Nagios Core vs Plixer Scrutinizer comparison

Nagios and Plixer are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Nagios is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while Plixer is ranked #52 with an average rating of 8.0. Nagios holds a 2.5% mindshare in NMS, compared to Plixer’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Nagios users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Plixer users who would recommend it.

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

3,994 Views
3,475 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Plixer Scrutinizer

Read 15 Plixer Scrutinizer reviews

1,289 Views
877 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

Plixer Scrutinizer

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

Nagios Core and Plixer Scrutinizer both compete in the network monitoring category. Plixer Scrutinizer might have the upper hand due to its detailed network traffic analysis and structured support options.

Features: Nagios Core offers extensive customization, flexibility, and integration of plugins, focusing on infrastructure monitoring with customizable notifications. Plixer Scrutinizer provides comprehensive network traffic analysis, data context enrichment, and integration with security products for efficient traffic monitoring.

Room for Improvement: Nagios Core has a steep learning curve, complex configurations, and limited built-in assistance, affecting scalability. Plixer Scrutinizer could improve its user interface, reporting process, and handling of high traffic volumes for complex configurations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nagios Core predominantly requires on-premises deployment demanding user expertise and relies on community support. Plixer Scrutinizer offers structured support, easing deployment complexities with prompt technical aid through its licensing options.

Pricing and ROI: Nagios Core is free but requires an investment in skilled personnel, delivering ROI by minimizing server downtime. Plixer Scrutinizer uses a sensor-based licensing model, providing cost-effective network monitoring with competitive pricing and advantageous trial periods.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. Plixer Scrutinizer Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

September 2025

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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

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

12th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th)

Plixer Scrutinizer

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

52nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 2.5%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plixer Scrutinizer is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nagios Core	2.5%
Plixer Scrutinizer	0.4%
Other	97.1%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Nishith-Vyas

Tech Lead at STL Digital Limited

Valuable reporting and alert system with room for PDF export improvements

The NetEase reporting structure needs improvement, especially the availability report, which is weak. It should be generated automatically with minimal human intervention and should be exportable as a PDF. Besides that, an integrated PDF export feature for reports is necessary. Also, the alert mechanism and graphing mechanism need to be integrated properly into Nagios Core. Currently, integrating these requires advanced Linux knowledge. Integration of more visualization tools like Grafana and Prometheus for better graphing and visualization is also recommended.

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Ira Mulyanti

Sales Director at ARGA SOLUSI

An affordable product with great integration capabilities

Plixer Core Platform is a valuable feature and a good software. Plixer Scrutinizer uses NetFlow analysis to monitor whatever is there in a network. Price-wise, Plixer Scrutinizer is not an expensive product. Basically, Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that can integrate with any other brand or product in the market, so it is not an area of concern.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The good thing about Nagios Core is it covers everything."

"We use the product to monitor server applications."

"Provides timely notifications."

"The solution is quite efficient."

"Our customers like that Nagios Core is an open source solution. It can be customized to our customers' specific needs."

"The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is it allows us to develop and add as many plugins as we want."

"I would rate the overall solution ten points out of ten."

"The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is the ability to check the availability of the server for network connectivity. Additionally, the interface is good."

More Nagios Core pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."

"It shows us the saturation of the network of devices. It gives us a clear view of the flows in the network to understand, for instance, planning upgrades in the network to get an idea of what's going on the network on traffic flows. It gives us insight, for instance, on what's going on on our VPN Client. There are a lot of things where it provides very helpful information. It also gives us our security reports with quite detailed information on what's going on in the network, and whether there are data exfiltrations and so on."

"It helps us determine what is going on with our Internet and who is hogging it all up. If we get a real high throughput or a throughput that's going over and getting dropped fairly quickly, we can tell who (or what device) is consuming that traffic."

"We have had many requests to understand in the network which devices are connected to others. Most people don't have this information or are able to establish a map of data flow everywhere around the network. Scrutinizer can really help with this. We are using it to understand who is talking to what, how, and which protocols can help us to improve security and analyze flow."

"Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features."

"One of the most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer is the reporting, particularly how easy it is to drill down into the reports. Another valuable feature of the solution is its overall visibility. It's great. I also liked Plixer Scrutinizer in terms of deployment time and that it's very simple to set up. Once you get the appliance set up and connected, the customer starts to see results immediately, versus other solutions where that could take a while."

"The reporting and generating troubleshooting reports would be the best feature; our host-to-host conversation reporting."

"The ability to view the status of the top-10 at a glance is helpful. We immediately know which link is over-utilized or heavily used... and it's all in real-time."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pros

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the graphics."

"It's not that easy to install the product itself. Also, the UI is a bit hard for regular users to navigate through."

"I would like to see a sensor that shows the traffic of a user and what they're doing on the network."

