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Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 2024

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 XI
Ranking in Server Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (16th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th), Cloud Monitoring Software (19th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Server Monitoring
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (22nd), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of Nagios XI is 6.3%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 2.9%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor2.9%
Nagios XI6.3%
Other90.8%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Emmanuel Appiah Boateng - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and Security Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Simplifies setup and requires user interface enhancement
Nagios XI is easy to install, which sets it apart from other open-source solutions I've tried. Typically, setting up a monitoring system on Linux involves cloning files from GitHub, building it, and installing many dependencies, but with Nagios XI, it wasn't like that. Nagios XI simplifies our setup and reduces the time spent configuring monitoring tools.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Nagios XI is a simple monitoring tool with performance management and everything a standard monitoring tool provides."
"Overall, it's a powerful system."
"The dashboard allows you to see what's going on in the overall system."
"It has a wide variety of plugins in existence, but when there's no plugin available it is quite simple to integrate one's own programs and scripts."
"The product allows comprehensive monitoring of your environment, from basic monitoring of your servers health to more complex tasks like AD, database, and, to some extent, application-level monitoring."
"It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability."
"It is a very stable solution and the best solution for monitoring any IT infrastructure for all companies."
"All of them, but mainly: Highly-efficient server performance monitoring engine Configuration wizards Infrastructure management Configuration snapshot."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
 

Cons

"Nagios provides most of the features by default, however to add more services to it, it requires additional plugins which require little effort on administrative end."
"Nagios needs to improve their incident manager. Currently, it isn't good for ITIL in my opinion."
"Adding new servers and passive checks (which require setting up agents and NRDS) on servers are a little difficult to do properly when employees don't understand the process."
"It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure."
"From an alerting point of view, some graphics and metrics don't work properly with Nagios XI as they do with Checkmk."
"I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space."
"The technical support is variable - sometimes I get answers, but most of my tickets go unanswered."
"WebUI should be improved (visual aspect) and should incorporate non-relational databases."
"MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking; without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, and I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."
"Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Nagios XI is an expensive solution."
"You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
"It is good to contact experts for advice about what is the best solution for your specific infrastructure and enterprise."
"The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily."
"Licensing costs are reasonable."
"For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value."
"We are using the free version of this solution."
"The pricing is high with separate licensing for the product and support."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"The price is too high."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
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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
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
13%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nagios XI?
The pricing for the Nagios XI product is good and better than other solutions. I would give it a four or five.
What needs improvement with Nagios XI?
The user interface needs improvement. Many tools have poor user interfaces, making them hard to manage and navigate.
What is your primary use case for Nagios XI?
I normally use Nagios XI for our servers. It's not particularly used for network equipment, however, I use it for monitoring our server performance, including CPU, memory, data, and services runnin...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios XI vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,403 professionals have used our research since 2012.