Nagios Core vs Zenoss Cloud comparison

Nagios and Zenoss are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Nagios is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.7, while Zenoss is ranked #76. Nagios holds a 1.9% mindshare in NMS, compared to Zenoss’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Nagios users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zenoss users who would recommend it.

Nagios Core

Read 51 Nagios Core reviews

4,463 Views
3,749 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Zenoss Cloud

Read 8 Zenoss Cloud reviews

2,016 Views
968 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Nagios Core

Zenoss Cloud

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Zenoss Cloud and Nagios Core are competitors in the IT infrastructure monitoring market, each catering to different needs. Zenoss Cloud has the upper hand with its advanced features, making it more appealing for businesses looking for a comprehensive, cloud-based solution.

Features: Zenoss Cloud offers advanced real-time analytics, dynamic network visualization, and predictive insights. Nagios Core is valued for its extensive plugin ecosystem, customizable alerting capabilities, and open-source adaptability.

Room for Improvement: Zenoss Cloud could improve by offering more flexible pricing options, enhancing integration with third-party tools, and simplifying its feature set to reduce complexity. Nagios Core could benefit from improving its user interface, offering dedicated customer support, and streamlining its installation process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zenoss Cloud provides a streamlined cloud-based deployment model, reducing setup time and includes dedicated customer support. Nagios Core requires manual installation and configuration but benefits from strong community support for customization.

Pricing and ROI: Zenoss Cloud's initial setup cost may be higher due to its comprehensive features but can offer better ROI through predictive analytics and reduced downtime. Nagios Core's open-source nature ensures minimal setup costs, with increased ROI as organizations leverage community resources and custom plugins.

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

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. Zenoss Cloud

December 2025

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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:

Categories and Ranking

Nagios Core

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

10th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zenoss Cloud

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

76th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

52nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (28th), Event Monitoring (13th), Server Monitoring (26th), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (43rd), AIOps (24th)

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 Zenoss Cloud is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nagios Core	1.9%
Zenoss Cloud	0.7%
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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ClaudiaChen

Cloud Architect - Senior Technology Architect at Telstra

Generates close to real-time alerts so users can resolve issues, but needs more integration and public cloud monitoring features

As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor.

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

"What I like about Nagios Core is that it helps me ensure everything is running smoothly by checking the status of hosts and services."

"It has made the life of the network operations staff more proactive in managing the resources of the infrastructure. It prevents disasters long before they can take place."

"Nagios Core is very configurable. Whatever you want, you can do it."

"The most valuable feature depends on the project. It's great if you need to check to ensure a service is running 24/7. I can use the full solution for free, and it's flexible. If I need to add a dashboard, I can integrate it with Nagios. Cloud synchronization is wonderful."

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

"The reporting structure and the feature set are valuable to me."

"The solution is quite efficient."

More Nagios Core pros

"Its Docker Container concept is mind blowing. It is the first monitoring tool which comes with Docker features."

"It's easy to use."

"The product offers good documentation that helps with initial training."

"What I like most about Zenoss Service Dynamics is that it monitors the devices and gives close to real-time alerts. For example, in case the device is not available, Zenoss Service Dynamics generates an alert so my team can resolve the issue."

"The most valuable feature is the flexible discovery mechanism."

"The custom built integration is one of the most valuable features because you can see all the especially critical items."

"They have also accommodated many state-of-the-art technologies like Docker and ZooKeeper."

Cons

"The dashboard and monitoring features could be improved."

"Bandwidth monitoring is the pain point for me because Nagios Core does not monitor bandwidth effectively like Cacti does."

"Would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down."

"The interface could be improved."

"I would like to see more training videos."

"I believe Nagios Core will need to provide an option for big data platforms in the future."

"The tool needs to improve the integrations."

"The initial setup process could be easier."

More Nagios Core cons

"As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor."

"There is room for improvement with the administrative part. They introduced Control Center to manage things in Zenoss 5. The services that Zenoss provides remained the same, but the administrative part, since they introduced Docker, etc., has become a little complex"

"The inclusion of a feature to show a graphical view of the network would be a helpful improvement."

"It would be ideal if the product offered sound alerts."

"There was a problem with Zenoss and storage monitoring."

"Now it is stable, but they should design threshold parameters in percentage instead of raw values."

"The AI aspect needs to improve."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Nagios Core is free to use."

"We are using the free version of Nagios Core."

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

"It's free."

"The solution is expensive."

"Most the plugin features are free."

"We have saved a lot of time, money, and effort in reducing disaster times, which is owed to Nagios quick alerting."

More Nagios Core pricing and cost advice

"There are additional costs you'll have to pay apart from the license fee for Zenoss Service Dynamics. I can't remember exactly how much my company is paying because I don't handle the finance part, but the cost is paid annually. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I'm rating the solution three out of five."

"The pricing depends on the environment, the number of services, and the size of the data center. It can go from $100,000 to a million dollars."

"It is very cost-effective compared to the tools I worked with in the past. The company is gaining a lot with respect to the cost factor. It provides agentless monitoring and in a very cheap way."

"It depends on the customer, what he wants."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

No data available

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	4
Large Enterprise	5

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

In my experience, I worked with many monitoring software, but the one that gave me the most functionalities of a large-scale company is Zenoss, due to its ability to monitor completely hybrid and a...

See all answers

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

Dynatrace vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Zenoss Cloud

January 2026

Download Zenoss Cloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

Cloud Monitoring, Zenoss Service Dynamics

Overview

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

Nagios

Zenoss Cloud revolutionizes IT infrastructure monitoring with a service-centric approach, prioritizing the overall health of services and applications. Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIOps), Zenoss Cloud offers end-to-end visibility across servers, networks, storage, and applications. Real-time monitoring, event correlation, and automated remediation ensure immediate insights and efficient issue resolution. The customizable dashboards empower users to tailor visualizations to their needs, while scalability accommodates diverse infrastructures. Zenoss Cloud guarantees improved application performance, reduced downtime, and enhanced IT efficiency, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes, from small enterprises seeking simplicity to large corporations requiring advanced scalability. Experience unified monitoring and proactive management with Zenoss Cloud, a comprehensive solution that transforms IT infrastructure optimization in today's complex environments.

Zenoss

Sample Customers

Airbnb, Cisco, PayPal, FanDuel

2degrees, Rackspace, State of North Dakota, El Paso Independent School District, NWN Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Nagios Core vs. Zenoss Cloud

December 2025

Free Report: Nagios Core vs. Zenoss Cloud

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