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."
"The most valuable feature is the performance parameters of the system."
"Nagios Core is very configurable. Whatever you want, you can do it."
"The solution is quite efficient."
"The most valuable feature depends on the project. It's great if you need to check to ensure a service is running 24/7. I can use the full solution for free, and it's flexible. If I need to add a dashboard, I can integrate it with Nagios. Cloud synchronization is wonderful."
"I like the way the solution sends alerts and how it keeps on escalating them."
"Alert calls occur anytime a service goes down or a matrix is difficult and that helps us to quickly restore service and transfer work."
"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."
"What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services."
"The reporting module is easy to configure."
"The solution is very easy to use and the web provides information with ease."
"Ability to create a dashboard inside software monitoring."
"It is pretty simple to use, which is always a good thing. It's been very reliable in updating us if any issues crop up."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to span multiple technologies and multiple vendors."
"Its initial setup process is fast and easy."
"It is able to satisfy all our requirements in terms of email notifications and specific errors on the devices."
"The most valuable feature is the notifications. As long as you spend time and think about what and when you want to be notified, it's always accurate. It is always there. I find things out before my Internet provider."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."
"The scalability needs improvement, it's not scalable at this time."
"Nagios Core is limited in terms of distributed setups, and there is no central view for remote data centers."
"Nagios Core can improve the graphical interface, it would make things a little easier."
"The tool needs to improve the integrations."
"Nagios Core does not have a graphic display."
"Bandwidth monitoring is the pain point for me because Nagios Core does not monitor bandwidth effectively like Cacti does."
"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."
"In the next release, PRTG Network Monitor should add a backup solution."
"The operations dashboard is only available in PRTG's enterprise version, but I wish it could be accessed in the standard licensing. It would also be nice if PRTG had templates for dashboard monitoring, software monitoring, etc. It can help me set up a dashboard because now we don't have a template from PRTG, so we need to create one from scratch."
"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."
"It would be good if there were better graphical interfaces when you have it on multiple monitors... Because we have so many servers, things can get lost in the fog a little bit. Maybe having a better way of showing different geographies, Flash, etc., would help."
"Needs ability to monitor standard notification time (notify after X time)."
"This product can be improved by updating the net flow interface. The one that is in place works – I can get all the information I need from it – but it is a little bit clunky."
"In a very few cases, customers want more detailed reports, which we cannot meet."
"PRTG Network Monitor could improve by having a feature to allow uploading of preset standard network switch configurations and the ability to monitor the SLA configuration, such as uptime for the switches or internet connectivity. This would be very useful."
Nagios Core is ranked 7th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 46 reviews while PRTG Network Monitor is ranked 6th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring 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.
See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors and best Network Monitoring Software vendors.
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