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7,919 views|6,097 comparisons
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19,530 views|15,128 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 29, 2023

We compared Nagios XI and Zabbix across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Features: Nagios XI received positive feedback for its versatility and adaptability. It offers a diverse selection of plugins and scripts for monitoring needs. Zabbix is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and reliable performance. It provides customizable dashboards, trigger dependencies, SNMP monitoring, and problem tracking.

  • Room for Improvement: Users have suggested Nagios XI could improve integration, simplify configuration, and make the platform more user-friendly. Nagios XI users also suggest improvements to network visibility and cloud discovery. Zabbix could reduce false positives and improve integration, cloud monitoring, and reporting.

  • Service and Support: Some Nagios XI customers complained about the lack of chat or phone support options. Users had mixed opinions about Zabbix customer service. Some found it helpful, while others feel it needs improvement. Customers generally rely on online documentation and community forums for assistance. 

  • Ease of Deployment: Some Nagios XI users found the setup to be relatively simple, while others considered it challenging. Deployment can take a few months to complete, and there’s a steep learning curve. The complexity of Zabbix's initial setup varies, and it may require an experienced group of administrators and engineers.

  • Pricing: Nagios XI’s pricing is considered reasonable and transparent, with no extra charges. Zabbix is a free, open-source solution, but users can purchase support services and additional features.

  • ROI: Nagios XI users reported positive outcomes overall, but some said visibility limitations lower the solution’s ROI. Users say that Zabbix provides a cost-effective solution.

Comparison Results: Nagios XI is an affordable, flexible solution with a broad feature set and a selection of helpful plugins. At the same time, users say the setup can be complex, and some expressed a desire for more convenient ways to contact support. Zabbix is a highly customizable open-source solution with a wide range of monitoring capabilities, including the ability to monitor virtual machines and databases. However, Zabbix’s setup can be complex and may require technical expertise.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios XI vs. Zabbix Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Which network monitoring tool is more customizable: Nagios or Zabbix?
Answer: I think that your best bet of the two is Nagios. I would also take a look a CA Nimsoft Monitor Freemium. This will have more OOTB functionality for you sir.
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 can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."

More Juniper Mist Premium Analytics Pros →

"The Script Module in Nagios is really easy to use and is really cost efficient.""The ability to set up templates and groups of checks, as well as customize the checks themselves.""The solution is pretty stable.""I can monitor a phone on a desk to very big servers of any company.""The dashboard allows you to see what's going on in the overall system.""Since this is an open source technology, if we are capable of writing the plugins in any scripting language, this product allows us to monitor anything we want.""The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers.""It's a monitoring agent. It's designed to do one thing. Its most valuable feature is its monitoring."

More Nagios XI Pros →

"Health and communication links availability.""During my testing, the features that I like the most are that it can be integrated with my system, and it provides me with reports of all of my servers.""There is less computing power needed for scaling.""The product is very stable.""Zabbix is scalable.""The flexible licensing model is one of the solution's most valuable aspects. It really allows for great flexibility for companies.""The solution is quite mature and very stable.""It has an intuitive UI with beautiful graphs and customizable maps."

More Zabbix Pros →

Cons
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."

More Juniper Mist Premium Analytics Cons →

"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module.""The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect.""It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure.""The interface could be more user-friendly.""The product uses the backend as Perl and could be modified to a more lightweight solution like what's being offered by other vendors.""Open-source software is usually not user-friendly.""The technical support is variable - sometimes I get answers, but most of my tickets go unanswered.""The product's stability could be even better."

More Nagios XI Cons →

"I am having difficulties connecting it to Grafana, as well as some of the other plugins like Kibana.""The integration of the product is not so easy, especially when it comes to the application database.""The networking monitor is not too easy to work with.""I want Zabbix to improve the UX/UI. Zabbix doesn't use a JavaScript chart for images, and I want them to improve this.""Having a more customizable interface and dashboard would be an improvement.""Look and feel.""The performance reporting could be improved.""Zabbix can use better documentation and support for troubleshooting."

More Zabbix Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
Information Not Available
  • "The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily."
  • "You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
  • "For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value."
  • "We are using the free version of this solution."
  • "This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years."
  • "The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $3,000 USD per year."
  • "The pricing is high with separate licensing for the product and support."
  • "Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license."
  • More Nagios XI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It’s free of cost."
  • "It is a true open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
  • "The product is an open source and free solution."
  • "It's free software released under the GNU/GPL license."
  • "There are no licenses."
  • "We’re using the free version, which covers all our current needs."
  • "It is free, which allows us to reduce costs."
  • "I was using the free, Community Edition."
  • More Zabbix 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 →
    Answers from the Community
    Avigail Sugarman
    it_user116742 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user116742 (Oracle Web Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Consultant

    ZABBIX ... of course :)
    We are working with this wonderful monitoring tool since 2008

    it_user90867 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user90867 (Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees)
    Consultant

    ZABBIX ... of course :)
    We have been working with this wonderful monitoring tool since 2007 (before we had used Nagios, Openview, Whatsup, Hobbitmon, etc) and until now we haven't seen any limitations in our projects.
    If you need to learn a little bit more about 'how to customize ZABBIX' you can search about:

    - ZABBIX UserParameters;
    - ZABBIX pluggable modules;
    - ZABBIX LLD;
    - ZABBIX API;

    I think this things will help a lot to know how to extend/customize ZABBIX.

