Nmap vs Pandora FMS comparison

Nmap and Pandora FMS are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Nmap is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.7, while Pandora FMS is ranked #46 with an average rating of 8.0. Nmap holds a 0.5% mindshare in NMS, compared to Pandora FMS’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Nmap users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Pandora FMS users who would recommend it.

Nmap

Read 22 Nmap reviews

1,259 Views
1,083 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pandora FMS

Read 22 Pandora FMS reviews

1,376 Views
729 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Nmap

Pandora FMS

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

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Nmap and Pandora FMS are competing products in the network monitoring solutions category. While both excel in their domains, Pandora FMS has the upper hand due to its versatility in offering a comprehensive suite of features that cater to diverse IT monitoring needs.

Features: Nmap provides powerful network discovery, robust security auditing, and efficient device scanning. Its focus is on network security depth. Pandora FMS offers extensive monitoring features, managing servers, applications, and networks to support a broad IT infrastructure. It serves as a comprehensive IT operations tool.

Room for Improvement: Nmap could expand its feature set beyond basic network discovery to include broader IT context monitoring. It may also benefit from a more graphical user interface for enhanced usability and integration with other systems. It would gain from beefed-up support options. Pandora FMS could streamline its installation process to reduce complexity. Offering a lighter version for smaller operations could be beneficial. Enhancements in real-time alerting and plugin development would reinforce its competitive edge.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nmap shines with a lightweight, straightforward deployment ideal for rapid setups. Its command-line interface aids swift initiation but can be off-putting for those unfamiliar with such environments. Pandora FMS requires a more involved deployment, reflecting its extensive feature set, but it offsets this with robust support services for configuration and troubleshooting, providing a balance between complexity and support quality.

Pricing and ROI: Nmap being open-source significantly reduces setup costs, offering a cost-effective solution for fundamental security scanning with a quick return on investment. Pandora FMS, though bearing higher initial costs due to its array of enterprise-level features, delivers considerable ROI by optimizing IT monitoring activities through its enhanced capabilities and robust support infrastructure.

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To learn more, read our detailed Nmap vs. Pandora FMS Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Nmap vs. Pandora FMS

July 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

Nmap

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

12th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pandora FMS

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

46th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (18th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (44th), Log Management (34th), Cloud Monitoring Software (28th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nmap is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pandora FMS is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

AntoSebastin

Cyber Security Consultant - APAC at Logon Software

Scans the network and identifies vulnerabilities on each machine

Nmap is mostly helpful during compliance checks. We run the scanner to see how many devices are on our network and find vulnerabilities in those that aren't compliant. We also use it monthly to scan our network and identify devices that aren't connected properly. This helps us detect any issues related to the operating systems of these devices. The tool's most valuable feature is its vulnerability scanning. It allows us to scan a specific range of IP addresses and discover devices within that range. This makes it easy to identify devices and view their details. Port scanning is crucial for network management tasks. It helps us identify vulnerabilities by finding open ports that may be unused or misconfigured. This tool makes it easy to detect such issues. The OS detection feature is great. Unlike other tools, Nmap provides accurate information about asset vulnerabilities, helping us easily detect and address them. Using Nmap provides value to the company, especially during compliance audits. It helps generate reports on assets, updates on workstations, and insights into network activities and potential attacks. Additionally, Nmap detects vulnerabilities and provides port details, allowing us to close unused ports on the client machines.

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Gabriel Glusgold

Asociado/ at Infraestructura Informática

Personalized metrics; simplicity of data

My primary use case for Pandora is monitoring This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the…

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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

"The most valuable feature of the solution for security audits stems from the fact that it serves as a powerful tool with the ability to scan a large number of ports."

"The real-time reporting feature of Nmap is particularly valuable. It generates detailed reports on the source and destination IP addresses, the protocols used, and the types of traffic."

"Nmap's performance is great, and I've never noticed any issues in this respect. It really doesn't put a heavy load on the machine when using it."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its scripts. These scripts prove beneficial when security features may obscure or block connections. Nmap helps identify vulnerabilities across different systems, including web servers and various server types."

"From a functionality standpoint, it's robust and straightforward to comprehend."

"Nmap has a powerful command line tool and a set of diagnostic features."

"Nmap is mostly helpful during compliance checks. We run the scanner to see how many devices are on our network and find vulnerabilities in those that aren't compliant. We also use it monthly to scan our network and identify devices that aren't connected properly. This helps us detect any issues related to the operating systems of these devices."

"Nmap is easy to use. It's a command-line interface, and the output is quite good."

More Nmap pros

"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."

"It allows me to quickly see the status of all of my printers, switches, computers, and virtual machines to determine if any system has fallen."

"What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it."

"Features I have found most valuable with Pandora are the personalized metrics and the simplicity of data."

"The solution is so lightweight that with only 4GB of ram, it allows keeping track of up to two hundred agents from a single console."

"The official forum is active enough to answer most of the high-end technical questions that you may have."

"Pandora's architecture is interesting. It's open so you can easily extend and enhance it. It's simpler to customize Pandora compared to other solutions. It's also scalable enough to support large environments."

"This product has allowed us to identify and correct certain issues that were affecting our solution."

More Pandora FMS pros

Cons

"The solution should increase the number of features under a free license."

"There are concerns with the stability of the product, making it an area where improvements are required."

"One of the drawbacks of the standard Nmap utility is that it does not come with a graphical user interface, unlike a number of other open-source alternatives such as Zenmap."

"The challenge often lies in finding suitable courses and professional resources."

"Nmap major operates through the CLI; there's no GUI component, and that's where the challenge is."

