Nagios Core vs New Relic comparison

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Nagios Core

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

New Relic and Nagios Core are both monitoring solutions competing in the application and infrastructure monitoring category. New Relic seems to have the upper hand with its user-friendly interfaces and comprehensive application performance management capabilities, while Nagios Core is favored for its flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Features: New Relic provides real-time analytics, custom dashboards, and error tracing, enhancing DevOps strategies and offering extensive application insights. It is known for its easy installation and operational friendliness for developers. Nagios Core offers a highly customizable open-source framework with numerous plugins and integrations, allowing extensive adaptability to various infrastructure needs, especially for technical users interested in bespoke configurations.

Room for Improvement: New Relic users have expressed concerns about data privacy, pricing transparency, and configurability within monitoring settings. There are additional criticisms regarding historical data retention and high costs. In contrast, Nagios Core faces challenges with its setup and configuration process, outdated interface, and limited scalability, which can require technical expertise to manage effectively.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic benefits from a SaaS model, facilitating ease of deployment in the public cloud, with generally highly rated customer service, albeit sometimes slow in problem resolution. Nagios Core primarily operates on-premises, depending heavily on a strong community support structure, which caters more to technically proficient users.

Pricing and ROI: New Relic's pricing matches its premium feature set, potentially expensive as usage scales, yet often justified by the value offered in performance enhancements and problem resolution. Nagios Core, as an open-source model, delivers excellent ROI through zero-cost licensing, appealing to organizations leveraging its extensibility without incurring substantial costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. New Relic Report (Updated: September 2025).

Nagios Core vs. New Relic

September 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:

ROI

Sentiment score

8.8

Nagios Core reduces downtime and costs with quick alerts, providing full ROI and eliminating expensive monitoring tools.

Sentiment score

6.8

New Relic enhances performance by quickly pinpointing issues, improving application speed and stability, despite occasional pricing concerns.

No quotes available

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No quotes available

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Customer Service

Sentiment score

5.1

Nagios Core relies on community support, praised for stability and resources, but lacks official help compared to Nagios XI.

Sentiment score

7.6

New Relic's customer service is praised for quick, helpful support, although some experience variable wait times and off-hour delays.

No quotes available

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Issues that could be solved quickly sometimes take longer because they go around in circles.

Pietro Dell'Erba

Head of API at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees

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Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

6.7

Nagios Core shows scalability for large networks but may need customizations and integrations for distributed environments.

Sentiment score

7.7

New Relic offers reliable scalability for diverse infrastructures, effectively handling thousands of applications and servers with minor concerns.

The solution is scalable.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

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No quotes available

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Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.2

Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable with minimal footprint, supporting extensive monitoring without network burden.

Sentiment score

7.8

New Relic is highly stable, handling workloads well, with minor issues quickly resolved and consistently high user ratings.

I tried many other solutions at work, however, in terms of Nagios, I haven't seen any disruption or downtime.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

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No quotes available

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Room For Improvement

Nagios Core needs a more intuitive interface, better scalability, and features like enhanced reporting and integration with modern tools.

New Relic users seek better pricing, enhanced integrations, improved documentation, and more comprehensive dashboards, alerts, and performance monitoring.

No quotes available

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Using real-time data, if there are any malicious patterns or something happening, they can identify those.

Hari Rajendiran

Platform Software Engineer 4 at Nexthink

Email alert customization is limited; it cannot be tailored much, which makes the system more rigid than optimal.

Pietro Dell'Erba

Head of API at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Setup Cost

Nagios Core is a free, cost-effective open-source tool, but requires Linux expertise and incurs hosting and maintenance costs.

Enterprise buyers should consider New Relic's complex and potentially expensive pricing model, especially for smaller companies or large deployments.

No quotes available

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No quotes available

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Valuable Features

Nagios Core provides flexible, low-resource monitoring with customization, automation, efficient alerts, and integration support for reliable IT performance visibility.

New Relic offers performance monitoring, real-time analysis, error detection, and integration tools, enhancing efficiency and user experience.

It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.

Husham Yaqoob

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort.

Pietro Dell'Erba

Head of API at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees

The best features in New Relic include its numerous API integrations and a good source of support.

Hari Rajendiran

Platform Software Engineer 4 at Nexthink

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

13th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

New Relic

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

10th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

8th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

159

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (4th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 2.6%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 1.9%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
New Relic	1.9%
Nagios Core	2.6%
Other	95.5%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Nishith-Vyas

Tech Lead at STL Digital Limited

Valuable reporting and alert system with room for PDF export improvements

The NetEase reporting structure needs improvement, especially the availability report, which is weak. It should be generated automatically with minimal human intervention and should be exportable as a PDF. Besides that, an integrated PDF export feature for reports is necessary. Also, the alert mechanism and graphing mechanism need to be integrated properly into Nagios Core. Currently, integrating these requires advanced Linux knowledge. Integration of more visualization tools like Grafana and Prometheus for better graphing and visualization is also recommended.

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Hari Rajendiran

Platform Software Engineer 4 at Nexthink

Has improved monitoring efficiency with robust alerting and automation features

The best features in New Relic include its numerous API integrations and a good source of support. The support is excellent, and they provide blogs and forums. There is something called NRQL, New Relic Query Language, which can be used to query many things and retrieve data. Using API calls allows you to automate and pull a dashboard out of it, making manipulation easily done. These are some things I have done with New Relic as an end customer. It reduces the operational overhead. Your data is monitored end to end, which could be directly linked with the SLA and SLO. That is the main thing.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	22

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	60

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios Core?

What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services.

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.

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

I reviewed another observability tool, DataDog, and we moved away from New Relic because the pricing was not convenient and didn't fit our budget. With DataDog, some of the APM features we were loo...

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Comparisons

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Compared 23% of the time

Nagios XI vs Nagios Core

Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

OpenNMS vs Nagios Core

Compared 3% of the time

Dynatrace vs New Relic

Compared 11% of the time

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 9% of the time

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs New Relic

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Nagios Core product report

Nagios Core

August 2025

Download New Relic product report

August 2025

Also Known As

No data available

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM

Overview

This is IT infrastructure monitoring's industry-standard, open-source core. Free without professional support services.

Nagios

New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.

New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.

What are New Relic's most important features?

Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant visibility into application performance.
Detailed Transaction Tracing: Identifies specific transaction issues quickly.
Error Rate Tracking: Monitors and reports on error occurrences efficiently.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailors dashboard views for specific needs.
APM Integration: Seamlessly integrates with application performance management tools.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Operational Efficiency: Quick issue detection reduces downtime.
Improved Debugging: Enhanced error analysis supports rapid problem resolution.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers a holistic view of application performance and user behavior.
Incident Management: Integration with incident tools helps streamline responses.
Efficient Alerts: Rapid alert systems ensure timely notifications of issues.

In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club