Nagios Core vs SolarWinds AppOptics comparison

Nagios and SolarWinds are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Nagios is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.7, while SolarWinds is ranked #58. Nagios holds a 2.4% mindshare in IM, compared to SolarWinds’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Nagios users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

4,463 Views
3,526 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

SolarWinds AppOptics

Read 9 SolarWinds AppOptics reviews

1,452 Views
653 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

SolarWinds AppOptics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Nagios Core and SolarWinds AppOptics are two contrasting monitoring solutions in the IT monitoring and management category. Nagios Core holds the upper hand for users who value flexibility, customization options, and cost-effectiveness, especially within technical environments. SolarWinds AppOptics is favored by those who prioritize ease of use, integration capabilities, and extensive feature sets.

Features: Nagios Core provides flexibility with extensive customizability and a vast plugin ecosystem, as well as robust monitoring and alerting features. SolarWinds AppOptics offers application performance management, topology discovery, and real-time reporting on a more user-friendly platform.

Room for Improvement: Nagios Core faces challenges with complex setups, a steep learning curve, and limited reporting capabilities without customization. SolarWinds AppOptics could enhance cloud integration, consolidate its application stack, and better tailor its licensing model.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nagios Core, mainly used in on-premises deployments, relies on community guidance due to its open-source nature and lacks official support. SolarWinds AppOptics provides flexible deployment options with vendor support, suitable for users seeking direct assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Nagios Core's open-source model allows cost savings, with users investing mostly in setup and maintenance. SolarWinds AppOptics involves licensing fees based on elements, and many users find the investment justified by the comprehensive features and support for larger environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds AppOptics Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

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

Nagios Core

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (10th)

SolarWinds AppOptics

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

58th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (55th), Cloud Monitoring Software (47th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 2.4%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds AppOptics is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nagios Core	2.4%
SolarWinds AppOptics	0.7%
Other	96.9%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

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.

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John Yuko

Assistant Manager ICT - Projects at I&M Bank Ltd

Unique features allow consolidating and combing metrics into a single dashboard, but don't monitor mobile solutions

I would like to see more granular information provided on Unix applications. Also, the integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward in terms having an agent to retrieve your credentials rather than having to enter or save them for SSH on SolarWinds. From the outset, we had to set some commands to log into the search console, and they are saved on the solution, which presents a challenge in terms of exposure. The solution is unable to monitor APK solutions completely because we'd then be forced to break down the APK and provide the APIs or go through the source code. They don't have a module that can analyze an application that is maybe under-used.

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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

"Dashboard provides monitor of total assets."

"Other products are good but from the configuration point of view Nagios is really very lightweight. The price is really good in my opinion. Another important thing is that my Nagios engine still works with Dual core 8GB ram for the last 10 years."

"Nagios monitors our servers, so we know if anything goes wrong and can solve the problem before it happens."

"Provides timely notifications."

"It is fairly easy to set up, and we can monitor pretty much everything we want to."

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

"We use the product to monitor server applications."

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

More Nagios Core pros

"Technical support is always live and they're supportive."

"Some of the most valuable features of SolarWinds are the topology discovery and network performance analysis."

"I have found the most valuable feature is application performance management."

"The sum solution, NTA, and DPA."

"The product has a great dashboard."

"The reporting of the solution is very good."

Cons

"I would like to see more training videos."

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

"It is a bit slow due to latency."

"The UI is a little outdated and graphics could be displayed in a better way."

"Bandwidth monitoring is the pain point for me because Nagios Core does not monitor bandwidth effectively like Cacti does."

"It would be nice if the company offered a sales or contract manager that was dedicated to our company so that we would have some sort of link to Nagios, and if we had issues or questions, we'd be able to contact them directly."

"The initial setup process could be easier."

"The mapping is a little hard."

More Nagios Core cons

"The implementation needs improvement. It needs to get modernized with the newer cloud scenario in both public and private deployment models."

"I would like to see more integration with other tools that are available on the market."

"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."

"The integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward."

"The solution should be more user-friendly."

"In terms of the technology, I think they need to put some more advanced troubleshooting into SolarWinds, in terms of AI capabilities. That's the next generation, especially in the cases of APIs which have already adopted AI capabilities into their products."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Lessening the price point would be an improvement."

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

"The product is cheaply priced."

"Nagios Core is an open source solution, and there are no licensing fees."

"The solution is expensive."

"We are using the open-source, unpaid version."

"We have saved a lot of time, money, and effort in reducing disaster times, which is owed to Nagios quick alerting."

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

More Nagios Core pricing and cost advice

"Mostly, it's a perpetual license. We don't have any customers using the subscription right now—it's mostly a perpetual license that the customers purchase. The licensing is based on the number of elements, whereas other solutions are node-based."

"I believe the current licensing cost is reasonable."

"Since it's a negotiable rate, I would rate the pricing as a five out of five."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

University

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	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

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...

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Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs Nagios Core

Compared 8% of the time

LibreNMS vs Nagios Core

Compared 6% of the time

Centreon vs Nagios Core

Compared 5% of the time

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New Relic vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 17% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 16% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 9% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Instana Observability vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 5% of the time

More SolarWinds AppOptics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

January 2026

Download Nagios Core product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

January 2026

Download SolarWinds AppOptics product report

Also Known As

No data available

AppOptics, SolarWinds TraceView, Librato

Overview

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

Nagios

AppOptics is a SaaS-based simple, powerful and affordable Infrastructure & Application monitoring for custom on-premises, cloud, and hybrid systems.

Your business runs on applications, and when they go down or run slowly, it can impact the business in lost productivity, customers, or revenue. To add to the complexity, your IT environment is changing, and workloads can be spread across data centers, and cloud resources. You need to monitor the availability and performance of applications and infrastructure, regardless of where they are, so you can identify potential issues early and address them before they impact users

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

TraxoCovea Insurance BTE TechnologyDatarista

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

January 2026

Free Report: Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds AppOptics

Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios Core vs. SolarWinds AppOptics and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.

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