Nagios Core vs New Relic comparison

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Nagios Core

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

New Relic and Nagios Core are competing in the application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring categories. New Relic seems to have the upper hand due to its extensive features and strong customer support, making it favorable for larger enterprises, whereas Nagios Core is ideal for those seeking cost-effective and customizable monitoring solutions.

Features: New Relic offers comprehensive real-time performance statistics, custom instrumentation, and transaction tracing capabilities, making it particularly effective for devops practices and operational analysis. Its dashboard provides clear insights into application performance, enhancing troubleshooting efficiency. Nagios Core is renowned for its flexibility and open-source nature which supports extensive customization via user-created plugins, providing robust monitoring across a wide range of network elements. Its distributed monitoring architecture helps reduce network traffic, enhancing efficiency.

Room for Improvement: New Relic faces challenges with its high cost and data privacy concerns due to its SaaS model. Users report difficulties with alert configurations and a need for more granular data insights. The interface can be complex for new users. Nagios Core requires a steep learning curve because of manual configuration needs and lacks an intuitive dashboard, which makes it less user-friendly. Improvements in UI design and scalability are areas for enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: New Relic offers versatile deployment options across public and hybrid clouds, facilitating integration within cloud-heavy environments, and has a well-rated customer support system despite occasional delays. Nagios Core, mostly deployed on-premises, requires significant technical know-how for setup and maintenance. While it is cost-effective due to its open-source nature, it lacks the formalized customer support structure found in paid solutions.

Pricing and ROI: New Relic's pricing is often considered expensive, mainly due to data ingestion costs, but provides significant ROI for larger businesses through its comprehensive performance insights and reduction in troubleshooting time. Nagios Core, being open-source, is free to use, though customization and maintenance may involve costs. It offers excellent cost efficiency, particularly for users with the technical expertise to leverage its flexible capabilities, resulting in high ROI with minimal overheads.

To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. New Relic Report (Updated: February 2026).

Nagios Core vs. New Relic

February 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

ROI

Sentiment score

8.8

Nagios Core reduces downtime and costs with quick alerts, providing full ROI and eliminating expensive monitoring tools.

Sentiment score

6.2

New Relic improved issue detection, reduced downtime, enhanced efficiency, and delivered high returns through better performance and streamlined operations.

No quotes available

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There is return on investment because since we reduced the downtime, we can definitely save a lot of money within that period.

BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

There is a definite return on investment for New Relic, as we would not have invested in building its infrastructure if there were no returns.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the metrics that helped as a return on investment was the ability to detect issues faster and troubleshoot more quickly, which in turn helped to achieve a much better service level agreement with customers.

Aditya Krishnakumar

Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne

Customer Service

Sentiment score

5.1

Nagios Core relies on community support, praised for stability and resources, but lacks official help compared to Nagios XI.

Sentiment score

7.5

New Relic's customer service is praised for responsiveness and effectiveness, with users appreciating comprehensive resources and timely support.

No quotes available

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If I drop an email to them, they will respond quickly to my email.

Vamsi Busa

Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Customer support from New Relic is very good, and we rarely need to create support tickets.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They are very polite and helped him out.

TusharGoel

Cloud Engineer at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

6.7

Nagios Core shows scalability for large networks but may need customizations and integrations for distributed environments.

Sentiment score

7.7

New Relic efficiently scales with ease of deployment, adaptable architecture, and consistent performance across various workloads in any environment.

The solution is scalable.

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

We currently use New Relic for tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of teams within our organization, and we have not encountered any scalability issues.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is also suitable for cloud native architectures, SaaS, or software as a service, and for high volume data ingestion also.

TusharGoel

Cloud Engineer at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

New Relic's scalability is good based on my experience, and it can handle my organization's needs as they grow.

Oleksii Barybin

Contingent Worker at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.2

Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable with minimal footprint, supporting extensive monitoring without network burden.

Sentiment score

7.9

New Relic is highly stable, with minor issues rarely occurring, appreciated for reliable performance and minimal maintenance needs.

I tried many other solutions at work, however, in terms of Nagios, I haven't seen any disruption or downtime.

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

New Relic lags sometimes.

TusharGoel

Cloud Engineer at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

New Relic is stable based on my experience, as I have not seen any problems with the UI.

Oleksii Barybin

Contingent Worker at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Room For Improvement

Nagios Core needs a more intuitive interface, better scalability, and features like enhanced reporting and integration with modern tools.

Users seek better pricing, data visibility, user interface, integration, AI insights, and support in New Relic's offerings.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful.

BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Using real-time data, if there are any malicious patterns or something happening, they can identify those.

Hari Rajendiran

Platform Software Engineer 4 at Nexthink

Because of the pricing model, organizations have experienced uncontrolled costs and were not able to afford New Relic.

Aditya Krishnakumar

Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Setup Cost

Nagios Core is a free, cost-effective open-source tool, but requires Linux expertise and incurs hosting and maintenance costs.

Enterprise buyers find New Relic's pricing complex and potentially costly, despite appreciating its robust features and available discounts.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Considering the features New Relic offers, the pricing or cost setup has not been a blocker for our budget.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for synthetic monitoring is that minions used to cost a lot.

Palak Bhawsar

DevOps engineer at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Valuable Features

Nagios Core provides flexible, low-resource monitoring with customization, automation, efficient alerts, and integration support for reliable IT performance visibility.

New Relic offers real-time monitoring, seamless integration, and operational efficiency with user-friendly analytics for performance optimization and issue resolution.

You can monitor anything.

For more quotes and insights, download the Nagios Core report

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

Using New Relic speeds up troubleshooting and resolution, giving us a clearer picture of where issues are, thus saving time and effort.

Pietro Dell'Erba

Head of API at a marketing services firm with 11-50 employees

New Relic is very useful for teams that don't have much of a dedicated DevOps team but want to have observability for their platform, and it's an easy way to get started.

Aditya Krishnakumar

Senior SRE Engineer at SentinelOne

New Relic has positively impacted our organization by reducing errors, improving performance, and saving time.

For more quotes and insights, download the New Relic report

Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

10th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

New Relic

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

8th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

172

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (4th), IT Operations Analytics (3rd), Mobile APM (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 1.4%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
New Relic	1.4%
Nagios Core	1.9%
Other	96.7%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Monitoring solution provides comprehensive visibility across IT infrastructure

Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group

The good thing about Nagios Core is it covers everything. Everything in the IT domain, you can monitor anything. You can even monitor printers, the ports of printers, Core workstations, and storage. You can monitor the workflow Core and the utilization of computes. If you want to grasp everything of your IT equipment on a single interface, you can use Nagios. It's the best one. It provides dashboards, and you can also configure your emails and alerts with it. If something is critical, you can configure it to notify via emails. It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.

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BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Real-time alerts have reduced server outage impact and support fast incident response

In the dashboard, if they could show a little more metrics regarding the application and related things, that would be how New Relic could be improved. Currently, there are things showing from the server level and application level, but it can be improved. That is what I felt. Regarding user interface, I do not feel much concern, but for some kind of issues when we are trying to get support from the New Relic team, their SLA seems to be long. They are taking seven to ten working days for resolving some kind of scenario or issue. That is a bit difficult for us. If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful. When it comes to the customer support part, I felt they need to be a little more improved on that part. The support overall is good, but they can improve. That is the reason I have given it eight out of ten.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	22

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	76

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios Core?

Nagios Core is a free and open-source product. We don't charge for the product itself, but we charge for the man-hour costs related to installation, configuration, ongoing operation, and maintenance.

What needs improvement with Nagios Core?

The dashboard should be improved. It's very simple. I don't have a very clear or specific suggestion. You can change the skin of the dashboard, however, it's good for me.

What is your primary use case for Nagios Core?

I was a senior system administrator. I've been using Nagios Core for more than ten years now. It can be used to monitor hosts, such as machines, and monitor services of any kind. I'm using it to mo...

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

For our end-to-end use case, New Relic is completely satisfactory, and we extensively rely on its features for our day-to-day life. I would like to have more AI and ML-based suggestions and algorit...

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Compared 6% of the time

Centreon vs Nagios Core

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Nagios Core product report

Nagios Core

January 2026

Download New Relic product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM

Overview

This is IT infrastructure monitoring's industry-standard, open-source core. Free without professional support services.

Nagios

New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.

New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.

What are New Relic's most important features?

Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant visibility into application performance.
Detailed Transaction Tracing: Identifies specific transaction issues quickly.
Error Rate Tracking: Monitors and reports on error occurrences efficiently.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailors dashboard views for specific needs.
APM Integration: Seamlessly integrates with application performance management tools.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Operational Efficiency: Quick issue detection reduces downtime.
Improved Debugging: Enhanced error analysis supports rapid problem resolution.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers a holistic view of application performance and user behavior.
Incident Management: Integration with incident tools helps streamline responses.
Efficient Alerts: Rapid alert systems ensure timely notifications of issues.

In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club