Kentik vs Nagios Core comparison

Kentik and Nagios are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Kentik is ranked #29 with an average rating of 9.0, while Nagios is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.7. Kentik holds a 1.8% mindshare in NMS, compared to Nagios’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Kentik users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Nagios users who would recommend it.

Kentik

Read 16 Kentik reviews

3,784 Views
3,368 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

5,494 Views
4,505 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Kentik

Nagios Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Kentik and Nagios Core are in the network monitoring realm. Kentik seems to have the upper hand due to its SaaS nature, user-friendly features, and superior support.

Features: Kentik provides NetFlow visualization, DDoS alerting, and traffic analysis, which assist in monitoring and optimizing network performance. It offers real-time visibility and automation through an intuitive data explorer. Nagios Core stands out for its flexibility and extensibility, supporting various endpoints and allowing extensive customization for different monitoring needs.

Room for Improvement: Kentik could improve its user and security rights management for more granularity, enhance API usability, and derive more actionable insights from alerts. Nagios Core must tackle its outdated interface and steep learning curve, with modernization and user-friendly updates needed to remain competitive.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Kentik's SaaS model simplifies deployment and is supported by excellent customer service, described as proactive and responsive. Nagios Core's on-premises deployment is more challenging, relying on users' expertise for configuration. Its community-driven support contrasts with Kentik's dedicated team.

Pricing and ROI: Kentik is positioned with enterprise pricing justifying its robust features with significant ROI through network operations savings. Nagios Core offers a budget-friendly option as a free, open-source tool appealing to users needing basic monitoring without added costs, albeit requiring more setup time.

To learn more, read our detailed Kentik vs. Nagios Core Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. Nagios Core

March 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:

ROI

Sentiment score

7.0

Kentik enhances network management and cost efficiency, offering data insights while reducing engineering efforts, boosting operational efficiency and security.

Sentiment score

8.9

Nagios Core boosted operational efficiency, reduced costs, minimized downtime, and significantly improved productivity and disaster recovery times.

In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

8.3

Kentik's customer service is efficient and responsive, with proactive communication and expertise, greatly enhancing user satisfaction.

Sentiment score

5.5

Nagios Core relies on community and documentation for support, offering valuable resources but facing scalability and consistency challenges.

They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.

Shubham-Saxena

Network Engineer III at Fortanix

I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

8.3

Kentik is praised for its scalability in large, global installations, handling increased data flows and integrating with Kubernetes.

Sentiment score

7.6

Nagios Core is highly scalable, supporting diverse infrastructures with open-source flexibility, despite some horizontal scaling concerns.

Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.

Shubham-Saxena

Network Engineer III at Fortanix

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

The solution is scalable.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.1

Users commend Kentik for its strong stability, minimal disruptions, efficient issue resolution, and satisfactory performance, especially in lab settings.

Sentiment score

8.6

Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable, offering exceptional performance on Linux with minimal plugin-related issues.

In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.

Shubham-Saxena

Network Engineer III at Fortanix

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

I tried many other solutions at work, however, in terms of Nagios, I haven't seen any disruption or downtime.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Room For Improvement

Kentik users desire enhanced permissions, UI, API access, integrations, AI, insights, cost-effectiveness, and alert and data features.

Nagios Core needs a modernized interface, simplified configuration, scalability, and integration with tools like Grafana for improved usability.

More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Setup Cost

Kentik's pricing depends on usage factors, offering discounts for education, with annual and multi-year contracts available.

Nagios Core provides cost-effective, open-source monitoring with engineering setup and maintenance, requiring customization expertise for full benefits.

The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.

ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON

Sales Manager at IFX NEtworks

Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Valuable Features

Kentik offers real-time network visibility, customizable dashboards, and automation, enhancing security, performance, and user experience efficiently.

Nagios Core offers extensible plugins, alerting, customizable dashboards, proactive monitoring, and integration, enhancing system reliability and minimizing downtime.

One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.

reviewer2695314

BDM at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives.

ADRIANA SALDARRIAGA TOBON

Sales Manager at IFX NEtworks

Kentik is easy to use and set up.

Shubham-Saxena

Network Engineer III at Fortanix

For more quotes and insights, download the Kentik report

It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Categories and Ranking

Kentik

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

29th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (16th)

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Kentik is 1.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Nagios Core	1.9%
Kentik	1.8%
Other	96.3%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Shubham-Saxena

Network Engineer III at Fortanix

Integrating synthetic tests and network monitoring enhances traffic pattern visualization

The Kentik support team is good. If you want me to rate them on a scale, I would give them eight. I had a call with the Kentik support team for fifteen minutes, so I'm going to give them eight for now. The reason for giving them an eight is that they are good and address our issues. They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us, including what is needed and what is not. However, when we are working on some real issues with Kentik, I sometimes feel there's a delay due to the busyness of their teams. We faced some outages and were not able to get the desired results from Kentik tools, so that took a little time to resolve.

Read full review

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

Monitoring solution provides comprehensive visibility across IT infrastructure

The good thing about Nagios Core is it covers everything. Everything in the IT domain, you can monitor anything. You can even monitor printers, the ports of printers, Core workstations, and storage. You can monitor the workflow Core and the utilization of computes. If you want to grasp everything of your IT equipment on a single interface, you can use Nagios. It's the best one. It provides dashboards, and you can also configure your emails and alerts with it. If something is critical, you can configure it to notify via emails. It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	23

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?

I would say Kentik's pricing is not cheap. From my perspective as part of the technical team, I would not categorize it as expensive, but I know it is not cheap.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Kentik?

There's always room for improvements and better relations when using any kind of product. We faced some issues with Kentik UI and alerting, which we asked them to fix, and they succeeded. They have...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Kentik?

We are using Kentik mostly for synthetic tests, and from one last year, network monitoring as well. We are using it for inter DC BGP tests and server monitoring as well.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios Core?

Nagios Core is a free and open-source product. We don't charge for the product itself, but we charge for the man-hour costs related to installation, configuration, ongoing operation, and maintenance.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Nagios Core?

The dashboard should be improved. It's very simple. I don't have a very clear or specific suggestion. You can change the skin of the dashboard, however, it's good for me.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Nagios Core?

I was a senior system administrator. I've been using Nagios Core for more than ten years now. It can be used to monitor hosts, such as machines, and monitor services of any kind. I'm using it to mo...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kentik

March 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

March 2026

Download Nagios Core product report

Overview

Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.

With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.

Kentik

This is IT infrastructure monitoring's industry-standard, open-source core. Free without professional support services.

Nagios

Sample Customers

Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent.

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

Buyer's Guide

Kentik vs. Nagios Core

March 2026

Free Report: Kentik vs. Nagios Core

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