Nagios XI vs Sensu Go
Nagios XI
nagios.com
Sensu Go
sensu.ioSide by side
| Figure | Nagios XI | Sensu Go |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $3/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 3 |
| Spec score · Container Monitoring | 9.0 (#4) | 8.1 (#25) |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Monitoring | 9.0 (#3) | 8.1 (#14) |
| Spec score · Server Monitoring | 9.0 (#4) | 8.1 (#17) |
| Alerting | Alerts can use email, Twilio or Multi-Tech SMS, Slack, Discord and SNMP traps, with acknowledgements, downtime, dependencies and escalations. | Sensu can send alerts through email, Slack, and SMS, create or resolve incidents in PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and JIRA, and deduplicate alerts. |
| Company history | Nagios Enterprises was founded by Ethan Galstad in 2007 in St. Paul, Minnesota. | Sensu Go OSS was released in 2017 by Sensu Inc., which was acquired by Sumo Logic in June 2021. |
| Founded | 2007 | 2017 |
| Integrations | Nagios XI supports authentication with Active Directory or LDAP over SSL, Single Sign-On with Microsoft Entra ID, and two-factor authentication through Duo. | Sensu names Elasticsearch, Splunk, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Ansible Tower, Prometheus, and Nagios among its integrations and compatible tools. |
Plans
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
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.
Sensu Go
Sensu Go is a commercial monitoring and observability solution for enterprise DevOps and SRE teams overseeing infrastructure from Kubernetes to bare metal. It collects, filters, and transforms monitoring events before sending them to a database chosen by the customer. Teams can manage declarative monitoring configuration, check system and service health, collect metrics and logs, and run custom scripts including Nagios-style plugins. Agents discover virtual machines, public cloud compute instances, containers, and services. Sensu can alert by email, Slack, or SMS, create or resolve incidents in PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and JIRA, and deduplicate alerts. It also supports remediation actions such as restarting services or running scripts. Sensu Go is self-hosted and free for up to 100 nodes at one site. Pro costs $36 per year, billed annually, with a 100-node minimum; this equals $3.00 per node/month when billed annually. The free 14-day trial is for evaluating beyond 100 nodes. The backend is unsupported on Windows and macOS.