Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Zabbix VS LibreNMS

Compare Zabbix VS LibreNMS and see what are their differences

Zabbix logo Zabbix

Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

LibreNMS logo LibreNMS

A fully featured network monitoring system that provides a wealth of features and device support.
  • Zabbix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-10-02
  • LibreNMS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-20

Zabbix features and specs

  • Open-source
    Zabbix is free and open-source, allowing for extensive customization and modification to meet specific needs without licensing costs.
  • Scalability
    Zabbix can handle a large number of devices and data points, making it suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Zabbix offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including servers, networks, cloud services, and applications.
  • Alerting and Notification
    It provides robust alerting mechanisms, allowing notifications via email, SMS, and other methods.
  • Flexible Configuration
    The system allows for detailed and flexible configuration, accommodating various specific monitoring requirements.
  • Extensive API
    Zabbix comes with a comprehensive API that allows for integration with third-party tools and custom automation scripts.
  • Strong Community Support
    As an open-source project, Zabbix has a strong community that can provide support and share best practices.

Possible disadvantages of Zabbix

  • Complex Setup and Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complicated and time-consuming, often requiring a steep learning curve.
  • Resource Intensive
    Zabbix can be resource-intensive, particularly on the database side, which might require substantial hardware resources for large deployments.
  • User Interface
    The user interface is considered less modern and user-friendly compared to some commercial alternatives.
  • Documentation
    While comprehensive, the documentation can sometimes be difficult to navigate for new users.
  • Maintenance Effort
    Ongoing maintenance, such as updates and troubleshooting, can be labor-intensive.
  • Dependency on MySQL
    The heavy reliance on MySQL databases can be a disadvantage for users preferring other database technologies.
  • Initial Costs for Large Scale Deployments
    Although the software is free, the costs associated with setting up and maintaining the necessary infrastructure and hardware can be significant, especially for larger deployments.

LibreNMS features and specs

  • Open Source
    LibreNMS is open-source software, allowing you to customize, modify, and distribute it freely. This also means it has a community of contributors who help improve and maintain the project.
  • Vendor-Agnostic
    Supports a wide range of network devices and vendors, making it a versatile network monitoring tool capable of managing heterogeneous environments.
  • Scalability
    Designed to scale from small office networks to large data center environments, ensuring it can grow with your network infrastructure needs.
  • Auto Discovery
    Includes automatic network discovery capabilities which help in identifying and adding devices to the monitoring system effortlessly.
  • Extensive Features
    Offers a robust set of features including alerting, graphing, and support for a variety of network protocols (e.g., SNMP, ICMP, BGP).
  • Integration
    Integrates well with other tools and services such as RANCID, Collectd, Nagios, and more, enhancing its capabilities in various IT ecosystem setups.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Provides an intuitive web-based interface that makes it easier for administrators to navigate and use the tool effectively.

Possible disadvantages of LibreNMS

  • Complex Initial Setup
    The initial setup can be complex and time-consuming, especially for users who are not familiar with network monitoring systems.
  • Resource Intensive
    Requires significant server resources (CPU, memory, disk space) as your network grows, which could necessitate infrastructure upgrades.
  • Learning Curve
    Has a steep learning curve for new users, particularly those who are not experienced with network monitoring tools.
  • Documentation
    While there is documentation available, it can sometimes be lacking in detail or out-of-date, making it difficult for users to troubleshoot or fully utilize all features.
  • Community Support
    Relies heavily on community support which can be inconsistent and may not always provide timely solutions for critical issues.
  • Third-Party Dependencies
    Requires several third-party dependencies for full functionality, making the setup process more complicated and sometimes leading to compatibility issues.

Zabbix videos

An overview of Zabbix 4.0 and how we are using it.

More videos:

  • Review - Zabbix Monitoring Solution - Overview
  • Review - ZABBIX Network Discovery For Dynamic Deployments

LibreNMS videos

Network Monitoring - LibreNMS

More videos:

  • Review - NLNOG day 2017 - Neil Lathwood (LibreNMS) - Monitoring Everything
  • Review - [LibreNMS] Explaining alert rules
  • Tutorial - Introduction to LibreNMS and Prime Features - LibreNMS
  • Tutorial - LibreNMS Application -Apache

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Zabbix and LibreNMS)
Monitoring Tools
91 91%
9% 9
Log Management
90 90%
10% 10
Performance Monitoring
88 88%
12% 12
Website Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Zabbix and LibreNMS

Zabbix Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    Indispensable

    Zabbix has been part of my toolbox for quite some time. I can easily say it's an indispensable tool for me now.

