Comparison
Nagios and Zabbix are free. Running them is not.
Both are genuinely capable, both have large communities, and teams with the expertise and the time get excellent results from them — we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the licence was never the expensive part. The expensive parts are the engineer who understands the templates, the on-call rota nobody wants, and the fact that neither tool ships a SOC, a camera estate, or anybody awake at 3am.
templates, plugins or checks for you to maintain
coverage available as a service, not as a rota you staff
platform for network, security and video
Where the real cost turns up.
None of this is an argument that the software is bad. It is an argument about what an open-source monitoring deployment actually consumes once it is past the first hundred devices.
The expertise is one person deep
Most self-hosted deployments have exactly one engineer who genuinely understands the checks, the templates and why that threshold is set the way it is. That is a single point of failure with a notice period, and it is rarely on anybody's risk register.
Maintenance is the job, not a task
Plugins, templates, dependencies, database growth, upgrades and the checks that quietly stopped working eighteen months ago. It is steady, unglamorous work that competes directly with the projects your team was hired to deliver.
There is no security half and no video
Neither project ships security operations, correlation across a security estate, or camera and access-control monitoring. Those are separate builds or separate products, and integrating them is entirely your problem.
Nobody is watching at 3am
A monitoring system that alerts perfectly into a channel nobody is reading at 3am has told you nothing. Open source solves the detection problem and leaves the staffing problem exactly where it was.
What you are actually buying.
Not features you could not build. Time you would otherwise spend building and maintaining them, plus two layers that neither project covers, plus the option to hand over the hours.
Multi-vendor normalisation out of the box
Device health, interfaces, capacity and configuration mapped into one model across manufacturers, without per-device templates to write and maintain. The estate is comparable on day one rather than after a quarter of tuning.
Diagnosis instead of alerting
Symptoms are correlated to the device or link that actually failed and the downstream storm is suppressed. Getting the equivalent from a check-based system means writing and maintaining dependency logic yourself.
Security operations included
Detection mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, analyst-verified triage and automated containment on the same platform as the network telemetry — the layer an open-source monitoring stack has no answer for.
Cameras and access control too
The physical estate is monitored and correlated alongside everything else. For an industrial site, a bank or a campus that is usually the layer with the least visibility and the most exposure.
Self-healing, not just notification
Known faults trigger their remediation playbook — restart a service, fail a link over, clear a queue — with an approval model behind each action. Recurring problems stop reaching a human at all.
You can hand over the hours
The same platform is available as NOC as a Service and SOC as a Service. That option does not exist with self-hosted open source at any price, and for most teams it is the actual reason to move.
The honest comparison is not licence cost. It is engineer-hours.
Work out what your monitoring stack costs in the time of the people who keep it running, then add the risk that concentrates in whoever understands it best. That figure is the one worth comparing against a subscription — and for some teams it still comes out in favour of staying.
Build-and-maintain versus subscribe
Templates, checks, plugin updates, dependency maps and upgrades are the ongoing cost of a self-hosted deployment. They do not appear on any invoice, which is exactly why they are so easy to leave out of the comparison.
The bus-factor problem
Deep tool-specific knowledge held by one or two people is fine until it is not. A platform with a vendor behind it moves that risk off your team, which is worth something even to organisations that could do it themselves.
Two layers you would otherwise integrate
Security operations and physical security are separate projects on top of an open-source monitoring stack. Here they are the same platform and the same incident timeline, with nothing to build between them.
Coverage is purchasable
Round-the-clock operation is a staffing problem regardless of tooling. This is the only option on the shortlist where somebody else can hold the rota, which is frequently what the evaluation was really about.
Where each one is the better answer
Stay on open source if
- You have the in-house expertise and it is not concentrated in one person.
- Monitoring is the requirement — no SOC, no cameras, no managed hours.
- Deep customisation matters more to you than time-to-value.
- Capital cost is the binding constraint and engineer time is not.
Look at PrahiX if
- Maintenance is competing with the projects your team was hired for.
- One person's departure would leave nobody who understands the checks.
- Security and physical estate need to be in the same picture.
- You need 3am coverage and cannot staff three shifts to get it.
How a migration actually works.
In parallel, and without touching the existing deployment. If your open-source stack is doing its job, you should be able to see us matching it before you retire anything.
