bmon vs Cacti

bmon is a free bandwidth monitor and rate estimator for Linux and macOS. It captures networking statistics for monitoring and debugging, presenting them through an interactive curses interface or programmable text output for scripts. The 5.0 release notes describe graph rendering with Braille cells, JSON output, traffic-control ingress and egress display filters, and IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in additional information. Installation guidance covers Fedora and CentOS 7 packages, Debian or Ubuntu and CentOS 6 builds, and macOS installation through Homebrew or source compilation. Release notes also mention CI builds for Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, with fixes for FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, and OpenBSD builds. The repository lists MIT and BSD license files. bmon is maintained by tgraf and hosted on GitHub Pages. Its free plan costs nothing.

Cacti is a free, self-hosted network graphing and operational monitoring framework built around RRDtool. It collects data through SNMP object identifiers or scripts, which can retrieve database information or run other code. Availability checks cover SNMP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP. Discovery and automation can create graphs and data sources, while Remote Data Collectors distribute collection and cache data during network interruptions. Graph items support line, area, stacked, horizontal-rule, vertical-rule, print, and comment types. Device templates connect devices with graph templates and data queries, and plugins can extend collection to other protocols, with WMI listed as an example. Role-based management covers users, groups, and domains. Cacti supports SNMP versions 1, 2, and 3, with a documented limitation for advanced SNMPv3 settings such as SHA224+ or AES192+ when PHP SNMP is used. It is available for Linux/Unix and Windows. Installation requires MySQL, PHP, RRDtool, Net-SNMP, and a PHP-capable web server such as Apache or IIS.