplify configuration, and make the platform more user-friendly. Nagios XI users also suggest improvements to network visibility and cloud discovery. Nagios Core users have requested better documentation, improved scalability, and a more user-friendly configuration process.
Service and Support: Some Nagios XI customers complained about the lack of chat or phone support options. Nagios Core lacks direct customer service, but users can generally find help from a supportive open-source community and large knowledge base.
Ease of Deployment: Some Nagios XI users found the setup to be relatively simple, while others considered it challenging. Deployment can take a few months to complete, and there’s a steep learning curve. Nagios Core's setup is generally seen as well-documented and straightforward.
Pricing: Nagios XI’s pricing is considered reasonable and transparent, with no extra charges. Nagios Core is free, but users may incur costs for installation and configuration.
ROI: Nagios XI users reported positive outcomes overall, but some said visibility limitations lower the solution’s ROI. Nagios Core users say they have saved money by replacing paid monitoring tools with this open-source solution.
Comparison Results: Nagios XI is an affordable, flexible solution with a broad feature set and a selection of helpful plugins. At the same time, users say the setup can be complex, and some expressed a desire for more convenient ways to contact support. Nagios Core is a flexible open-source solution that is highly customizable and offers robust functionality commonly found in paid enterprise solutions. However, some users have said that Nagios Core becomes unwieldy when used at a large scale and that the documentation could be more thorough.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"Alert calls occur anytime a service goes down or a matrix is difficult and that helps us to quickly restore service and transfer work."
"Nagios monitors our servers, so we know if anything goes wrong and can solve the problem before it happens."
"What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services."
"The most valuable feature depends on the project. It's great if you need to check to ensure a service is running 24/7. I can use the full solution for free, and it's flexible. If I need to add a dashboard, I can integrate it with Nagios. Cloud synchronization is wonderful."
"Key features include the GUI interface, its notification capabilities, and the real-time reporting."
"The application performance monitoring feature is valuable."
"The most valuable features are the reports and the way it generates the report in a graphical manner."
"I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of processes."
"The solution has a lot of plugins and scripts integrated with it."
"The features I've found the most useful are the plug-ins, the fact that you can connect almost everything to it. That's very useful."
"You want to monitor a specific metric that nobody else has? You can do it even with the most basic of scripting skills, and you can always share it with the vast community of Nagios Exchange."
"The most valuable features of Nagios XI are you can customize it based on your use case and requirements. It is flexible and easy to integrate with our systems. You can customize the solution by adding additional features using code."
"The ability to set up templates and groups of checks, as well as customize the checks themselves."
"Nagios allows us to configure any device so that we can send pager alerts when people don't have access to emails. It also allows us to schedule downtime and maintenance."
"Nagios XI helps us monitor the bandwidth of the internet connection, HTTP, DNS, active directory services, and exchange data availability. We have multiple servers to monitor databases, availability of servers, and ping."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"It's not that easy to install the product itself. Also, the UI is a bit hard for regular users to navigate through."
"It is a bit slow due to latency."
"The tool needs to improve the integrations."
"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."
"Nagios Core can improve the graphical interface, it would make things a little easier."
"There is room for improvement in the graphics."
"The mapping is a little hard."
"The UI is a little outdated and graphics could be displayed in a better way."
"The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them."
"The scalability of Nagios XI is scalable. However, it is not easy to do."
"The installation and monitoring need improvement."
"There's room for improvement in the visibility, and in the ability to extract information. Stuff like this should be more simple."
"The product uses the backend as Perl and could be modified to a more lightweight solution like what's being offered by other vendors."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"The product does not have SAP monitoring."
"The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect."
Nagios Core is ranked 7th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 46 reviews while Nagios XI is ranked 9th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 54 reviews. Nagios Core is rated 8.0, while Nagios XI is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Nagios Core writes "An Open Source Fully Featured Data Centre Monitoring Tool". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". Nagios Core is most compared with Zabbix, Icinga, Centreon, OP5 Monitor and LogicMonitor, whereas Nagios XI is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Wireshark, Icinga and SCOM. See our Nagios Core vs. Nagios XI report.
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We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Ultimately NagiosXI is the better solution than Core but shortlisting NagiosXI also definitely depends on the infra landscape, technology, network devices, and other scopes of activities in monitoring.
The biggest difference I see between Nagios Core and XI is the user interface, reporting, and onboarding any element for monitoring, and that onboarding is much easier in NagiosXI than Core. Nagios Core is little complicated where you have to use console called Nconf or editing conf files in Linux needs more technical knowledge than using NagiosXI.