Discover, without templates
Agentless discovery over SNMP, syslog, NetFlow and vendor APIs identifies the estate — make, model, firmware, interfaces and topology — with no per-device configuration to write. The list it returns is usually longer than the one currently monitored.
Run alongside what you have
Both systems poll the same devices for as long as you want. This is where the comparison gets made honestly: same estate, same period, and you can see which one caught what, and how much noise each produced getting there.
Add the layers you never built
Security telemetry, and the cameras and access controllers if you run them, join the same platform. This is the part that was never going to happen on the open-source stack, because it was always the next project.
Decide what you still want to run
Some teams retire the old stack entirely; some keep it for a specific job it does well. Either is fine — but the maintenance burden should be a decision from here on, rather than something that accumulated.
An honest side by side.
Open source is a legitimate choice made well by many capable teams. The comparison below is about what each model asks of you, not about which software is better written.
| Capability | Nagios / Zabbix | PrahiX | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | None | A subscription | The one line where open source always wins |
| Setup and tuning | Templates, checks and plugins, written and maintained by you | Agentless discovery and per-device baselines | Where most of the hidden cost actually sits |
| Multi-vendor handling | Per-device templates and community plugins | Normalised into one model at ingestion | Whether devices are comparable without your own work |
| Root-cause correlation | Dependency logic you configure | Built in, with downstream suppression | One diagnosed fault versus forty alerts |
| Security operations | Not included | Same platform, same timeline | Whether the SOC is a separate build |
| Video / physical security | Not included | Cameras and access control included | The layer with the least visibility on most estates |
| Automated remediation | Event handlers you write | Playbooks with an approval model and audit trail | Whether recurring faults stop reaching a human |
| 24x7 operation | Your rota, at every hour | Yours, or ours as a managed service | Usually the real reason the evaluation started |
| Customisation ceiling | Effectively unlimited — it is your code | Configurable, not open-ended | An honest point against us for teams that value it |
Evidence you would otherwise assemble
An open-source stack holds the data an auditor wants but rarely in the shape they want it. Availability records, incident timelines with escalation timings, retained logs and change history come out of this platform as reports rather than as a query-writing exercise the week before — which matters most to exactly the regulated estates that tend to run the leanest teams.
- Continuous availability and performance records
- Incident timelines with detection, escalation and response
- Configuration-drift and change history across the estate
- RBI, SEBI CSCRF and CERT-In evidence produced as you operate
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No. Both are capable, well-established projects with large communities, and plenty of organisations run them extremely well. If you have the in-house expertise, the time to maintain them, and your requirement is monitoring rather than converged operations, staying is a defensible decision and we will say so on a call.
They suit different teams — Nagios is plugin-centric with a long history and a commercial edition alongside the open-source core; Zabbix is template-centric with more built in by default. But the choice between them rarely changes the calculation this page is about, which is what either costs to run and what neither covers.
More than zero, obviously. The comparison worth doing is a subscription against the engineer-hours your current stack consumes each month, plus the risk concentrated in whoever understands it best, plus what you would spend building the security and physical layers that are not there. For some teams that maths favours staying — it depends on how scarce your engineers are.
Yes, and several customers do for specific jobs their stack does well. Collection is agentless and does not interfere, so running both indefinitely is possible. Most teams eventually retire the old system, but nothing about the migration requires deciding that up front.
The scripts themselves are, but the intent behind them usually is not — most custom checks encode knowledge about what matters on a particular device or service, and that maps onto baselines and detections here. Bring your check list to the scoping conversation; it is the fastest way to establish whether the platform covers your real requirements.
Monitoring is built on the same open standards your current stack uses — SNMP, syslog, NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, SSH and vendor APIs — so mixed estates are handled without per-device work. Send your inventory and we will confirm coverage against your actual models.
Unlimited customisation, and the ability to fix anything yourself because you have the source. That is a genuine loss and for some teams it is decisive. What you gain is the maintenance time back, two layers you did not have, and the option to hand over the hours.
Yes. Run us alongside your existing deployment on the same devices for a few weeks and compare directly — what each caught, how quickly, and how much noise each produced. That is a much better test than any feature comparison, and it is a test your current stack might well pass.
Keep reading
Run us next to it for a month.
Same devices, same period, no disruption to what you already have. Then compare what each system caught and what it cost you in attention. If your stack wins, keep it — that is a legitimate outcome and we would rather find out early too.