We compared Centreon and Nagios XI across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Centreon features a user-friendly interface with useful options for customization and manual configuration. Users like the solution’s flexible dashboards and the ability to create plugins. Nagios XI received positive feedback for its versatility and adaptability. It offers a diverse selection of plugins and scripts for monitoring needs.
Room for Improvement: Some Centreon users requested better documentation and more flexibility to customize reporting. Other areas for improvement include auto-scanning efficiency and integration. Users have suggested Nagios XI could improve integration, simplify configuration, and make the platform more user-friendly. Nagios XI users also suggest improvements to network visibility and cloud discovery.
Service and Support: Centreon is highly regarded for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service that offers support in multiple languages. However, some customers feel that the lower levels of support are inadequate. Some Nagios XI customers complained about the lack of chat or phone support options.
Ease of Deployment: Centreon's initial setup is described as time-consuming and complex. The deployment varies in duration depending on the IT infrastructure. Some Nagios XI users found the setup to be relatively simple, while others considered it challenging. Deployment can take a few months to complete, and there’s a steep learning curve.
Pricing: Centreon's cost depends on the company's size. It is affordable and suitable for small companies, but it can be costly to scale up. Nagios XI’s pricing is considered reasonable and transparent, with no extra charges.
ROI: Centreon delivers value by helping users identify and resolve critical issues fasters, which could yield large savings. Nagios XI users reported positive outcomes overall, but some said visibility limitations lower the solution’s ROI.
Comparison Results: Centreon is a flexible solution offering a range of customization options. The solution has earned high marks for support and affordability. At the same time, users say the setup can be complicated and time-consuming. Others said that auto-scanning and integration have room for improvement. Nagios XI is an affordable, flexible solution with a broad feature set and a selection of helpful plugins. At the same time, users say the setup can be complex, and some expressed a desire for more convenient ways to contact support.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The customizable reports and dashboards are really flexible. We started this partnership with Centreon, when we were looking for a solution, because of the flexibility of the reporting. That's what we found to be most attractive in the solution. You can display the data as you want."
"We have all our tickets inside Centreon in real-time and can monitor a lot of ELP and CLN in real-time for application purposes."
"Valuable features include the ability to schedule downtime, intensity or depth of monitoring which it does, different plugin packs, Centreon MAP, Centreon BI."
"The product is available in ISO image format, ready for deployment. Centreon also has a comprehensive guide and documentation that are simple and easy to follow."
"You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view."
"Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time... The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us."
"BPI: It allows defining peripherals to map business criticality for efficient monitoring, as required."
"This is a very good solution and it is simple to use, for any company."
"The installation is no problem. I've installed Nagios several times."
"The most valuable feature is its support for different types of devices, where it can use all of the equipment that you need."
"It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers."
"The features I've found the most useful are the plug-ins, the fact that you can connect almost everything to it. That's very useful."
"Nagios is a custom API manager, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I would like them to improve their documentation. When I faced some issues, I was looking for more documentation on the Internet. There is official documentation on Centreon's website, which sometimes is useful. Sometimes it is not very useful, as you cannot find the information or enough examples of configuration. The answer for me was to contact the support, who helped me, but I was not able to find all the information by myself on Centreon's website. A Centreon community or blog would be helpful."
"Improvements I would like to see include a discovery solution, better reports, and end-to-end monitoring."
"It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version."
"I think Centreon's security could be improved by leveraging AI. That's where things are heading in the industry."
"Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes."
"Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on."
"This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud."
"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"I would like to see more customization in the network map because it is a bit tricky to use it."
"They need more documentation for the plugins."
"We'd like to see more integration capabilities."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"There's room for improvement in the visibility, and in the ability to extract information. Stuff like this should be more simple."
"Nagios XI can improve network and hardware monitoring, these parameters should be simplified to allow usage for monitoring. Additionally, if there was automatic reporting it would be helpful."
"The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them."
"The product's stability could be even better."
Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while Nagios XI is ranked 8th in Network Monitoring Software with 54 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while Nagios XI is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and Datadog, whereas Nagios XI is most compared with Nagios Core, Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Wireshark and Nagios Fusion. See our Centreon vs. Nagios XI report.
See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors, best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors, and best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.
We monitor all Network Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.