Nagios Open Source
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy if you have sysadmin time and want free, self-hosted monitoring that scales to huge environments.
Comparison
Nagios Open Source and The OpenNMS Group, Inc. both land on Depends.
Buy if you have sysadmin time and want free, self-hosted monitoring that scales to huge environments.
Built for enterprises running large, distributed networks with dedicated ops staff . the free Horizon edition makes it worth piloting at that scale.
| Compare | Nagios Open Source | The OpenNMS Group, Inc. |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | Hands-on sysadmin teams | Large distributed networks |
| Who it's not for | Teams without time to edit config files | Small businesses with a handful of devices |
| Privacy | Publicly disclosed and patched vulnerabilities exist; no unpatched crisis in evidence . patch promptly.⁹ | Actively maintained: Meridian undergoes penetration testing, but a past code-execution vulnerability required immediate upgrade. |
| Support quality | No Core support evidence found | Horizon is community-only; paid support via Meridian |
| Public sentiment | Admins rate Core 7.7/10 on TrustRadius across 172 reviews, but Reddit chatter questions how much attention the free version still gets.² | No substantive user review scores surfaced; Reddit and directory coverage centers on release announcements rather than buyer opinions. |
| Biggest gotcha | Core is free, but many features live in paid XI; Reddit users complain the open version lags⁶ | A past vulnerability allowed local and remote code execution and demanded immediate upgrades |