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Datadog vs GroundWork Monitor vs Nagios XI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.1%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GroundWork Monitor is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios XI is 3.3%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.1%
Nagios XI3.3%
GroundWork Monitor0.4%
Other92.2%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
it_user186582 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PC/Client Server Analyst II at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees
It's easy to setup and the plugins are easy to write. When we need to, the threshold is easy to change.
It's easy to setup and the plugins are easy to write. When we need to, the threshold is easy to change It would be nice to have a centralized client-settings management. At the moment, the client settings have to be changed individually. I've used it since 2011. The deployment of the new server…
Emmanuel Appiah Boateng - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and Security Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Simplifies setup and requires user interface enhancement
Nagios XI is easy to install, which sets it apart from other open-source solutions I've tried. Typically, setting up a monitoring system on Linux involves cloning files from GitHub, building it, and installing many dependencies, but with Nagios XI, it wasn't like that. Nagios XI simplifies our setup and reduces the time spent configuring monitoring tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"This solution improves our organization as now we have higher visibility into our application that we otherwise would not have."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog, which improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space, allowing us to monitor business transactions and take proactive action before an end user reports it."
"This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space."
"It has saved us a lot of trouble in implementation."
"Using the product has caused a paradigm shift in how we deploy monitoring."
"It's easy to setup and the plugins are easy to write."
"Nagios is a custom API manager, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature."
"The ability to set up templates and groups of checks, as well as customize the checks themselves."
"It's a monitoring agent. It's designed to do one thing. Its most valuable feature is its monitoring."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of processes."
"The integration with the alerting software, automated maintenance windows, and the ability to set up templates and groups of checks, as well as customize the checks themselves, are very valuable features."
"You can save a lot of time using Nagios monitoring because otherwise you need to check all of your services or system one by one."
"Nagios is the best monitoring tool that I have ever worked on."
"BPI: It allows defining peripherals to map business criticality for efficient monitoring, as required."
 

Cons

"The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration."
"All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward."
"The product could do better with its notifications."
"I'd rate Datadog support four out of 10. It was primarily an issue with support in the Asia-Pacific region."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"We'd like Datadog to make the log storage cheaper."
"The monitors need improvement."
"Datadog could always lower the price!"
"Deploying an agent leaves much to be desired."
"I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space."
"While this solution works, I think that it can be improved in terms of maintenance, support, and price."
"I think that the community needs to concentrate development to get a standard GUI (Adagios is a side project) and gives the user a better notification system."
"The web interface is perfectly fit for purpose but isn't up there with the best modern admin panels."
"The PNP4Nagios plugin not working easily with XI is an issue for me, because some open source monitoring plugins do not work out of the box."
"For some, it may be difficult to deploy."
"It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure."
"Adding new servers and passive checks (which require setting up agents and NRDS) on servers are a little difficult to do properly when employees don't understand the process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
Information not available
"We are using the free version of this solution."
"You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
"This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years."
"Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license."
"For our country in North Africa, it's expensive and we could purchase another solution for that price. But it's a reasonable price if we're speaking in international terms."
"The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily."
"For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value."
"Licensing costs are reasonable."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several time...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was t...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios XI?
The pricing for the Nagios XI product is good and better than other solutions. I would give it a four or five.
What needs improvement with Nagios XI?
The user interface needs improvement. Many tools have poor user interfaces, making them hard to manage and navigate.
What is your primary use case for Nagios XI?
I normally use Nagios XI for our servers. It's not particularly used for network equipment, however, I use it for mon...
 

Also Known As

No data available
GWOS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Swiss Life, JBFCS, Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre
Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.