Nagios Core vs Nmap comparison

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Nagios Core

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

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Nmap and Nagios Core are prominent tools in network management. Nmap appears advantageous for security analysis and network discovery, whereas Nagios Core is preferred for comprehensive network monitoring.

Features: Nmap offers robust port scanning capabilities, OS detection, and flexible scripting options. It is ideal for detailed security audits and network inventory. Nagios Core provides extensive infrastructure monitoring, service availability alerts, and performance data collection.

Room for Improvement: Nmap could enhance its GUI for easier navigation, improve integration with other tools, and expand its reporting capabilities. Nagios Core could benefit from a simplified initial setup process, better user interface customization, and enhanced documentation for ease of use.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nmap is straightforward to deploy, requiring minimal configuration, with strong community support, making it ideal for quick assessments. Nagios Core needs a more involved setup due to its extensive capabilities, but supports third-party plugins for flexibility. Both have active community forums for troubleshooting and support.

Pricing and ROI: Nmap, being open-source, incurs no direct costs, providing an excellent ROI for network scans. Nagios Core, also open-source, might involve additional costs related to setup and training time, justified by its comprehensive monitoring abilities.

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To learn more, read our detailed Nagios Core vs. Nmap Report (Updated: December 2025).

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Nagios Core vs. Nmap

December 2025

Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

10th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th)

Nmap

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 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 Nmap is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nmap	0.7%
Nagios Core	1.9%
Other	97.4%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Husham Yaqoob

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.

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MoshiurRahman Khan

CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Improves network monitoring and offers insights into traffic, including VPNs

The real-time reporting feature of Nmap is particularly valuable. It generates detailed reports on the source and destination IP addresses, the protocols used, and the types of traffic. This feature is crucial for law enforcement agencies to monitor and analyze network connectivity effectively. It also has traffic analysis. For example, assessing bandwidth usage and configuring the tool to track specific types of traffic is crucial. Unlike SolarWinds, which requires configuration for this, Nmap has built-in functionality that allows it to check all 4,000 computer ports. It identifies the type of traffic each port is using and can easily generate reports on network communications between computers, whether there are 100 or 1000 in the network.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would rate the overall solution ten points out of ten."

"The solution is quite efficient."

"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 solution's most valuable feature is that it offers proper alerting capabilities."

"Alert calls occur anytime a service goes down or a matrix is difficult and that helps us to quickly restore service and transfer work."

"Nagios Core is stable."

"Provides timely notifications."

"I like that it's very simple to install, easy to manage and deploy, and easy to use for monitoring."

More Nagios Core pros

"The most important function, according to me, is the capability to use some arguments in the scanning. The solution's capability to go figure and do a deep dive, discovering information on specific aspects."

"The scanning procedure includes UDP ports which sets it apart from competitors."

"The initial setup was simple."

"It is a very user-friendly product."

"The solution detects the operating systems, which makes testing the software much easier before making the payload."

"The most valuable feature of the solution for security audits stems from the fact that it serves as a powerful tool with the ability to scan a large number of ports."

"Nmap's performance is great, and I've never noticed any issues in this respect. It really doesn't put a heavy load on the machine when using it."

"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 scan our network and identify devices that aren't connected properly. This helps us detect any issues related to the operating systems of these devices."

More Nmap pros

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the graphics."

"The dashboard should be improved."

"Cloud monitoring is an area for improvement because there aren't too many plugins available."

"It would be nice if the company offered a sales or contract manager that was dedicated to our company so that we would have some sort of link to Nagios, and if we had issues or questions, we'd be able to contact them directly."

"The mapping is a little hard."

"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."

"It is a bit slow due to latency."

"I would like to see a sensor that shows the traffic of a user and what they're doing on the network."

More Nagios Core cons

"The solution's initial setup could be better."

"They should deliver Playtech's username and password."

"It takes a bit of time to get familiar with the solution and its options."

"The challenge often lies in finding suitable courses and professional resources."

"The solution should increase the number of features under a free license."

"Since I started using Nmap, it has been completely based on the command prompt and I think it would help other users if they implemented a decent GUI as well."

"One of the drawbacks of the standard Nmap utility is that it does not come with a graphical user interface, unlike a number of other open-source alternatives such as Zenmap."

"The tool's license limits the number of scans it can perform. Improving the license model could benefit customers by allowing more scans for compliance and other purposes."

More Nmap cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version."

"It's free."

"We are using the open-source, unpaid version."

"The product is cheaply priced."

"The enterprise version has technical support. The version we are using is free."

"The solution is expensive."

"I would rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"Nagios Core is a cheap solution."

More Nagios Core pricing and cost advice

"It's an open-source product, and I haven't seen any premiums. Options are available for those who purchase, but for my use case, everything I need is available in the community and forums."

"Nmap is an open-source product. You don't need a license to install it."

"I am using the standard free version of Nmap."

"The product's pricing is fine. The licensing options for Nmap include perpetual licenses and volume-based licenses. For perpetual licenses, once you purchase it, there's no need to invest in renewals. And for volume-based licenses, enterprise companies can use it multiple times based on the number of users or devices they need to scan. It's a pay-as-you-go model, similar to how you pay for what you use."

"The solution is free of cost."

"Nmap is open source software, which suits us well because we are a manufacturing company and not an IT company, for example. If we were an IT company, we would probably need to pay for extra support or instead go for another software solution. But as it is, we don't have any need for high-end troubleshooting tools."

"The solution is open source so it is free."

"The solution is free of cost, but there are specific services that we have to buy."

More Nmap pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.

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881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Manufacturing Company

14%

Government

University

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	9
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

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 experience regarding pricing and costs for Nmap?

I am using the free version of Nmap.

What is your primary use case for Nmap?

Nmap is used for network scanning to map the network, identify devices, and assess their status. It helps determine open ports and services running on a particular endpoint or server within an ente...

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Nmap

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Download Nagios Core product report

Nagios Core

January 2026

Download Nmap product report

January 2026

Overview

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

Nagios

Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff), and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

Lockheed Martin, Eastern Bank Boston, Perspecta, Harris Corporation, Discovery Communication