    Managing a dozen servers without Zabbix would be unimaginable. I'm monitoring all of this: CPU, Memory, Hard-drives, website response times, downtime. The UI might be a bit "old school", but everything works flawlessly.

    With regards to hard-drive monitoring, I love the machine learning option that allows you to "predict" the number of days before running out of space. That's quite helpful, as I've got some of my servers down due to running out of space multiple times in the past (before I was using Zabbix).

    👍 Pros:    Open-source|It can monitor everything
    👎 Cons:    The ui is a bit unintuitive in some cases

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Unlimited scaling: Zabbix is a flexible software that lets you monitor anything you want. It is highly scalable as it helps you manage both multi-tenant enterprise environments and your home.
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Zabbix is a very strong competitor to Nagios and its development is very encouraging. Zabbix is completely free to use, which makes it a competitor to Nagios Core. Zabbix beats Nagios in the free monitoring market because it has a good frontend, which Nagios Core lacks and it also provides NetFlow monitoring, which isn’t present in Nagios Core – that is a separate paid...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
Zabbix, a widely adopted open-source monitoring tool, offers a range of practical features. It allows you to monitor various aspects of your system, including transactions, application performance, and real browser monitoring. With ready-to-use templates for different servers and operating systems, Zabbix simplifies the monitoring process.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Zabbix offers a unified view of the entire IT infrastructure through its user-friendly web-based interface. It delivers potent visualization capabilities through customizable dashboards, complemented by robust alerting mechanisms and comprehensive support for alert escalations.
Source: signoz.io

LibreNMS Reviews

The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
LibreNMS is a fully-fledged network monitoring system supporting various device types and vendors, including Linux, Foundry, Cisco, and many others. As a result, it’s one of the most accessible tools on this list to use straight out of the box. In addition, its autodiscovery features help you spend as little time as possible setting it up.
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: LibreNMS is an open source network monitoring system that uses several network protocols to observe every device on your network. The LibreNMS API can retrieve, manage, and graph the data it collects and supports horizontal scaling to grow its monitoring capabilities alongside your network. The tool features a flexible alerting system that is tailor-made to...
Top 10 PRTG Alternatives for Monitoring Networks and IT Infrastructure
Observium is similar to LibreNMS (which is a fork of it) and comes in Enterprise, Professional and Community Editions, so you have a free version if you want to try it out. It is more a network centric tool instead of a systems monitoring tool.
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
LibreNMS is a fully featured network monitoring system. It is based on PHP/MySQL/SNMP. LibreMNS covers a wide range of operating systems and network hardware.
Source: geekflare.com
13 Best Nagios Alternatives for Networks, Servers, IT Systems Monitoring
During the setup process, LibreNMS automatically discovers individual devices and end-points using various protocols such as CDP, FDP, LLDP, OSPF, BGP, SNMP and ARP. Users don’t need to spend hours adding individual devices to be monitored.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Zabbix seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 5 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Zabbix mentions (5)

  • Learning Resources
    Official Zabbix trainings, documentation on zabbix.com ? Source: over 2 years ago
  • zabbix installation
    Hallo, do you know a howto to install zabbix on an ubuntu 20.04 ? I tried the manuals from zabbix.com for MySQL Apache but it didn't work. Source: about 3 years ago
  • How I am getting experience as a linux admistrator (Follow Up)
    He suggested that I indeed should set up a home-lab. To be specific he said that I should create a minimal install of Centos 8 and install zabbix server on it (https://zabbix.com) and monitor a whole bunch of other VMs, services and stuff.. He said that I should set up a variety of VMs and also maybe host a website on one of them. And then if I was able to do that, I could help to share a load of zabbix related... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Ubuntu Impish 21.10 / Zabbix 6.0 LTS
    This is a fresh 21.10 install, using the install repo as detailed on the zabbix.com download page. Source: about 3 years ago
  • One dev conference speaker's family member died, need your help to fill the speaking slot on Nov 27/28
    Well, if you can't find anyone, I am more than happy to fill the slot with something regarding Zabbix - just let me know ;). Source: over 3 years ago

LibreNMS mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of LibreNMS yet. Tracking of LibreNMS recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Zabbix and LibreNMS, you can also consider the following products

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Observium - Observium

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

Icinga - Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

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