Nagios Core vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

Nagios and Splunk are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Nagios is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.7, while Splunk is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.1. Nagios holds a 2.3% mindshare in IM, compared to Splunk’s 2.6% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Nagios users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

5,072 Views
3,855 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Splunk AppDynamics

Read 260 Splunk AppDynamics reviews

15,142 Views
5,603 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

Splunk AppDynamics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 23, 2025

Splunk AppDynamics and Nagios Core are prominent players in the application and infrastructure monitoring domain. While Splunk AppDynamics appears to have the upper hand with its advanced analytics and comprehensive application monitoring capabilities, Nagios Core excels with its customizable open-source solution and cost-effectiveness.

Features: Splunk AppDynamics provides valuable features such as detailed JVM metrics, transactional awareness, and stack trace visibility. It offers business transaction tracking and advanced application monitoring across various environments. Nagios Core is appreciated for its flexibility and low cost, offering extensive plugin support for customized monitoring and infrastructure reliability.

Room for Improvement: AppDynamics could enhance its UI for simplicity and improve integration with emerging technologies like cloud services. Its complex licensing can also be addressed. Nagios Core needs a more user-friendly configuration interface, better scalability, and enhanced analytics to match its competitors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk AppDynamics provides various deployment models, including public and hybrid clouds, and offers robust customer service with quick technical support. Nagios Core is typically deployed on-premises, requiring skilled setup and relying more on community support due to its open-source nature.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk AppDynamics is recognized for its high cost and complex licensing, often justified by the ROI gained through improved performance and time savings. Nagios Core offers a no-cost entry, making it ideal for those seeking a budget-friendly solution without compromising basic monitoring capabilities.

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

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. Splunk AppDynamics

January 2026

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Helped 881,733 peers since 2012

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

8.8

Nagios Core reduces downtime and costs with quick alerts, providing full ROI and eliminating expensive monitoring tools.

Sentiment score

6.4

Organizations highly valued Splunk AppDynamics for enhancing performance, client satisfaction, productivity, and delivering significant time and cost savings.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Overall, as a production gatekeeper, we achieve at least 50% efficiency immediately, with potential savings ranging from 60 to 70% as well, reinforcing why it is a popular tool in the banking industry.

DevendraKumar1

Technology lead at Infosys

According to errors, exceptions, and code-level details related to their application performance on a daily basis, the application development team tries to help with Splunk AppDynamics to reduce errors and exceptions, which helps the end users get application availability and feel more confident.

Gyanesh Rahatekar

Back office at Reliance Industries Ltd

To understand the magnitude of it, when the company asked to replace Splunk AppDynamics with another tool, I indicated that for the proposed tool, we would need five people to do the analysis that Splunk AppDynamics enables me to do.

Konstantinos Michailidis

Digital Performance Tester at Amdocs

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

5.1

Nagios Core relies on community support, praised for stability and resources, but lacks official help compared to Nagios XI.

Sentiment score

7.1

Splunk AppDynamics offers responsive customer service, expert technical support, and excels in monitoring, despite occasional delays in issue resolution.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

AppDynamics is much more helpful.

Eduardo Gallardo

Director of Technical Part at NOS SGPS

We got a contact, an account manager, to work directly with for technical support.

NagadevanMuthusamy

Performance Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

They help us resolve any issues raised by our team relating to operations, application instrumentation, or any other issues.

Gyanesh Rahatekar

Back office at Reliance Industries Ltd

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

6.7

Nagios Core shows scalability for large networks but may need customizations and integrations for distributed environments.

Sentiment score

7.3

Splunk AppDynamics is scalable and user-friendly, but some users face challenges with cost and scaling in specific areas.

The solution is scalable.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

We have reached maximum capacity in our tier, and extending capacity has not been cost-effective from Splunk's perspective.

reviewer2674446

Senior Principal, Enterprise Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

I would rate the scalability of Splunk AppDynamics as a nine out of ten.

Konstantinos Michailidis

Digital Performance Tester at Amdocs

I assess how Splunk AppDynamics scales with the growing needs of my organization as good, since we are growing and adding more servers.

reviewer2756163

Development Operations Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.2

Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable with minimal footprint, supporting extensive monitoring without network burden.

Sentiment score

7.8

Splunk AppDynamics is generally stable and reliable, with high ratings, minor glitches, and responsive support for rare issues.

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

It is necessary to conduct appropriate testing before deploying them in production to prevent potential outages.

reviewer2674446

Senior Principal, Enterprise Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

There are no issues or bugs with the 20.4 version; it is very stable with no functionality or operational issues.

Gyanesh Rahatekar

Back office at Reliance Industries Ltd

Splunk AppDynamics is superior to any alternative, including Dynatrace.

DevendraKumar1

Technology lead at Infosys

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Room For Improvement

Nagios Core needs a more intuitive interface, better scalability, and features like enhanced reporting and integration with modern tools.

Splunk AppDynamics needs simpler navigation, better integration, enhanced UI, reduced complexity, and improved support for new technologies.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Splunk AppDynamics does not support the complete MELT framework, which includes metrics, events, logging, and tracing for the entire stack.

reviewer2674446

Senior Principal, Enterprise Architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

If AppDynamics could develop a means to monitor without an agent, it could significantly improve application performance and reduce potential problems.

Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui

Head of Technology and Services at arwentech

A good integration with Splunk would be very interesting, as Splunk is a good product for logs, and that part is currently missing in Splunk AppDynamics.

Eduardo Gallardo

Director of Technical Part at NOS SGPS

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Setup Cost

Nagios Core is a free, cost-effective open-source tool, but requires Linux expertise and incurs hosting and maintenance costs.

Enterprise users find Splunk AppDynamics costly and complex, with licenses based on server count and features, justifying high costs.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

We completed a three-year deal for Splunk and for AppDynamics, which costs millions of dollars.

reviewer2756163

Development Operations Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Overall, I consider Splunk AppDynamics an expensive product; it's very expensive.

Per Eklund

Manager, System Scom at Handelsbanken

Customers have to pay a premium price, however, they receive considerable value from the product.

Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui

Head of Technology and Services at arwentech

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Valuable Features

Nagios Core provides flexible, low-resource monitoring with customization, automation, efficient alerts, and integration support for reliable IT performance visibility.

Splunk AppDynamics provides comprehensive application monitoring with stack trace analysis, real-time insights, and user-friendly, customizable dashboards for efficiency.

You can monitor anything.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

We have multiple tools, but end users prefer to use Splunk AppDynamics because their portal navigation is very simple and clear.

Gyanesh Rahatekar

Back office at Reliance Industries Ltd

The real user monitoring and digital experience monitoring effectively track actual user experience with the applications, including page loading, interaction time for both desktop and mobile applications.

Mohammed Hassan

Regional Director at iSecureMind

This is the best feature because, although you can't monitor a whole application at once, Splunk AppDynamics gives you the option that if there is any failure—simple failure regarding anything set up as per our use cases—you will get an alert.

DevendraKumar1

Technology lead at Infosys

For more quotes and insights, download the Splunk AppDynamics report

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (10th)

Splunk AppDynamics

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

260

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 2.3%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 2.6%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk AppDynamics	2.6%
Nagios Core	2.3%
Other	95.1%

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.

Read full review

DevendraKumar1

Technology lead at Infosys

Has enabled us to detect issues instantly through alerts and monitor every service from a single dashboard

Splunk requires significantly more improvements compared to Splunk AppDynamics, specifically regarding the licensing aspect. Splunk renews licenses every six months, which is inconvenient. It would be better to have a one-year license to avoid needing to update keys constantly, which can only occur on weekends, making it a burdensome task. Although Splunk is better for certain use cases, Splunk AppDynamics is broader in functionality. Specifically, I want enhancements related to creating dashboards not only for logs or minor services but also for configuration levels, allowing us to check configurations immediately without manually opening the entire code when exceptions arise—a feature I wish to see improved in Splunk, although it may not be necessary for Splunk AppDynamics.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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	55
Midsize Enterprise	36
Large Enterprise	195

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...

See all answers

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

See all answers

What do you like most about AppDynamics?

The solution saves time and cost.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics?

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on a yearly basis, if we don't add new modules or features to the license, we need ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Icinga vs Nagios Core

Compared 9% of the time

LibreNMS vs Nagios Core

Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs Nagios Core

Compared 6% of the time

Nagios XI vs Nagios Core

Compared 6% of the time

Centreon vs Nagios Core

Compared 5% of the time

More Nagios Core Competitors

Dynatrace vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 10% of the time

New Relic vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 7% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 5% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 3% of the time

More Splunk AppDynamics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

January 2026

Download Nagios Core product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk AppDynamics

January 2026

Download Splunk AppDynamics product report

Overview

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

Nagios

Splunk AppDynamics is a comprehensive performance monitoring tool providing end-to-end transaction tracking, real-time monitoring, and a user-friendly interface. With AI-powered features, it enhances operational efficiency and resilience by offering insights into user interactions and infrastructure issues.

Splunk AppDynamics excels in monitoring applications and infrastructure performance, offering extensive support across environments like AWS and cloud. It aids in application performance monitoring, end-user experience, database analysis, and proactive incident detection. Supporting Java, .NET, and other technologies, it provides real-time insights into application health, resource utilization, and transaction tracking, ensuring reliable user experiences. Challenges remain in UI complexity, agent-based architecture, integration with diverse environments, and documentation clarity. Its licensing model is costly, and customer support may be slow. Performance concerns exist in historical data granularity and network visibility.

What features make Splunk AppDynamics stand out?

End-to-End Transaction Tracking: Monitors entire user transactions for comprehensive visibility.
Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant insights into system performance.
AI-Powered Anomaly Detection: Identifies anomalies with advanced machine learning techniques.
Code-Level Troubleshooting: Diagnoses issues at the code level for precise fixes.
Business Transaction Visibility: Offers detailed views into transaction flow across all system layers.

What benefits and ROI can users expect from Splunk AppDynamics?

Improved Application Performance: Enhances system efficiency and reliability.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and issue resolution processes.
Enhanced Business Resilience: Strengthens the ability to adapt to performance challenges.
Seamless User Experiences: Ensures uninterrupted service and user satisfaction.

Organizations in industries like finance and healthcare implement Splunk AppDynamics to monitor critical applications and infrastructure. Its capabilities in transaction tracking and AI-driven insights are crucial for maintaining system reliability, supporting technologies such as Java and .NET, and ensuring optimal resource utilization.

Splunk

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. Splunk AppDynamics

January 2026

Free Report: Nagios Core vs. Splunk AppDynamics

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