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Packetbeat vs Zabbix comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Packetbeat
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
61st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
2.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zabbix
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (11th), Server Monitoring (1st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Packetbeat is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zabbix is 3.7%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zabbix3.7%
Packetbeat0.3%
Other96.0%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Network analytics have delivered lightweight, integrated visibility for search, observability, and security
Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows. I recall that Packetbeat can cover a limited number of protocols including ICMP, but not as deeply as other solutions. It covers NetFlows and these types of flows, but not at the level of a deep packet capture that you can find in the market where it taps every single packet in the network. Packetbeat is more about bringing statistics about the packets, but it doesn't capture these packets. The development intention of Packetbeat appears to be to provide a window for application monitoring and performance analytics, and for that purpose, it is doing sufficiently well. However, if the vendor has another goal to build a similar network monitoring solution that exists in the market, which is outside of Elastic's business nature, Packetbeat is a sensor that needs to be improved to the level of deep packet capture where it loses no packets in the network. That improvement would take Elastic to another level.
PJ
Developer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Unified monitoring has reduced outages and enables proactive fixes with automated remediation
My favorite best feature is the ability to manage complex hybrid environments from a single dashboard. Zabbix natively supports monitoring everything from Linux servers and Windows servers to network devices and cloud infrastructure. The view I rely on the most on a day-to-day basis is a custom dashboard combining the problem widget and graph widget. The problem widget gives me an immediate filtered snapshot of the active alerts across all our servers. I pair that with the graph widget, which allows me to track performance metrics and compare values over time, such as monitoring storage and capacity trends on our Synology appliance. Having all of this in a single pane of glass saves me from constantly digging through logs. I also rely heavily on custom dashboards that combine the problem widget and the top host widget. The problem widget gives me an immediate filtered list of any active alerts across the entire environment. I pair that with the top host widget, which instantly shows me which servers are consuming the highest resources. Having all of these related metrics side-by-side in a single view allows me to spot the issue and identify the exact server causing it without having to dig through separate tools. Zabbix has built-in machine learning for continuous anomaly detection and proactive trend prediction. It establishes a baseline by analyzing historical data, allowing it to forecast impending issues, such as predicting exactly when a system will run out of resources before critical thresholds are breached. From a governance and security perspective, it delivers enterprise-grade security by supporting full data encryption and integration with external secret vaults to protect sensitive credentials. From a governance perspective, it features detailed configuration change tracking and role-based user permissions, which allows administrators to secure different teams or tenants within a single environment. Regarding accuracy, Zabbix's proactive alerts are highly accurate and trustworthy, provided they are fed enough historical data to establish a solid baseline. Regarding reliability and output, the prediction outputs are extremely reliable because Zabbix relies on transparent statistical mathematics, such as standard deviation and weighted moving averages, rather than a closed black box AI model. The straightforward statistical approach allows administrators to forecast value reliability and predict exactly how much time they have before a system reaches a critical problem threshold.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Elastic's scalability, in terms of cluster robustness, is definitely the most valuable feature."
"The beauty of Packetbeat is that it is easy, free, and lightweight, while other solutions are expensive and will accumulate a huge amount of data."
"Zabbix is very easy to implement."
"The most valuable feature is the alert and alarm monitoring."
"I recommend this solution."
"We are able to monitor our virtual infrastructure, virtual machines, windows servers, databases, and the network using a simple network management protocol. We are able to pull almost all the metrics that we want, receive notifications, and have them integrate with telegrams for certain devices that are critical, such as UPSs."
"It is a very good product, and it is for a good reason that we have chosen Zabbix as part of our monitoring portfolio."
"I really love Zabbix because it has a lot of functions and works well."
"It has an intuitive UI with beautiful graphs and customizable maps."
"SNMP monitoring, source discovery, and alert triggering are most valuable."
 

Cons

"The scalability of the agent itself could be improved."
"Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows."
"In an upcoming release, there should be automated reports which we are currently doing manually. For example, if we collect a report file every day and want to send it to a moderator for review. We are expecting this feature to come out soon but it would be valuable to have now."
"Correlation of events would be a wonderful addition."
"The product delivers false positives during reporting because of flapping. Other reasonably priced alternatives may have better performance."
"We would like to monitor other touchpoints such as ATM machines. It would be great if it can provide monitoring of ATM machines. Compatibility with other products would also be great."
"The reports are not great and should be improved."
"The dashboard and the graph section could be a little bit more professional."
"Overall, setting up Zabbix is a challenge."
"It would be helpful if they translated the documentation to Cyrillic languages."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is a true open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
"This is an open-source solution that can be used free of charge."
"If you have 20,000 hosts, the support costs around €95,000 for a year."
"The solution is free. However, many open-sourced tools start out free but eventually start charging."
"Zabbix is open-source so if one wishes to implement it in-house, they must have qualified professionals to set up and optimize databases, Linux/Unix OS, PHP, Apache, and depending on what is monitored, a full-stack network and systems administrator may be needed."
"I was using the free, Community Edition."
"It is worth every cent to pay or even study to do your own installation."
"This solution is completely open-source, so it is quite affordable."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
21%
Outsourcing Company
20%
Construction Company
14%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise35
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Packetbeat?
Elastic is pretty cheap for large enterprises but unaffordable for small ones.
What needs improvement with Packetbeat?
Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows. I recall that Packetbeat can cover a limited number of protocols including ICMP...
What is your primary use case for Packetbeat?
I have dealt with all of them: Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, Elastic Agent, and Fleet, because I need to use all of them to achieve a solution for customers. These solutions are typically...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zabbix?
I think Zabbix is economical, whereas SolarWinds is expensive. SolarWinds has a lot of secure features, but Zabbix is providing everything free of cost. Zabbix is economical, and you can install it...
What needs improvement with Zabbix?
The initial configuration has a steep learning curve because Zabbix is so flexible and customizable. Setting up the right templates, pre-shows, and scripts requires a lot of deep Linux and system k...
What is your primary use case for Zabbix?
On a day-to-day basis, I use Zabbix to monitor our entire infrastructure stack, including our Linux servers, Active Directory, domain controller, and Synology NAS storage array. A specific problem ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
1. IBM 2. Dell 3. Cisco 4. HP 5. Oracle 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon 8. Google 9. Facebook 10. Twitter 11. LinkedIn 12. Netflix 13. Adobe 14. VMware 15. Salesforce 16. SAP 17. Intel 18. AT&T 19. Verizon 20. T-Mobile 21. Vodafone 22. Ericsson 23. Nokia 24. Siemens 25. General Electric 26. Honeywell 27. Philips 28. Sony 29. Samsung 30. LG 31. Panasonic 32. Toshiba
Find out what your peers are saying about Packetbeat vs. Zabbix and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.