Netdata vs smartmontools
Netdata
netdata.cloudsmartmontools
smartmontools.orgSide by side
| Figure | Netdata | smartmontools |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $4.50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Hardware Monitoring Software | 9.0 (#5) | 7.9 (#30) |
| Spec score · Hardware monitoring tools | 8.8 (#8) | 8.7 (#9) |
| License | The Netdata Agent repository is marked GPL-3.0, while the Netdata UI is distributed under the NCUL1 license. | Smartmontools is licensed under the GNU GPL Version 2. |
| Purpose | Netdata describes its product as an observability platform for real-time monitoring and troubleshooting across infrastructure. | Smartmontools provides utilities to control and monitor storage systems using S.M.A.R.T. |
| Security | The site states that Netdata Cloud is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and lists SSO and role-based access control among Business features. | The project uses free code signing from SignPath.io and a free certificate from the SignPath Foundation. |
Plans
Netdata
- CommunityFree
- Business$4.50 a month
- Homelab$90 a year
- Enterprise On-PremisePriced on request
In their own words
Netdata
Netdata is an observability platform for real-time infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. Its agent gathers metrics and logs and provides per-second monitoring, machine-learning anomaly detection, dashboards, and alerts. Netdata lists more than 800 collectors and notification channels, including Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, email, and webhooks. The agent can ingest Prometheus, OpenMetrics, StatsD, and OpenTelemetry data and export to Prometheus Remote Write, InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, and TimescaleDB. Organizations can use the managed cloud platform or deploy on premises, including in air-gapped environments. Netdata says metrics remain on the user's infrastructure while only metadata reaches the cloud. Native Android and iOS apps provide alerts and notifications. The Community plan is free, with up to five active connected nodes and one active custom dashboard per room. Signing up for Netdata Cloud includes a 14-day Business trial for any number of nodes with no limits. Business costs $4.50 per month billed annually, with a stated total of $540.00/year.
smartmontools
smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.