Mackerel vs Nagios XI
Mackerel
mackerel.ioNagios XI
nagios.comSide by side
| Figure | Mackerel | Nagios XI |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 9 |
| Spec score · Cloud Monitoring | 7.8 (#11) | 9.0 (#4) |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Monitoring | 7.9 (#15) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Founded | 2001 | 2007 |
| Headquarters | Kyoto, Japan | St. Paul, Minnesota, United States |
| Support | Customer Reliability Engineers provide technical support and can guide customers through implementation and use. | A paid license includes the first year of Maintenance & Support, version upgrades, up to ten support cases, Support Portal access, Premium features, and an assigned Customer Success Manager. |
| Trial | The two-week free trial provides Standard-plan functions, with a trial trace-span allowance of 100M spans. | The 30-day trial includes unlimited monitoring, Enterprise features, and direct technical support, with no credit card required. |
Plans
Mackerel
- FreeFree
- StandardPrice not published
- Standard (micro host)Priced on request
Nagios XI
- Standard — 100 Nodes$2,595, paid once
- Enterprise — 100 Nodes$4,690, paid once
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Standard$2,595, paid once
- Standard (100-Node)$2,595, paid once
- Enterprise$4,690, paid once
- Enterprise (100-Node)$4,690, paid once
- SitewidePriced on request
In their own words
Mackerel
Mackerel is a cloud-based SaaS service for monitoring servers and team-managed infrastructure. Installing its agent starts monitoring, after which hosts can be grouped into services and roles. It visualizes host metrics and user-defined service measures, including response time, sales and page views. Monitoring features include combining metrics, tracking predicted values and machine-learning anomaly detection. Cloud integrations cover Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; a container agent treats Amazon ECS tasks and Kubernetes pods as hosts. Users can extend monitoring with open-source plugins, APIs and the mkr command-line tool. Customer Reliability Engineers can offer technical guidance on implementation and use, while standard-plan technical support is email-only. The free plan has five standard and micro hosts total, 500 metrics, one-day retention, 10 monitoring rules, one dashboard and up to 5M trace spans. A two-week trial includes Standard-plan functions and a 100M-span allowance. Standard host usage costs 2,180 yen, tax included, per host month.
Nagios XI
Nagios XI monitors servers, network devices, applications and services from a Linux server you manage. It checks configured thresholds, records results and sends notifications. Standard includes more than 90 configuration wizards, auto-discovery, dashboards, performance graphs, an open REST API, automation, configuration rollback and snapshots. Enterprise adds SLA and capacity-planning reports, scheduled reports and pages, business process intelligence, bulk changes and an audit log. Users can be restricted to assigned host and service groups, with authentication options including Active Directory or LDAP over SSL, Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on and Duo two-factor authentication. It is self-hosted on Linux, with virtual machine images for several hypervisors and offline installation on Red Hat and CentOS Stream. A 30-day trial provides unlimited monitoring, Enterprise features and direct support without a credit card. The free plan is limited to 7 nodes or 100 services, whichever comes first. Paid perpetual licenses are priced by monitored nodes: Standard is $2,595.00 once and Enterprise is $4,690.00 once, each shown for 100 nodes.