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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
40th
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 (31st)
Nagios Core
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
12th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
12th
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 July 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Icinga is 1.2%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.5%, down from 2.8% 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

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

"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"There's a module called Icinga Director, which helps us configure the product using an intuitive interface through clicks instead of creating a text configuration. It's very helpful for us."
"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."
"I use it for monitoring infrastructure and it was very good for that issue."
"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."
"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"It sends alerts to the right people which ensures there is no delay in the correct person or team looking into issues, and it has helped to reduce downtime in the production environment to almost zero so we now spend less time on network or server administration."
"Our customers like that Nagios Core is an open source solution. It can be customized to our customers' specific needs."
"Dashboard provides monitor of total assets."
"The most valuable features are the reports and the way it generates the report in a graphical manner."
"Nagios Core is a great solution for monitoring pretty much any size of deployment but you do need to know your way around a Linux system to set it up and run it."
"I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring."
"I would rate the overall solution ten points out of ten."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."
"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built."
"The installation and configuration are very complex."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"Sometimes, it is very hard to keep an overview of what's happening."
"I would like to see a much better Nagios Manager GUI that can support all type of configuration items, and advance search options."
"Nagios Core is limited in terms of distributed setups, and there is no central view for remote data centers."
"Nagios Core would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down."
"The tool needs to improve the integrations."
"Bandwidth monitoring is the pain point for me because Nagios Core does not monitor bandwidth effectively like Cacti does."
"The dashboard and monitoring features could 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."
"The configuration and reporting modules need to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"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 free to use."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The solution is cheap."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It's free."
"We are using the free version of Nagios Core."
"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."
"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."
"Nagios Core is a cheap solution."
"Nagios Core is free to use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software 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: June 2026.
904,146 professionals have used our research since 2012.