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Nagios Core vs SCOM 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
8.8
Nagios Core reduces downtime and costs with quick alerts, providing full ROI and eliminating expensive monitoring tools.
Sentiment score
6.4
SCOM users experience varied ROI, with advantages in monitoring and management offset by potential licensing costs and latency issues.
 

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
6.8
Microsoft customer service is generally viewed positively, with efficient assistance and experienced staff, despite occasional consistency issues.
They often treat issues in isolation, not considering how one problem might relate to another.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
When I was working directly with Microsoft at TCS, my first company, the support experience was quite smooth, and we received solutions promptly.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Nagios Core shows scalability for large networks but may need customizations and integrations for distributed environments.
Sentiment score
6.9
SCOM offers scalable management, efficient load balancing, and high availability but faces challenges with non-Microsoft integration and diverse device monitoring.
The solution is scalable.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
The scalability of SCOM, meaning its ability to adapt to our needs, is excellent because we are working with SQL systems and multiple servers.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Nagios Core is highly stable and reliable with minimal footprint, supporting extensive monitoring without network burden.
Sentiment score
7.1
SCOM's stability has improved significantly, especially in newer versions like 2019, with proper configuration and resource allocation.
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
I have not seen many errors or frequent data loss because once we have installed the agent on the system and have the details, not much manual intervention is required.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
SCOM is a bit unstable lately, primarily due to a lack of resources.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
 

Room For Improvement

Nagios Core needs a more intuitive interface, better scalability, and features like enhanced reporting and integration with modern tools.
SCOM needs better dashboards, lower licensing costs, easier integration, improved reporting, enhanced support, and efficient alert management.
I would like to see a software-as-a-service version in Azure to eliminate the need for on-premise infrastructure.
ICT System Administrator at College of Europe
SCOM is likely to be phased out in favor of more compatible tools like Icinga for application monitoring or when moving to cloud solutions like CloudWatch and Azure.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
It would be beneficial to have a summary on one single dashboard, as there are many more possibilities available.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
 

Setup Cost

Nagios Core is a free, cost-effective open-source tool, but requires Linux expertise and incurs hosting and maintenance costs.
SCOM pricing varies with agreements, often part of cost-effective Microsoft packages, though licensing can be complex initially.
 

Valuable Features

Nagios Core provides flexible, low-resource monitoring with customization, automation, efficient alerts, and integration support for reliable IT performance visibility.
SCOM efficiently monitors Microsoft environments with integration, customizable dashboards, real-time reporting, and automated alerts for proactive management.
It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.
Senior System Administrator at Interactive Group
It assists me in detecting server downtime and delivers basic performance monitoring right out of the box.
Network Operations Center at Student Loans Company
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool.
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS.
ICT System Administrator at College of Europe
 

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (5th)
 

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 SCOM is 1.4%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nagios Core1.9%
SCOM1.4%
Other96.7%
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.
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

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 SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios Core vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.