We compared Nagios Core and PRTG Network Monitor across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Nagios Core is an adaptable solution praised for its integration, customizability, and ability to effectively monitor server availability and network connectivity. PRTG Network Monitor customers like its user-centric approach, straightforward reporting, and customizability.
Room for Improvement: Nagios Core users have requested better documentation, improved scalability, and a more user-friendly configuration process. PRTG Network Monitor could improve its performance and resource efficiency. Other pain points include usability and cross-platform compatibility.
Service and Support: Nagios Core lacks direct customer service, but users can generally find help from a supportive open-source community and large knowledge base. PRTG Network Monitor received mixed reviews for its customer service. Some users commended the support team’s prompt service, while others reported slow response times and noted the lack of remote session support.
Ease of Deployment: Nagios Core's setup is generally seen as well-documented and straightforward. PRTG Network Monitor’s setup isn’t considered to be overly complex. Deployment times may vary depending on the environment's complexity and device count.
Pricing: Nagios Core is free, but users may incur costs for installation and configuration. PRTG Network Monitor is deemed reasonably priced and cheaper than its competitors.
ROI: Nagios Core users say they have saved money by replacing paid monitoring tools with this open-source solution. Users said that PRTG Network Monitor has proven to save time and money through automation and proactive support.
Comparison Results: 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. PRTG Network Monitor is regarded as a simple, user-friendly, and cost-effective solution, but users would like to see improvements in performance, documentation, integration, and technical support.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring."
"Nagios Core is very configurable. Whatever you want, you can do it."
"What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services."
"Key features include the GUI interface, its notification capabilities, and the real-time reporting."
"The application performance monitoring feature is valuable."
"Alert calls occur anytime a service goes down or a matrix is difficult and that helps us to quickly restore service and transfer work."
"The most valuable feature is the performance parameters of the system."
"We use the product to monitor server applications."
"PRTG is relatively intuitive and fairly straightforward. It has net flow monitoring and that works all right. I would describe it as a decent middle-of-the-road solution."
"The product is easy to use and the web interface is fantastic."
"PRTG Network Monitor is a very stable product."
"PRTG Network Monitor helps us quickly and easily discover a large number of sensors, so we can spend minimal time monitoring customer sites."
"From a network point of view, we can see the state of the network, as well as bandwidth usage and downtime."
"It is very flexible, and we can monitor many aspects of IT as well as ERP and CRM services. It has a very powerful interface and APIs for customization."
"The real-time monitoring and alerting are its most valuable features."
"Its initial setup process is fast and easy."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."
"I believe Nagios Core will need to provide an option for big data platforms in the future."
"It is a bit slow due to latency."
"Making it a little easier to configure and set up from the start would help. There are multiple layers that you have to wade through to be able to set it up, to do it the right way, and to get it to do what you want it to do."
"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."
"The initial setup process could be easier."
"Nagios Core can improve the graphical interface, it would make things a little easier."
"Would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down."
"The solution has to evolve as an end-to-end monitoring solution. It has to do better at understanding the application at the deepest level."
"PRTG does not allow us to scan devices like we can scan software or another problem in it. Also, I cannot draw graphical graphs in Woodview/look. Another problem is that we cannot draw a good diagram in PRTG."
"I would like a more straightforward ability to create dashboards and maps. The network maps should be a bit more flexibility in the GUI to do what we need to do."
"PRTG's application monitoring sensor is not strong."
"In our organization, we encounter performance issues with our PRTG probe service. I saw documentation from the vendor or Paessler mentioning that there are limitations for WMI sensors. Other than that, we are okay with PRTG."
"Once you start going above 5000 sensors, things do start to get a bit shaky. There are some best practice out there that you will need to adopt and be aware of."
"PRTG Network Monitor is okay to use, but you'll need some time to analyze the data. If it can automatically locate or identify the problem area, it would be more helpful to users."
"When it comes to third-party integration, one of the things we were looking at was putting some sensors onto our firewall, for instance. If there were a little bit more documentation and some step-by-step guides around that, that would be useful for us."
Nagios Core is ranked 7th in Network Monitoring Software with 46 reviews while PRTG Network Monitor is ranked 5th in Network Monitoring Software with 96 reviews. Nagios Core is rated 8.0, while PRTG Network Monitor is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Nagios Core writes "An Open Source Fully Featured Data Centre Monitoring Tool". On the other hand, the top reviewer of PRTG Network Monitor writes "It's an all-in-one solution, and net flow is included in the licensing ". Nagios Core is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios XI, Icinga, Centreon and Meraki Dashboard, whereas PRTG Network Monitor is most compared with Zabbix, Centreon, Nagios XI, SolarWinds NPM and ManageEngine OpManager. See our Nagios Core vs. PRTG Network Monitor report.
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