Cacti vs Zabbix
A side-by-side comparison on deployment model, data residency, licensing basis and security coverage. Structural facts are verifiable against vendor documentation; the scored dimensions are our assessment.
Cacti
The Cacti Group
6.7
Average across eight dimensions
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Licensing
- Free
- Time to value
- Medium
- Segment
- SMB / education
- G2
- —
Zabbix
Zabbix LLC
7.8
Average across eight dimensions
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Licensing
- Free; paid support available
- Time to value
- Complex
- Segment
- SMB / mid-market / enterprise
- G2
- —
Score by dimension
| Dimension | CA | ZB |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency control | 10 | 10 |
| Pricing value | 9.8 | 9.8 |
| Detection accuracy | 6 | 8 |
| Response speed | 5.5 | 7.5 |
| Ease of setup | 6 | 5.5 |
| Management UX | 5.5 | 7 |
| Integration depth | 6 | 8.5 |
| Security coverage | 4.5 | 6.5 |
Cacti
- +Free, stable and extremely light on resources
- +Long-established SNMP graphing with a large body of community templates
- +Runs happily on modest hardware in small or isolated environments
- −Graphing-first: alerting requires plugins and is not a core strength
- −Interface and workflow are dated, and development pace is slow
Best for Small or isolated networks needing long-term interface graphing at no cost
Watch out Treat this as a graphing tool rather than a monitoring and alerting platform
Zabbix
- +Genuinely free with no device or metric ceiling at any scale
- +Proxies allow distributed collection across sites and network boundaries
- +Very flexible templating and trigger logic once you understand the model
- −Steep initial learning curve — the configuration model is powerful but unintuitive
- −Database sizing and housekeeping become a real operational job at scale
Best for Engineering-capable teams wanting unlimited scale with no licence cost
Watch out Budget engineering time, not licence budget — that is where the cost actually lands
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Other comparisons
Data last verified 2026-09-16. nPro publishes this comparison. Where nPro appears as one of the platforms listed, its card is marked and its scores are our own assessment. Third-party review scores are sourced from public vendor profiles. Structural facts — deployment model, licensing basis, residency — are verifiable against each vendor's documentation.