Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Zabbix VS Nagios

Compare Zabbix VS Nagios and see what are their differences

Zabbix logo Zabbix

Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Nagios logo Nagios

Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services
  • Zabbix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-10-02
  • Nagios Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Zabbix features and specs

  • Open-source
    Zabbix is free and open-source, allowing for extensive customization and modification to meet specific needs without licensing costs.
  • Scalability
    Zabbix can handle a large number of devices and data points, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Zabbix offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including servers, networks, cloud services, and applications.
  • Alerting and Notification
    It provides robust alerting mechanisms, allowing notifications via email, SMS, and other methods.
  • Flexible Configuration
    The system allows for detailed and flexible configuration, accommodating various specific monitoring requirements.
  • Extensive API
    Zabbix comes with a comprehensive API that allows for integration with third-party tools and custom automation scripts.
  • Strong Community Support
    As an open-source project, Zabbix has a strong community that can provide support and share best practices.

Possible disadvantages of Zabbix

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complicated and time-consuming, often requiring a steep learning curve.
  • Resource Intensive
    Zabbix can be resource-intensive, particularly on the database side, which might require substantial hardware resources for large deployments.
  • User Interface
    The user interface is considered less modern and user-friendly compared to some commercial alternatives.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate for new users.
  • Maintenance Effort
    Ongoing maintenance, such as updates and troubleshooting, can be labor-intensive.
  • Dependency on MySQL
    The heavy reliance on MySQL databases can be a disadvantage for users preferring other database technologies.
  • Initial Costs for Large Scale Deployments
    Although the software is free, the costs associated with setting up and maintaining the necessary infrastructure and hardware can be significant, especially for larger deployments.

Nagios features and specs

  • Extensive Community Support
    Nagios has a large and active user community, which means you can easily find help and resources online. There are numerous plugins and add-ons developed by the community that can extend the functionality of Nagios.
  • Highly Customizable
    Nagios is highly customizable and flexible. It allows you to tailor monitoring to suit your specific needs, including creating custom plugins, modifying configuration files, and integrating with other tools.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Nagios provides detailed monitoring of network services, host resources, and infrastructure systems. This includes the ability to monitor CPU load, disk usage, memory, and more.
  • Alerting and Notification
    Nagios has robust alerting and notification features that ensure you can stay informed of any issues or downtime. Alerts can be sent via email, SMS, or other communication channels.
  • Scalable
    Nagios is scalable and can grow with your organization. It supports a large number of hosts and services, making it suitable for both small and large enterprises.

Possible disadvantages of Nagios

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Nagios can be quite complex to set up and configure, especially for newcomers. The learning curve is steep, requiring time and effort to fully understand and utilize its capabilities.
  • Manual Configuration
    A significant amount of configuration is manual, particularly in the open-source version. This can be time-consuming and prone to human error, especially in larger environments.
  • Interface
    The user interface of Nagios is often considered outdated and less intuitive compared to other modern monitoring tools. The web interface can be difficult to navigate and is not as visually appealing.
  • Performance Issues
    Nagios can experience performance issues, particularly when monitoring a large number of hosts and services. It can become resource-intensive, requiring careful optimization and tuning.
  • Cost of Enterprise Version
    The enterprise version of Nagios, Nagios XI, comes with a significant cost. While it offers additional features, support, and a more user-friendly interface, it might not be affordable for all organizations.

Zabbix videos

An overview of Zabbix 4.0 and how we are using it.

More videos:

  • Review - Zabbix Monitoring Solution - Overview
  • Review - ZABBIX Network Discovery For Dynamic Deployments

Nagios videos

Stop using Nagios - Andy Sykes

More videos:

  • Review - Bernd Erk - Why favour Icinga over Nagios
  • Review - How Nagios XI Works

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Zabbix and Nagios)
Monitoring Tools
71 71%
29% 29
Log Management
72 72%
28% 28
Performance Monitoring
71 71%
29% 29
Website Monitoring
64 64%
36% 36

User comments

Share your experience with using Zabbix and Nagios. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Zabbix and Nagios

Zabbix Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    Indispensable

    Zabbix has been part of my toolbox for quite some time. I can easily say it's an indispensable tool for me now.

    Managing a dozen servers without Zabbix would be unimaginable. I'm monitoring all of this: CPU, Memory, Hard-drives, website response times, downtime. The UI might be a bit "old school", but everything works flawlessly.

