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Nagios XI vs PRTG Network Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nagios XI3.5%
Zabbix12.2%
Datadog5.2%
Other79.1%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PRTG Network Monitor4.2%
Zabbix11.7%
LibreNMS4.6%
Other79.5%
Network Monitoring Software
Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor2.7%
Zabbix25.9%
Checkmk10.5%
Other60.900000000000006%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Amir  Said - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective alerting enhances network monitoring experience with an easy setup
We love Nagios XI due to the fact that JPS Web is very useful. JPS monitors the modem and performs switching, monitoring the computer, and performing switching. We implement some applications and traffic monitoring. The alerting system is very effective. For instance, if we have an alarm on some RAM storage if the traffic is cut or dropped.
Noman-Saleem - PeerSpot reviewer
Detects suden changes but significant pricing concerns affect the effectiveness of network traffic troubleshooting
We use PRTG Network Monitor for monitoring traffic on interfaces and the behavior of network traffic. If there are sudden changes in traffic or any configuration issues, we can sort them out using PRTG. It's very helpful for troubleshooting and monitoring traffic utilization on our interfaces…
VIVEK PATHAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring
My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting system is very effective."
"It's great for monitoring IT services infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is its support for different types of devices, where it can use all of the equipment that you need."
"The most valuable feature of Nagios XI is customization. We can customize based on our requirements. We can do modifications and implement a lot of scripts. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its simplicity."
"The solution has a lot of plugins and scripts integrated with it."
"It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"It's a monitoring agent. It's designed to do one thing. Its most valuable feature is its monitoring."
"It is easy to use and intuitive, which is really important. It does what it says on the box by giving you a visual of the state of what is going on at any one time."
"PRTG Network Monitor's best features are its flexibility, ease of implementation, user-friendliness, and intuitive interfaces."
"It helps the entire organization become digitally enabled."
"We like the alerting system, the SNMP monitoring and the customization of the bandwidth."
"PRTG gives us true visibility of the downtime of particular circuit functions. So if a circuit is up but not routing traffic, I will know with this tool. I can write a customized script for a sensor to detect specific things."
"The scalability is good. You can improve a remote host or the clustering. This gives it the flexibility to monitor another infrastructure remotely."
"It has made our infrastructure more reliable."
"The fact that I can use custom MIB files to customize my sensors for the things that are not there as a default is a good feature."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
 

Cons

"We'd like to see more integration capabilities."
"Improve the documentation, examples, and best practices, therefore users can understand how to do things."
"It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure."
"The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them."
"The GUI could be improved. It's a bit too basic, and maybe having a GraphQL interface would resolve this."
"There's room for improvement in the visibility, and in the ability to extract information. Stuff like this should be more simple."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"The tool's AI model needs to be fixed."
"The user interface could be more modern as it is quite dated. PRTG Network Monitor can sometimes be too detailed and cluttered at the beginning, making it heavy to use."
"Technical support is an area with concerns in PRTG Network Monitor, where improvements are required."
"Sometimes, it is difficult to drill down further to get information, e.g., if we saw spike in traffic, then we would want to drill down and find out what is causing that spike in traffic."
"PRTG does not allow us to scan devices like we can scan software or another problem in it. Also, I cannot draw graphical graphs in Woodview/look. Another problem is that we cannot draw a good diagram in PRTG."
"I am not sure the solution is giving me all the needed feedback that we need. When something goes off on our IT infrastructure, it does tell me. However, it would be nice if it gave more intuitive information, e.g., the hard drive has gone up by 60 percent in an hour."
"PRTG Network Monitor needs to show bandwidth utilization in proper graphs. It isn't easy to learn."
"I would like to see more updates available in this solution."
"PRTG Network Monitor needs to enhance network performance monitoring."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 XI is an expensive solution."
"As it is not an agentless tool, I think it is expensive."
"Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license."
"Nagios XI is open source."
"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."
"It is good to contact experts for advice about what is the best solution for your specific infrastructure and enterprise."
"Pricing for PRTG Network Monitor is a nine out of ten. It meets my company's budget and monitoring requirements. My company is on a perpetual license."
"While I am not the person who deals with pricing, I would say that we pay around 1000 pounds a year."
"We have an unlimited perpetual license, so we just pay support costs and it can scale throughout the organization."
"PRTG Network Monitor's price is a little high."
"All monitoring system is close to the same pricing scheme."
"The price of PRTG Network Monitor is reasonable for the features that the solution provides. They charge you per monitoring, not per node, it is per port that you need for a device."
"We are licensed for 2500 endpoints."
"On a yearly basis, I believe it's between £1,200 and £1,500."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"The product is expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business56
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios XI?
It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
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 the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it a...
What do you like most about PRTG Network Monitor?
The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PRTG Network Monitor?
The pricing is in the middle. It's not too high, nor too low, but it's reasonable.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and App...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
Jameson Bank, Sidnix, RungeICT, MedicalAnimal, Truck-lite, GamingGrids, The Covell Group, Forsythn County Schools, NetMass, Musgrove Park Hospital, Lanes Health, Columbia Southern University, Vodafone, Intrust Bank
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: September 2025.
868,183 professionals have used our research since 2012.