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Nagios Core vs Nmap comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

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
8.9
Nagios Core boosted operational efficiency, reduced costs, minimized downtime, and significantly improved productivity and disaster recovery times.
Sentiment score
7.8
Nmap offers cost savings and efficiency for businesses, despite limitations, with users noting significant financial benefits like bug bounty earnings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.5
Nagios Core relies on community and documentation for support, offering valuable resources but facing scalability and consistency challenges.
Sentiment score
7.1
Nmap users benefit from community support and online resources, seldom needing formal technical support due to its robust functionality.
I have never reached out to customer support because Nmap never gave me any troubles.
Student at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Nagios Core is highly scalable, supporting diverse infrastructures with open-source flexibility, despite some horizontal scaling concerns.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nmap is renowned for scalability, handling vast networks efficiently, praised for adaptability despite lacking cloud capabilities.
The solution is scalable.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
Nmap's scalability is of a gold standard.
Student at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.6
Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable, offering exceptional performance on Linux with minimal plugin-related issues.
Sentiment score
8.1
Nmap is highly rated for stability and reliability, though some Windows users report issues after long-term use.
I tried many other solutions at work, however, in terms of Nagios, I haven't seen any disruption or downtime.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
Nmap has never crashed, and it is an amazingly optimized tool.
Student at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Nagios Core needs a modernized interface, simplified configuration, scalability, and integration with tools like Grafana for improved usability.
Nmap requires a GUI, faster scans, enhanced reporting, vulnerability assessments, advanced features, and improved stability for better usability.
Nmap could potentially become a GUI and provide automatic reports with one-click downloads.
Student at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

Nagios Core provides cost-effective, open-source monitoring with engineering setup and maintenance, requiring customization expertise for full benefits.
Nmap offers a free version and paid options for enterprises needing enhanced features and commercial support flexibility.
 

Valuable Features

Nagios Core offers extensible plugins, alerting, customizable dashboards, proactive monitoring, and integration, enhancing system reliability and minimizing downtime.
Nmap's powerful features offer comprehensive network analysis, vulnerability identification, and flexibility, making it essential for security audits and bug bounty projects.
It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
Nmap will be a little difficult for beginners because of the learning curve and the CLI-based system, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes very powerful.
Student at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th)
Nmap
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
30th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Nagios Core is 1.6%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nmap is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nagios Core1.6%
Nmap0.9%
Other97.5%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

HY
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
Monitoring solution provides comprehensive visibility across IT infrastructure
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.
Sai Aditya Panda - PeerSpot reviewer
Student at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Penetration testing has become efficient as I identify open ports and security risks with confidence
Nmap could potentially become a GUI and provide automatic reports with one-click downloads. For example, the report could show all the open ports for an IP address with a professionally formatted report. This is a far-fetched suggestion and not really required, but it could make the work a little better. On a scale of one to ten, I give Nmap a solid nine. I mean, how can you fix something that is not broken? Nmap is already the best, and I do not think there are any other features that can be added. Its job is reconnaissance, so I do not think there is more to add to it. However, if I get any ideas, I will let them know about this.
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
 

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...
What do you like most about Nmap?
Nmap is mostly helpful during compliance checks. We run the scanner to see how many devices are on our network and find vulnerabilities in those that aren't compliant. We also use it monthly to sca...
What is your primary use case for Nmap?
My main use case for Nmap is reconnaissance, so identifying open ports or running services and ultimately finding the security risks or vulnerabilities in a system. OS detection is the most importa...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel
Lockheed Martin, Eastern Bank Boston, Perspecta, Harris Corporation, Discovery Communication
Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios Core vs. Nmap and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.