"There is room for improvement in the design, the GUI. It looks a bit odd. Maybe Nmap should improve it or add more widgets to make it more attractive, but the basic functionality is good and provides what we need."

"It takes a bit of time to get familiar with the solution and its options."

"They should deliver Playtech's username and password."

More Nmap cons

"I think some improvements to the Android app would be good."

"I sincerely believe that Pandora needs new ideas for functionality closer to advanced device security monitoring."

"Third-party integration should be improved for some commonly used products."

"We would like the real-time monitoring of an interface to be improved within this solution."

"Pandora FMS is an overall great monitoring solution, but it does not have a community that is as large as Zabbix or Nagios."

"I would like for the solution to be faster and have a better tolerance between parallel servers for Pandora and Pest Control."

"Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas."

"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."

More Pandora FMS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Nmap is open source software, which suits us well because we are a manufacturing company and not an IT company, for example. If we were an IT company, we would probably need to pay for extra support or instead go for another software solution. But as it is, we don't have any need for high-end troubleshooting tools."

"It's an open-source product, and I haven't seen any premiums. Options are available for those who purchase, but for my use case, everything I need is available in the community and forums."

"The product's pricing is fine. The licensing options for Nmap include perpetual licenses and volume-based licenses. For perpetual licenses, once you purchase it, there's no need to invest in renewals. And for volume-based licenses, enterprise companies can use it multiple times based on the number of users or devices they need to scan. It's a pay-as-you-go model, similar to how you pay for what you use."

"The solution is open source so it is free."

"The solution is free of cost, but there are specific services that we have to buy."

"Nmap is an open-source product. You don't need a license to install it."

"Nmap is an open-source and free product."

"It's an open-source solution. Commerically, only the support service is available."

More Nmap pricing and cost advice

"The open-source version offers 100% functionality and the hardware requirements for a solution like this one are very modest."

"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."

"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."

"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."

"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."

"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."

"Pandora FMS is easy to implement and the pricing of licenses is competitive."

"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."

More Pandora FMS pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

University

Government

13%

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

Media Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nmap?

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nmap?

I am using the free version of Nmap.

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What is your primary use case for Nmap?

Nmap is used for network scanning to map the network, identify devices, and assess their status. It helps determine open ports and services running on a particular endpoint or server within an ente...

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LiveAction LiveNX vs Nmap

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Nagios Core vs Nmap

Compared 9% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs Nmap

Compared 9% of the time

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Zabbix vs Pandora FMS

Compared 21% of the time

Wazuh vs Pandora FMS

Compared 14% of the time

LibreNMS vs Pandora FMS

Compared 11% of the time

Checkmk vs Pandora FMS

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Pandora FMS

Compared 5% of the time

More Pandora FMS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nmap

August 2025

Download Nmap product report

Buyer's Guide

Pandora FMS

August 2025

Download Pandora FMS product report

Overview

Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff), and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).

Nmap

Pandora FMS is a monitoring as a service (MaaS) solution that is ideal for companies with at least 100 or more devices. Instead of multiple, difficult-to-integrate monitoring systems, Pandora FMS is an all-in-one solution that is easy to use. The software is able to untangle complicated technology infrastructures to easily identify the root cause of issues in order to find the most efficient solution. It does so by analyzing everything in your system, from databases and applications to services and desktops, as well as communications.

Pandora FMS Features

Pandora FMS has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Application Monitoring (APM)
IoT monitoring
Log collection
Inventory
Issue management / ITSM
Mainframe monitoring
Network monitoring
Remote control
Synthetic monitoring
Service oriented monitoring
Server monitoring
User experience monitoring
Virtualization & cloud

Pandora FMS Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Pandora FMS. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Comprehensive overview: Pandora FMS provides a comprehensive overview of your system to make troubleshooting easy. It also provides all the tools to monitor and analyze an extensive range of data, from traffic to connectivity.

Easy forecasting: With Pandora FMS, you can use your network diagram for forecasting solutions, which gives you the necessary info you need to perform maintenance.

Proactive solutions: Issues are proactively addressed. Pandora FMS provides alerts 24/7 so you can deal with problems before they grow even bigger. This also helps your organization eliminate any down time.

Solve future problems: Another benefit of implementing Pandora FMS is that it enables you to optimize your services to ensure that future issues are minimized. In addition, they offer around-the-clock monitoring and automated solutions. As a result, the solution enables you to operate your organization with maximum efficiency all the time, saving you money and time.

Personalized service maps: Pandora FMS allows you to create detailed, personalized service maps that can help you identify any shortcomings in your system and address them as soon as possible.

SLA and availability reports: With Pandora FMS, you receive critical alerts when SLA levels aren’t met, which also helps you understand when your applications and systems are not meeting your business goals.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Pandora FMS solution.

PeerSpot user Marc C., Systems Analyst at a university, says, "It is easy to create your own custom modules if you just know a little bit of scripting. If you have unique requirements, you can just make your own modules. You can even grab checks from other vendors. There are open-source checks for various things such as SMTP, etc. It is really flexible. It is reliable. It does the job, and it alerts. It is also surprisingly feature-rich. It is very mature for a not-so-known product."

Another reviewer, Alexandre J., comments, “What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it. The speed of locating problems and to be able to solve them quickly, so that it affects our client's network infrastructure as little as possible, is very valuable.

Thanks to Pandora FMS we have everything unified in the same point and it is highly efficient.”

Pandora FMS

Sample Customers

Lockheed Martin, Eastern Bank Boston, Perspecta, Harris Corporation, Discovery Communication

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes

Buyer's Guide

Nmap vs. Pandora FMS

July 2025

Free Report: Nmap vs. Pandora FMS

Find out what your peers are saying about Nmap vs. Pandora FMS and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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