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Icinga vs Nagios Core comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

Icinga
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
38th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
47th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (16th), Cloud Monitoring Software (34th)
Nagios Core
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
11th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Icinga is 1.2%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.5%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nagios Core1.5%
Icinga1.2%
Other97.3%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Claudio Kuenzler - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at Infiniroot
A free and time-saving product that helps to monitor servers and network devices
I use the product for server and network device monitoring. A team of five people is managing the solution, and around 50 people are using the solution in the organization Pro-active monitoring and alerting helped us to decrease downtimes of services. The apply rules feature saves a lot of time.…
HY
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"An affordable solution for small organizations to do basic network monitoring."
"The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"If you have a small infrastructure or a small number of devices that you want to monitor, then I think it's a good solution."
"I would recommend Icinga; it's an open-source solution, it's quite easy and simple to use, and checks can be run with Python code and Shell Script code."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"Open source and very flexible, with a large ecosystem of tools and custom monitors built up around Nagios."
"Nagios Core integrates with tools like Splunk, Datadog, or Dynatrace. It is usually used as a feed to provide more technical information about devices or hosts to another system."
"The most valuable features are the reports and the way it generates the report in a graphical manner."
"The scalability of Nagios Core is very good, we can add as many hosts as we like, and we can work with the concept master and client, making it very scalable and easy to use."
"Before we implemented Nagios, we did not know which servers were up or down until a customer told us, and now I can see trends over time and it gives me perspective of what needs to be improved so we are able to work proactively as opposed to reactively."
"Nagios Core is a great tool for monitoring the infrastructure including MSM queues, and when we use the agent, we can add other things as well."
"Reliability Security Flexibility Functionality Availability - controllability anywhere and with different methods"
"The solution is very complete and mostly easy to manage."
 

Cons

"It is not really adequate for our current needs. It causes additional issues which we have to work around and takes us time that a better solution would not."
"The user interface should be improved."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"The connection between Icinga and Icinga Web."
"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."
"A better UI for graphing would make it better. The present graphs are not very friendly and good to see."
"Generally, it does what I need it to do, but better error reporting would be great."
"We're using the free version, which limits us in terms of the things that we can do."
"There is room for improvement in the graphics."
"The NetEase reporting structure needs improvement, especially the availability report, which is weak."
"The configuration and reporting modules need to be improved."
"It's not that easy to install the product itself. Also, the UI is a bit hard for regular users to navigate through."
"I would like to see more training videos."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"The solution is cheap."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The solution is free to use."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"Nagios Core is a cheap solution."
"The enterprise version has technical support. The version we are using is free."
"The Nagios Core (PNP4Nagios + Core) is free and can be setup by Netadmin within a few hours. The only additional cost is the cloud server."
"It's free."
"It's free."
"The solution is expensive."
"Lessening the price point would be an improvement."
"We have saved a lot of time, money, and effort in reducing disaster times, which is owed to Nagios quick alerting."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...
What is your primary use case for Icinga?
We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...
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.
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.
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Icinga Cloud Monitoring
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel
Find out what your peers are saying about Icinga vs. Nagios Core and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.