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Icinga vs Nagios Core comparison

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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
42nd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
49th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (15th), Cloud Monitoring Software (34th)
Nagios Core
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
19th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
16th
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 September 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Icinga is 1.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.3%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nagios Core1.3%
Icinga1.1%
Other97.6%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2292201 - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovation Service Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Easy to use, and it's possible to customize the product as per the needs we may have but average multi-tenancy aspect
It's supported by the community. We use Icinga, which is not part of the Open-Source platform but is wrapped into a commercial solution from another provider, a local provider in Italy. Icinga is an open-source platform, so it is supported by the community. It's quite easy to use, and it's possible to customize the product as per the needs we may have. So it's not expensive, and it's quite a general purpose. We can easily monitor any kind of infrastructure we encounter. The ability to customize scripts and build your own queries to request information from the infrastructure elements you want to monitor. This level of personalization and customization is highly appreciated. The alerting is the same as any other monitoring platform. It's not a "wow" feature that has changed our lives, but it's perfectly adequate.
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

"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."
"We monitor all, starting from UPS to international mail chains."
"The most valuable feature is one that not many are even aware of, as Icinga has a self-healing event handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted, and you can configure the handler to take action after the critical alarm without human interaction."
"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."
"People should know that it is simple and advanced."
"Icinga2 was designed to delegate, distribute and balance tasks between several nodes."
"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
"We have the ability right now to see and create reports to tell whether or not we're meeting our SLAs on our production servers, through it."
"The poller is really good, I can easily implement new stuff and it is scalable."
"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."
"Open source and very flexible, with a large ecosystem of tools and custom monitors built up around Nagios."
"Nagios Core is stable."
"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."
"The solution is very complete and mostly easy to manage."
"I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them."
 

Cons

"The user interface should be improved."
"Scalability is problematic. If you have a stable environment it's good, but if the environment is growing, I had some problems 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."
"Icinga’s automation could be improved."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"Network Discovery capabilities would be extremely helpful."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"They should simplify the features so it becomes easier to setup out of the box."
"It would be nice if the company offered a sales or contract manager that was dedicated to our company so that we would have some sort of link to Nagios, and if we had issues or questions, we'd be able to contact them directly."
"Nagios SLA. I'm currently working on Nagios Digger, which has many code-level problems."
"The dashboard should be improved."
"I would like to see more training videos."
"We're using the free version, which limits us in terms of the things that we can do."
"The interface could be improved."
"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."
 

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."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"The solution is free to use."
"It's an open-source solution."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"The solution is cheap."
"We are using the free version of Nagios Core."
"It's free."
"The solution is expensive."
"It's free."
"Nagios Core is free to use."
"We have saved a lot of time, money, and effort in reducing disaster times, which is owed to Nagios quick alerting."
"The enterprise version has technical support. The version we are using is free."
"We are using the open-source, unpaid version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: September 2026.
913,630 professionals have used our research since 2012.