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."
"E-mail alert notifications are valuable."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"Centreon's most valuable feature is Opsgenie."
"We have a single GUI where we can view the status of all our infrastructure."
"Valuable features include the ability to schedule downtime, intensity or depth of monitoring which it does, different plugin packs, Centreon MAP, Centreon BI."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of servers and networks, because we have a lot of them and need to maintain control."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities."
"For servers and for applications, it was very, very efficient."
"The dashboard allows you to see what's going on in the overall system."
"The installation is no problem. I've installed Nagios several times."
"It's great for monitoring IT services infrastructure."
"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."
"The solution has a lot of plugins and scripts integrated with it."
"Nagios allows us to configure any device so that we can send pager alerts when people don't have access to emails. It also allows us to schedule downtime and maintenance."
"The most valuable features of Nagios XI are you can customize it based on your use case and requirements. It is flexible and easy to integrate with our systems. You can customize the solution by adding additional features using code."
"Nagios XI helped me to draw the network and check for system failures."
"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."
"To get it started is a lot of work, since it comes empty. We had to push information into it to make it work."
"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."
"The Home view could be improved by adding customization functions that allow users to change the size of the widgets for a more uniform layout."
"Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature."
"There is room for improvement in the area of artificial intelligence. The product gives us a lot of information, but it's only information. We want the product to do more auto-remediation."
"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."
"There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking."
"Improve the documentation, examples, and best practices, therefore users can understand how to do things."
"It can be quite difficult to know which drivers and agents to use when setting up."
"The product could be optimized to improve the administrative user experience via the Nagios Core Configuration (NCC) GUI module."
"The product uses the backend as Perl and could be modified to a more lightweight solution like what's being offered by other vendors."
"Nagios XI can improve its GUI for users with a new look."
"The product does not have SAP monitoring."
"We'd like to see more integration capabilities."
"The way Nagios displays information isn't easy for a new user to understand. It's not intuitive enough. You need to read some tutorials or be trained to understand what it's displaying. Also, I think it needs more features to improve network visibility because there are some things you can't detect."
Centreon is ranked 11th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 27 reviews while Nagios XI is ranked 9th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring 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 IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors, best Network Monitoring Software vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring 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.