We compared Centreon and Nagios Core across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Centreon features a user-friendly interface with useful options for customization and manual configuration. Users like the solution’s flexible dashboards and the ability to create plugins. Nagios Core is an adaptable solution praised for its integration, customizability, and ability to effectively monitor server availability and network connectivity.
Room for Improvement: Some Centreon users requested better documentation and more flexibility to customize reporting. Other areas for improvement include auto-scanning efficiency and integration. Nagios Core users have requested better documentation, improved scalability, and a more user-friendly configuration process.
Service and Support: Centreon is highly regarded for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service that offers support in multiple languages. However, some customers feel that the lower levels of support are inadequate. Nagios Core lacks direct customer service, but users can generally find help from a supportive open-source community and large knowledge base.
Ease of Deployment: Centreon's initial setup is described as time-consuming and complex. The deployment varies in duration depending on the IT infrastructure. Nagios Core's setup is generally seen as well-documented and straightforward.
Pricing: Centreon's cost depends on the company's size. It is affordable and suitable for small companies, but it can be costly to scale up. Nagios Core is free, but users may incur costs for installation and configuration.
ROI: Centreon delivers value by helping users identify and resolve critical issues fasters, which could yield large savings. Nagios Core users say they have saved money by replacing paid monitoring tools with this open-source solution.
Comparison Results: Centreon is a flexible solution offering a range of customization options. The solution has earned high marks for support and affordability. At the same time, users say the setup can be complicated and time-consuming. Others said that auto-scanning and integration have room for improvement. Nagios Core is a flexible open-source solution that is highly customizable and offers robust functionality commonly found in paid enterprise solutions. However, some users have said that Nagios Core becomes unwieldy when used at a large scale and that the documentation could be more thorough.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"It is decentralized, which is better, because you can reduce the load from a single system. Also, you get a better view because it's more independent. Then, for the management, it's nice because they have one central system. With that, they can manage all the other systems, as well. This means they don't have to configure each system by system. They can configure it from one single interface."
"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"E-mail alert notifications are valuable."
"We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"Another feature we use is Business Activity, which provides us with an end-user perspective when a service is down or isn't working correctly. This is helpful when monitoring the KPIs. When we see a device or server that isn't working, we find the root cause."
"I can't point to one valuable feature. All of Centreon is good."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities."
"The most valuable feature of Nagios Core is it allows us to develop and add as many plugins as we want."
"It is fairly easy to set up, and we can monitor pretty much everything we want to."
"The notifications are definitely one of the most valuable features of Nagios Core. We know what to look for and what to expect when things are down."
"The most valuable feature is the performance parameters of the system."
"It has made the life of the network operations staff more proactive in managing the resources of the infrastructure. It prevents disasters long before they can take place."
"I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them."
"We mostly use Nagios Core to integrate with Python and Bash Script."
"The solution is quite efficient."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version."
"Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on."
"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 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."
"To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work."
"Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes."
"There is room for improvement in the area of artificial intelligence. The product gives us a lot of information, but it's only information. We want the product to do more auto-remediation."
"We're using the free version, which limits us in terms of the things that we can do. If we had the paid version, a lot of our issues would probably go away. For example, we can't isolate instances that are being built or updated with the production ones. When they're being built, on Nagios, they're showing in red. It'd be nice to be able to partition those off until they're all green, and then we can bring them into the environment. This is probably because we've got the free version and not the paid version. If we went for the paid version, it would probably allow us to do exactly what we want to or remove the restrictions that we have, but if we are able to isolate instances in the free version, it would make life much easier."
"Nagios Core is limited in terms of distributed setups, and there is no central view for remote data centers."
"Bandwidth monitoring is the pain point for me because Nagios Core does not monitor bandwidth effectively like Cacti does."
"It's not that easy to install the product itself. Also, the UI is a bit hard for regular users to navigate through."
"There is room for improvement in the graphics."
"I believe Nagios Core will need to provide an option for big data platforms in the future."
"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."
"The UI is a little outdated and graphics could be displayed in a better way."
Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Nagios Core is ranked 7th in Network Monitoring Software with 46 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Nagios Core is rated 8.0. 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 Nagios Core writes "An Open Source Fully Featured Data Centre Monitoring Tool". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Icinga, Nagios XI and Datadog, whereas Nagios Core is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, Icinga, OP5 Monitor and LogicMonitor. See our Centreon vs. Nagios Core report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.
We monitor all Network 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.