ControlUp vs Icinga comparison

ControlUp and Icinga are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. ControlUp is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.0, while Icinga is ranked #30 with an average rating of 7.0. ControlUp holds a 0.9% mindshare in IM, compared to Icinga’s 2.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ControlUp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Icinga users who would recommend it.

ControlUp

Read 13 ControlUp reviews

2,429 Views
1,287 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Icinga

Read 17 Icinga reviews

4,206 Views
3,281 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

ControlUp

Icinga

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Icinga and ControlUp are competing products in the IT monitoring and management space. ControlUp seems to have the upper hand in environments requiring deep insights due to its comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting features.

Features: Icinga offers customizable alerting and compatibility with various plugins, adapting to different IT environments. It provides modularity in monitoring architecture. ControlUp has real-time performance monitoring, advanced analytics, and supports in-depth insight into virtual environments.

Room for Improvement: Icinga could enhance its real-time monitoring capabilities and streamline its initial setup process. It may also benefit from expanding its analytics features. ControlUp might improve its customization options and expand plugin support. Additionally, simplifying its configuration for complex environments could be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Icinga's modular approach requires configuration, potentially leading to more initial setup effort. ControlUp offers a streamlined setup process with central management tools, and it is noted for its customer service providing efficient guidance during deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Icinga's open-source framework leads to lower initial setup costs, offering better ROI for those with technical expertise. ControlUp demands higher upfront costs due to its extensive capabilities but offers significant ROI through enhanced operational efficiency and reduced downtime.

To learn more, read our detailed ControlUp vs. Icinga Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ControlUp vs. Icinga

January 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

ControlUp

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

19th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (4th)

Icinga

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

30th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (25th), Server Monitoring (13th), Cloud Monitoring Software (23rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of ControlUp is 0.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 2.4%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ControlUp	0.9%
Icinga	2.4%
Other	96.7%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

reviewer2717526

Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Delivers comprehensive and customizable system management with increased efficiency

The best features I have found are that it is very customizable, which would be number one, and very extensible through the use of scripts and triggers. The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening. It may sound facetious, but it really is everything about it. Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place. The benefits I have seen from using it so far include the ability to know in advance and take actions based on the information the tool gives you.

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Harrison Bulley

Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Net Consulting

A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification

I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI. It is a valuable tool to view the analysis reactions of a base core Level 2 or Level 1 team so that they can complete the necessary troubleshooting."

"ControlUp has an easy installation process."

"ControlUp is beneficial as it provides a web interface through which you can access all your infrastructure—servers, devices, and VDI infrastructure—all on the same platform. It supports gathering all infrastructure components in a single, unified dashboard. This helps you identify performance issues or high resource utilization, allowing quick troubleshooting. I appreciate the solid interface that ControlUp offers."

"The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening."

"ControlUp has some good functionalities, such as remotely pushing scripts in the device through the tool."

"The most valuable feature is the granularity of visibility into the resources that are in use by our applications."

"The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities."

"ControlUp has a lot of automation in it; it detects problems and failures very well, and it's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them."

More ControlUp pros

"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."

"The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first."

"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."

"We have found the solution to be stable."

"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."

"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."

"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."

"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."

More Icinga pros

Cons

"The graphical user interface needs to be improved from version to version."

"The most common complaint that I have heard, at least within our organization, is about reporting. They have their own reporting. It's just that it doesn't yet include everything that you can look at within the application. You can only report on specific metrics or collections."

"We'd like to see the mobile app working again so that we can get alerts 24/7. This is especially useful for the person on call."

"Solve is a quick and intuitive tool for quickly mapping data together, however, once you have the view of the data that you like, it is difficult to share this with colleagues."

"This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot of CPU but I cannot restrict the service from ControlUp. I have to use another tool like AppSense."

"Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be maybe a way to do this in a surface hosting provider."

"There was some lag earlier, and reports pulled from the dashboard would sometimes be half an hour old. But now, the information provides real-time status, which is greatly appreciated. Overall, I've seen improvement in the product."

"There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting."

More ControlUp cons

"The user interface should be improved."

"The installation and configuration are very complex."

"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."

"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."

"Icinga’s automation could be improved."

"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."

"Icinga is a complex solution that's hard to learn. It's a powerful product for monitoring, but new users will have a hard time figuring out what to do."

"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."

More Icinga cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive."

"Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios."

"We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions."

"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."

"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."

"It's an open-source solution."

"The solution is free to use."

"We're using the free version of Icinga."

"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."

"The solution is cheap."

"This is an open-source solution with paid support."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Healthcare Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

13%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?

It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ControlUp Real-time?

I don't see any.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?

I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?

It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Icinga?

There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Icinga?

