We performed a comparison between Centreon and Zabbix based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both solutions received high marks from users. Zabbix has a slight edge over Centreon because it is a free product.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"We use the remote server functionality on some customer sites, because you can see an independent view and are not dependent on a single connection. If you have branch offices or bigger office outside your headquarters, you can use remote servers because if the connection is broken or disrupted, then remote server will obtain a view of your environment and server availability. This is a good point against using other solutions. Because with other solutions, you don't have this feature. Then, you will be blind if you have this type of a situation."
"It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface."
"You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of servers and networks, because we have a lot of them and need to maintain control."
"SNMP monitoring, source discovery, and alert triggering are most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is monitoring."
"The solution is quite mature and very stable."
"Zabbix can use old data to current data to set the threshold. We can use previous data to set the threshold."
"The most valuable feature is network traffic monitoring."
"They've already added extra features, such as noise-canceling and facial recognition, which is great."
"The most valuable features of Zabbix are flexibility and a single interface for different types of monitoring."
"During my testing, the features that I like the most are that it can be integrated with my system, and it provides me with reports of all of my servers."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed."
"Centreon is actually missing an easy way to create a trendline for the metrics. Actually it is possible to create it, but you need a good knowledge of math, Centreon, and RRD."
"Currently, we have to go through all of the different templates and take a look at how the template is configured, and how specific parameters may change across different templates with different precedents, megatons, etc. It's a lot of work and involves trial and error. I wish they could simplify the process."
"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on."
"Release management and quality of testing need improvement, because with each major upgrade we have many issues coming in. Then, it takes several minor upgrades to get rid of them."
"The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution."
"To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work."
"Zabbix isn't very good at automation just yet."
"In an upcoming release, there should be automated reports which we are currently doing manually. For example, if we collect a report file every day and want to send it to a moderator for review. We are expecting this feature to come out soon but it would be valuable to have now."
"There are some features of Zabbix that are not good for reporting. The DX Spectrum solution has better reporting."
"Sometimes, the documentation is a little bit written in Estonia – a country in Europe. The language barrier and translation to English can sometimes make it difficult to understand what they're trying to get at. It's just a language thing."
"Zabbix isn't a great tool for cloud-specific monitoring - its connection to public clouds needs to be improved. Other areas for improvement would be the lack of dashboards and integrations."
"I would like to better be able to monitor Oracle processes."
"The documentation gets a bit messy between versions and is not too detailed, which is a bit painful for first-timers, especially when they run into issues."
"I am having difficulties connecting it to Grafana, as well as some of the other plugins like Kibana."
Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 1st in Network Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Centreon is most compared with PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga, Nagios XI and Datadog, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core, Nagios XI and Amazon CloudWatch. See our Centreon vs. Zabbix report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
We monitor all Network Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.