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
- 4.3 (209)
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 |
What the comparison says
Both platforms are self-hosted, so deployment model is not what separates them here. Cacti is described as medium to reach value, against complex for Zabbix.
Cacti licenses on free, Zabbix on free; paid support available. Neither bills on data volume, so the comparison is about what each licence includes rather than how much you send it.
Zabbix leads on fault detection, alerting speed, management UX, integrations and device coverage, and Cacti does not lead by a clear margin anywhere in this set.
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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Data last verified 2026-10-06. 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 are verifiable against each vendor's documentation: deployment model, licensing basis and residency.