"I would like to see more training videos."

"We're using the free version, which limits us in terms of the things that we can do. If we had the paid version, a lot of our issues would probably go away. For example, we can't isolate instances that are being built or updated with the production ones. When they're being built, on Nagios, they're showing in red. It'd be nice to be able to partition those off until they're all green, and then we can bring them into the environment. This is probably because we've got the free version and not the paid version. If we went for the paid version, it would probably allow us to do exactly what we want to or remove the restrictions that we have, but if we are able to isolate instances in the free version, it would make life much easier."

"Nagios Core does not have a graphic display."

"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."

"I believe Nagios Core will need to provide an option for big data platforms in the future."

More Nagios Core cons

"I wish the reporting side was easier to work with, but it does a decent job. I also wish the reporting side was a little more intuitive or they offered more reporting examples."

"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."

"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."

"We couldn't get it set up properly."

"For updating the Scrutinizer platform, when we have the actual data, it never happens in one day. Every time we have the data, we are obliged to install a new server in order to integrate the old data, and every time it has a problem. Most of the time, we were obliged to scrap all the data because we couldn't transfer it to the new server. So, it would be very good if they could improve this part."

"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."

"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."

"The visual acuity of how it presents data can sometimes be confusing. It takes a bit for people to spin up how to look at the graphs."

More Plixer Scrutinizer cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"It's free."

"The enterprise version has technical support. The version we are using is free."

"The solution is expensive."

"Nagios Core is a cheap solution."

"We are using the free version of Nagios Core."

"It's free."

"The Nagios Core (PNP4Nagios + Core) is free and can be setup by Netadmin within a few hours. The only additional cost is the cloud server."

More Nagios Core pricing and cost advice

"We have increased the license over time. We have added more licenses as the network has grown."

"We pay our one-off cost for the licenses, per device, in blocks of 50. And then we pay an annual maintenance fee of about $15,000 Australian, which is, at this point in time, about $9,000 US, for those 250 devices. The upfront costs for the 250-license use, were about $50,000 Australian, which is about $32,000 US."

"Our entire solution, amortized over five years, is in the vicinity of $40,000 to $50,000 a year."

"There are no extra costs. It's about $8,000 a year. The bang for the buck (cost) is definitely a plus."

"I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive."

"We just renewed. The pricing is 5,000 euro per year. This is the final price. All tax (20 percent) is included."

"Currently, the license for Plixer Scrutinizer is subscription-based and at a yearly fee. The price would depend on the amount of traffic you pull in. For example, there are several blocks from a 10K flow, a 40K flow, and a 100K flow, and based on the number of devices that you receive the flows from, that's the license, and it is not a per-interface pricing model, so that is a very strong, very competitive pricing feature of Plixer Scrutinizer. Licensing for the product is also not based on the number of storage, compared to some competing products that are priced based on the amount of storage you need, particularly based on the retention and the amount of data. Plixer Scrutinizer licensing is based on the device, and it's more in the direction of $10,000 because, with just $1,000, you don't have anything."

"The license is per device. We have 50 devices."

More Plixer Scrutinizer pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	22

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

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios Core?

What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services.

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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.

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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.

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What do you like most about Plixer Scrutinizer?

Plixer Scrutinizer is an affordable product. Plixer Scrutinizer is a tool that allows for customization, especially in scenarios where customers need new product features.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plixer Scrutinizer?

I rate Plixer Scrutinizer's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price or affordable, and ten is high price or expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Plixer Scrutinizer?

I don't have deep enough knowledge to comment on what requires improvements in Plixer Scrutinizer. In Plixer Scrutinizer, scalability is an area with minor concerns where improvements are required.

See all answers

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 27% of the time

Kentik vs Plixer Scrutinizer

Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

September 2025

Download Nagios Core product report

Buyer's Guide

Plixer Scrutinizer

September 2025

Download Plixer Scrutinizer product report

Overview

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

Nagios

The Scrutinizer incident response system leverages network traffic analytics to provide active monitoring, visualization, and reporting of network and security incidents. The system quickly delivers the rich forensic data needed by IT professionals to support fast and efficient incident response.

Plixer

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

Oxford Networks, Squaw Valley Ski Holdings, UltiSat, Wipro, West Aurora School District 129, SUNY Geneseo College, Bloomington Public Schools, First National Bank of Pennsylvania, Kitsap Credit Union, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County Houston Texas, Carilion Clinic, Banner Health, IDEXX Laboratories, Phibro Animal Health Corporation, Goodwill Industries, Parmalat, Armstrong Coal Company, Flybe, James Walker

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

September 2025

Free Report: Nagios Core vs. Plixer Scrutinizer

Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios Core vs. Plixer Scrutinizer and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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