    Luciano

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points.
    Top Answer:The product is not expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
    Top Answer:The Wi-Fi side needs improvement. In most warehouse environments, there are shortfalls in such conditions. We often face… more »
    Top Answer:It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
    Top Answer:I don't deal with the licensing aspect of the product.
    Top Answer:The product's stability could be even better.
    Top Answer:In terms of customization and integration, we have more flexibility. We can automate configurations, define deletion… more »
    Top Answer:Zabbix itself is free, but professional support is paid. They have different pricing tiers based on the category and… more »
    Top Answer:There are areas of improvement. The database grows really fast. So, when you install Zabbix, you have to deal with some… more »
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Juniper Mist Premium Analytics is a comprehensive network analytics solution that provides organizations with valuable insights into their network performance and user experience. The primary use case of this product is to enable IT teams to proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their network infrastructure.

    The most valuable functionality of Juniper Mist Premium Analytics is its AI-driven insights and recommendations. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, it analyzes vast amounts of network data to identify anomalies, predict potential issues, and suggest remediation actions. This proactive approach helps organizations minimize network downtime, improve user experience, and optimize network performance.

    By providing real-time visibility into network performance, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics helps organizations quickly identify and resolve network issues. It offers detailed analytics on network traffic, application performance, and user behavior, allowing IT teams to pinpoint the root cause of problems and take immediate action. This not only reduces troubleshooting time but also enhances overall network reliability.

    Furthermore, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics enables organizations to optimize their network infrastructure. It provides insights into network capacity utilization, application usage patterns, and user behavior, allowing IT teams to make informed decisions about network design, resource allocation, and capacity planning. This helps organizations to ensure that their network is efficiently utilized and can support the growing demands of their users.

    Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Third-party add-ons provide tools for monitoring virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.

    Nagios XI uses a powerful Core 4 monitoring engine that provides users with the highest levels of server monitoring performance. This high degree of performance enables nearly limitless scalability and monitoring powers.

    With Nagios XI, stakeholders can check up on their infrastructure status using the role-based web interface. Sophisticated dashboards enable access to monitoring information and third-party data. Administrators can easily set up permissions so users can only access the infrastructure they are authorized to view.

    Nagios XI Benefits and Features

    Some of the benefits and top features of using Nagios XI include:

    • Extensive IT infrastructure monitoring: Comprehensively monitor all of your organization’s infrastructure’s components. Hundreds of third-party add-ons let you monitor virtually any internal application, service, or system.

    • Proactivity: With built-in, automated trend analysis and capacity planning charts, organizations can plan infrastructure upgrades before legacy systems encounter unexpected issues. IT staff, business stakeholders, and end users are notified via email or SMS with details of the outage so they can begin handling the issue immediately.

    • Multiple integration options: Numerous available APIs allow seamless integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting capabilities as well as custom interfaces are available, allowing you to customize Nagios XI to your company's needs.

    • Complete visibility: Get a single view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. The Nagios XI dashboards provide at-a-glance access to monitoring information and third-party data. Views give users quick access to the most useful information.

    • User-friendly interface: Customize the layout, design, and settings for each user’s GUI, providing clients and team members with the flexibility they need. Administrators can easily delegate control over monitoring configuration management, system settings, and more to end users and team members using the built-in web-based configuration interface. A configuration wizard guides users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications without understanding complex monitoring concepts.

    • Configuration snapshots: Snapshots allow you to save and archive your most recent configurations. Later on, you can revert back to them whenever you like.

    • Advanced user management: Ensure a secure infrastructure environment by easily setting up and managing user accounts and assigning custom roles with just a few mouse clicks.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Nagios XI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its integration options and monitoring abilities, as well as its alerting features.

    David P., a senior DevOps engineer at EML Payments Ltd, writes, “We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.”

    An IT-OSS manager at a comms service provider notes, “Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.”

    Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software that provides real-time monitoring and alerting for servers, networks, applications, and services. 

    It offers a wide range of features including data collection, visualization, and reporting. 

    With its user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, Zabbix helps organizations ensure the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure.

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
    1. IBM 2. Dell 3. Cisco 4. HP 5. Oracle 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon 8. Google 9. Facebook 10. Twitter 11. LinkedIn 12. Netflix 13. Adobe 14. VMware 15. Salesforce 16. SAP 17. Intel 18. AT&T 19. Verizon 20. T-Mobile 21. Vodafone 22. Ericsson 23. Nokia 24. Siemens 25. General Electric 26. Honeywell 27. Philips 28. Sony 29. Samsung 30. LG 31. Panasonic 32. Toshiba
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider32%
    Manufacturing Company24%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Retailer8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization47%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Aerospace/Defense Firm7%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization33%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise63%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise35%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business49%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise31%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise41%
    Buyer's Guide
    Nagios XI vs. Zabbix
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios XI vs. Zabbix and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Nagios XI is ranked 8th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 54 reviews while Zabbix is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 96 reviews. Nagios XI is rated 8.2, while Zabbix is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zabbix writes "Allows any number of customizations but lacks functionality for finding root causes". Nagios XI is most compared with Nagios Core, PRTG Network Monitor, Icinga, Wireshark and SCOM, whereas Zabbix is most compared with Centreon, Checkmk, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios Core and Amazon CloudWatch. See our Nagios XI vs. Zabbix report.

    See our list of best Server Monitoring vendors, best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software 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.