Centreon vs Spiceworks comparison

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Centreon Logo
7,222 views|4,615 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
Spiceworks Logo
1,317 views|684 comparisons
86% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Centreon and Spiceworks based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Centreon vs. Spiceworks Report (Updated: March 2024).
769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We have all our tickets inside Centreon in real-time and can monitor a lot of ELP and CLN in real-time for application purposes.""The most important feature is that it permits us to receive alarms if there is an incident within the infrastructure. The feature I love the most is the reporting feature, the MBI (Monitoring Business Intelligence) which permits us to send advanced reports to our customers in PDF format or in Doc format. We also deploy Centreon Map which gives our customers intuitive views of their information system.""I really like the filtering capabilities of it. You can easily tell what's critical next to what's okay, the state of the services. It's very easy to get the whole picture quickly.""Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie.""I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring.""For servers and for applications, it was very, very efficient.""What we like about it is that, whereas with Nagios, by design, if you have five or six data centers, you have to open five or six web pages to see what's going on, In Centreon, this is all included in one page, a single site, one dashboard. You don't have to jump from one specific dashboard to the other.""What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative."

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"The solution is very stable. It's reliable and efficient.""Spiceworks' dashboard allows you to drill down to the notes, where I can take an inventory of the network and see the devices I need to monitor.""Helpdesk and inventory are both equally valuable, and they form the true core of the product.""The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.""Tickets by e-mail, with actions by hastag.""The solution can find all asset details automatically, whether it's a Mac address, computer name, IP address, models, etc. It's very helpful.""The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free. Monitoring of printers for low toner. Finding machines that have low memory or low hard disk space.""Spiceworks is generic and free."

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Cons
"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.""I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful.""There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking.""This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud.""I think Centreon's security could be improved by leveraging AI. That's where things are heading in the industry.""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.""I went through a few things with them to do with Centreon MAP, to do with active polygons, being able to draw an area and make that active. The functionality was in the older version of Centreon MAP and in the new version, which was a complete rewrite, they dropped it.""I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things."

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"It would be nice to have remote access to the solution via a tablet. They also need remote control from a PC. Right now, to complete the technical support process, you have to have a tool to access the PC, and check the problems.""Once a device was recognized on the network, Spiceworks never got rid of it even after you took it off the network. You had to go in and manually remove it.""With Spiceworks, like, when I open the websites, I have to Zoom in. I need to zoom in on those websites sometimes because it makes it horrible to use.""I would like the solution to allow for more direct interaction with computers. I can open tickets and I can see their status, but I can't interact directly with the computers themselves.""I would like to see more information when drilling down into access permissions, assignments management, or tagging. When I click a note or a device, I should be able to see more details about the router and modem. For example, I want to see the version, downtime, availability, latency, etc. I should have easy access to everything about our assets at a glance.""Sometimes, it can be difficult to integrate what you need.""The network mapping could be improved. Putting together an actual bonafide network map would be really nice.""They've also tried to integrate it with social logins, like Twitter and LinkedIn, and that type of login authentication has no place in a corporate application."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them."
  • "In terms of licensing, you have to think through if the components that need licensing are really needed. For example, the Map module: If you don't need a map to be shown, I don't see a point in paying for those licenses, if you just use it a couple of times a month or a couple of times a week... You can use the Centreon free version and get the main features. The licensing part is, I would say, only for bigger customers who have the option to pay more and who really need those kinds of modules, fancy reports, etc."
  • "For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite."
  • "Centreon is an open source product. Thus, there is no need for licensing."
  • "The pricing is acceptable."
  • "They only sell four hour slots for support, so if you have just one question, then you need to pay for four hours. Or, you need to wait until you have enough questions to fill those four hours. They are not flexible in this."
  • "I think Centreon's pricing is fair, especially given the criticality of our system. They were cheaper than the other solutions. The licensing terms were pretty straightforward. I believe it was based on the number of hosts."
  • "The solution is very effective, despite the low price."
  • More Centreon Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The product is free! Get it now."
  • "It's free."
  • "It might be about $300 annually for a bigger company. If you pay annually, it's better and cheaper."
  • "Seeing that it is a low-cost solution, I would advise you to go ahead with Spiceworks and experiment with it to see if you can get things working properly, especially if you currently don't have any existing service desk software in place."
  • "The tool is cheap."
  • More Spiceworks Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid… more »
    Top Answer:Prometheus provides the ability to automate the backup of my infrastructure. This automatic backup capability allows me to integrate it into GitLab for versioning, among other functionalities. Thus… more »
    Top Answer:The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.
    Top Answer:The GUI must be improved. The GUI looks old-fashioned. The vendor must do some web development for it.
    Ranking
    Views
    7,222
    Comparisons
    4,615
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    907
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    1,317
    Comparisons
    684
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    666
    Rating
    7.2
    Comparisons
    Zabbix logo
    Compared 35% of the time.
    PRTG Network Monitor logo
    Compared 16% of the time.
    Nagios Core logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Icinga logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Nagios XI logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Zabbix logo
    Compared 24% of the time.
    Lansweeper logo
    Compared 22% of the time.
    ServiceNow logo
    Compared 19% of the time.
    Freshdesk logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Learn More
    Overview

    Centreon is an all-in-one IT monitoring solution that is a network, system, applicative supervision, and monitoring tool. It is free and open source, and one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market.

    Centreon Features

    Centreon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Supervision of hybrid infrastructures, from one end to the other
    • Open and flexible architecture 
    • Open-source solution, downloadable for free
    • Filtering capability in GUI interface
    • Proactive end to end monitoring
    • Easily configurable and simple to handle
    • Dedicated dashboard widgets
    • Scalability
    • Independent application for monitoring
    • End to end reporting with actual logs

    Centreon Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing Centreon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Single platform, multi-user rights & access: Centreon is designed with built-in ACL, allowing enterprise users access to the monitored data on a need-to-know basis.
    • Smart data-mapping for customized macro & micro views: Centreon provides real-time custom views in multiple screens with graphic-rich data mapping, which also enables monitoring operators to act and troubleshoot from a distance.
    • Ready monitoring intelligence & reporting: With Centreon, you can easily generate reports of essential operational KPIs by using pre-configured templates, and add reports as needed by exploiting the dedicated monitoring data warehouse.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Centreon users.

    PeerSpot user Thor M., CEO at a tech services company, says, "The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value.” 

    Thomas C., Managing Director, Canada at Eva, comments, “The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.”

    Marcilio L., President at ITS Solucoes, expresses, "The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."

    Florent Q., Network Engineer at a computer software company, mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."

    From network inventory and network monitoring to help desk software, and mobile device management (MDM) to cloud services detection, Spiceworks helps you manage everything about your IT workday from one easy place.
    Sample Customers
    Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.
    Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Logistics Company22%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Government11%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Construction Company10%
    Educational Organization6%
    Transportation Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government7%
    University7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise38%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business50%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise21%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise49%
    Buyer's Guide
    Centreon vs. Spiceworks
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Centreon vs. Spiceworks and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Centreon is ranked 11th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 27 reviews while Spiceworks is ranked 33rd in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 47 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Spiceworks is rated 7.8. 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 Spiceworks writes "Good low-cost service desk system, but lacks in automation workflows and categorization ". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and Nagios XI, whereas Spiceworks is most compared with Zabbix, Lansweeper, ServiceNow, Freshdesk and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus. See our Centreon vs. Spiceworks report.

    See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.

    We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring 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.