    With regards to hard-drive monitoring, I love the machine learning option that allows you to "predict" the number of days before running out of space. That's quite helpful, as I've got some of my servers down due to running out of space multiple times in the past (before I was using Zabbix).

    👍 Pros:    Open-source|It can monitor everything
    👎 Cons:    The ui is a bit unintuitive in some cases

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Unlimited scaling: Zabbix is a flexible software that lets you monitor anything you want. It is highly scalable as it helps you manage both multi-tenant enterprise environments and your home.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Zabbix is a very strong competitor to Nagios and its development is very encouraging. Zabbix is completely free to use, which makes it a competitor to Nagios Core. Zabbix beats Nagios in the free monitoring market because it has a good frontend, which Nagios Core lacks and it also provides NetFlow monitoring, which isn’t present in Nagios Core – that is a separate paid...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
Zabbix, a widely adopted open-source monitoring tool, offers a range of practical features. It allows you to monitor various aspects of your system, including transactions, application performance, and real browser monitoring. With ready-to-use templates for different servers and operating systems, Zabbix simplifies the monitoring process.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Zabbix offers a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure through its user-friendly web-based interface. It delivers potent visualization capabilities through customizable dashboards, complemented by robust alerting mechanisms and comprehensive support for alert escalations.
Source: signoz.io

Nagios Reviews

11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Nagios is an open source network monitoring solution. It helps organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure issues. However, Nagios could be difficult integrate into automatic provisioning processes. There are few other issues with Nagios as well. Here, is a curated list of top tools that can replace Nagios. This list consists of paid as well as open-source...
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Nagios is a very strong system monitoring package but its ability to compete in both the free and paid system monitoring market is frequently challenged. The free tool is very comprehensive. However, the Nagios team has taken away the traffic analysis functions from this, moving them off into a separate paid tool, which puts Nagios Core at a disadvantage when compared to...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
It’s also important to note that Nagios is completely open-source, which means that it’s free to use. However, “free to use” doesn’t mean that it won’t cost you anything. Often, the reason users look for alternatives to tools like Nagios is because of their open-source nature. Self-hosting a tool of this magnitude can be even more expensive than purchasing a SaaS subscription.
Source: betterstack.com
The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
Nagios is free for small environments with seven or fewer nodes and hosts. Its paid version starts at $1995 for the license and is priced per user. There is also a variety of free training options for Nagios available online. Both of Nagios’ paid versions include a free trial.
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Nagios Core is an open-source Linux/Unix systems monitoring and alerting tool that can be extended through custom plugins, providing flexible Linux server monitoring. It remotely executes different plugins (executables or scripts) on your Linux server using the NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) add-on, which gives you comprehensive monitoring data, including OS metrics,...
Source: sematext.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Zabbix seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 5 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Zabbix mentions (5)

  • Learning Resources
    Official Zabbix trainings, documentation on zabbix.com ? Source: over 2 years ago
  • zabbix installation
    Hallo, do you know a howto to install zabbix on an ubuntu 20.04 ? I tried the manuals from zabbix.com for MySQL Apache but it didn't work. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How I am getting experience as a linux admistrator (Follow Up)
    He suggested that I indeed should set up a home-lab. To be specific he said that I should create a minimal install of Centos 8 and install zabbix server on it (https://zabbix.com) and monitor a whole bunch of other VMs, services and stuff.. He said that I should set up a variety of VMs and also maybe host a website on one of them. And then if I was able to do that, I could help to share a load of zabbix related... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ubuntu Impish 21.10 / Zabbix 6.0 LTS
    This is a fresh 21.10 install, using the install repo as detailed on the zabbix.com download page. Source: about 3 years ago
  • One dev conference speaker's family member died, need your help to fill the speaking slot on Nov 27/28
    Well, if you can't find anyone, I am more than happy to fill the slot with something regarding Zabbix - just let me know ;). Source: over 3 years ago

Nagios mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Nagios yet. Tracking of Nagios recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Zabbix and Nagios, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Microsoft System Center - Microsoft System Center provides solutions to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of the infrastructure.

LogicMonitor - LogicMonitor is the SaaS performance monitoring platform for the world's best IT teams. Deploy Fast, Monitor More, Improve Ops.