We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nexthink vs ControlUp

Compared 26% of the time

Citrix uberAgent Monitoring vs ControlUp

Compared 15% of the time

Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) vs ControlUp

Compared 8% of the time

SysTrack vs ControlUp

Compared 7% of the time

eG Enterprise vs ControlUp

Compared 5% of the time

More ControlUp Competitors

Zabbix vs Icinga

Compared 28% of the time

Nagios Core vs Icinga

Compared 13% of the time

Checkmk vs Icinga

Compared 8% of the time

Nagios XI vs Icinga

Compared 5% of the time

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Icinga

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ControlUp

January 2026

Download ControlUp product report

Buyer's Guide

Icinga

January 2026

Download Icinga product report

Also Known As

No data available

Icinga Cloud Monitoring

Overview

ControlUp is a digital experience monitoring management platform that makes it possible for IT teams to deliver a work-from-anywhere experience for employees. The solution makes fixing and preventing issues easy, enabling IT teams to make smarter decisions. It also provides monitoring performance, availability, and useful productivity metrics.

The ControlUp platform supports:

Any digital workstyle
Physical endpoints
Virtual desktops
Apps
SaaS
Web apps
Unified communications tools

ControlUp Features

ControlUp has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Out-of-the-box device and performance metrics
Custom metric and device data collection
Non-intrusive, secure agents with offline mode
Custom reporting
Easy-to-use dashboards
Scalable SaaS infrastructure
Built-in troubleshooting & remediation actions
Remote assist
Custom script actions
Multiple scripting languages
Automation and alerting

ControlUp Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing ControlUp. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Wide range of platform options: ControlUp offers multiple platform options including Windows, macOS, Linux, and IGE, independent of device location.

Powerful analytics: With ControlUp, you can analyze across your entire infrastructure or you can collect detailed individual device performance.

Optimizes performance: The solution enables you to remediate issues and optimize performance with its support of both manual and automated actions.

Minimize user downtime: ControlUp helps you catch common issues that lead to workflow interruptions. Self-correcting capabilities and comprehensive early-warning systems address issues before they impact employee productivity.

Resolve issues faster: The solution enables you to spend less time on support calls and more time driving value via its real-time troubleshooting and remediation solutions.

Increased visibility of remote environments: Gain real-time visibility across your entire network and find new ways to deliver the best end-user experience possible.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the ControlUp solution.

A Chair, IEEE Consumer Technology Society - Dallas,Texas, USA at a non-profit says, “In terms of the public cloud, ControlUp's features make us feel very secure. Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service. ControlUp offers a return-on-investment type of approach that helps us.”

A VP Virtualisation and Citrix Engineer at BlackRock mentions, “Solve is quickly becoming one of the most-used features. Its interface allows us to connect to all 54,000 monitored endpoints in real-time. The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities. Combined with the triggers, we have been growing their usage to fix things before they become an issue. Lastly, the controller view allows us to compare the configurations of settings side-by-side which is extremely helpful when tracking down the RCA of an issue.”

A Senior Citrix Remote Access Engineer at Rabobank comments, “The high-level view of the estate coupled with powerful administration tools has been great. We can see real-time performance and trends and can create triggers for common issues with associated scripts that can automate a lot of the previous manual remediation steps.”

ControlUp

Icinga is a robust tool for monitoring IT infrastructure, known for its distributed monitoring capabilities and seamless integration with multiple platforms. It efficiently observes servers, network devices, and environments like Linux and Windows, enabling proactive issue identification and resource management.

With a focus on task delegation and clustering, Icinga offers an intuitive interface through its GUI and Icinga Director, simplifying configuration. The extensive plugin library supports diverse technologies, while the API allows automation with tools like Terraform and Ansible. Despite its strengths, users report challenges with data display in the GUI, a need for improved dashboards, and complex configuration processes. Users benefit from its SNMP alerts, email notifications, and automated incident handling, making it essential for managed service environments and enterprises.

What are the key features of Icinga?

Task Delegation: Streamlines monitoring tasks across distributed systems.
Event Handler: Enables automatic service recovery with minimal intervention.
Plugin Library: Offers extensive support for integrating diverse technologies.
API Accessibility: Facilitates automation with popular tools like Terraform.
Custom Plugins: Allows easy creation and personalization for monitoring needs.

What benefits should you consider in Icinga reviews?

Flexibility: Tailors monitoring to specific requirements with community support.
Scalability: Successfully manages growing infrastructure demands.
Proactivity: Enhances issue identification and resource allocation.
Integration: Seamlessly works with existing IT operations platforms.

Icinga is widely adopted in IT environments for monitoring servers, networks, and applications across industries such as finance, healthcare, and technology. Its ability to integrate with various operating systems and automation platforms makes it a versatile choice for industries prioritizing comprehensive surveillance and proactive management of their infrastructure.

Icinga

Sample Customers

B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre

Buyer's Guide

ControlUp vs. Icinga

January 2026

Free Report: ControlUp vs. Icinga

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