Zabbix vs PRTG Pricing at 50 to 1,000 Devices

Zabbix Cloud is cheaper than PRTG Hosted Monitor at every network size Paessler publishes, as long as each device sends fewer than about 60 to 240 values a minute. At 100 devices with 50 metrics each, collected every minute, Zabbix Cloud costs $1,224 a year on its annual plan against $4,299 for PRTG Hosted. Self-hosted, Zabbix has no license fee at all, and PRTG with its included support only beats Zabbix plus a Silver support subscription at the smallest size, 50 devices.

The two products count completely different things, which is why most comparisons fall back on "Zabbix is free, PRTG is not" and stop. PRTG sells sensors. Zabbix Cloud sells a data rate, new values per second (NVPS). To put them side by side you have to convert both to devices, and that conversion is where the answer turns. Every price below comes from paessler.com and zabbix.com in US dollars, and every total is arithmetic you can redo.

How much does Zabbix cost?

The Zabbix software is open source with no license fee and no limit on hosts, users or metrics. You pay in one of two ways. Zabbix Cloud, the hosted version, is $50 a month for Nano, $100 for Micro, $250 for Small, $750 for Medium, $1,875 for Large, $2,500 for xLarge and $5,000 for 2xLarge, priced by NVPS, plus $0.30 per GB of storage a month above the free 10 GB. Self-hosted, an optional support subscription costs $325 a month for Silver or from $825 a month for Gold, billed annually. The tier boundaries, the storage rule and a calculator built on Zabbix's own formula are on our Zabbix pricing page.

How much does PRTG cost?

PRTG Network Monitor is a subscription priced by sensor: $200 a month for 500 sensors, $358 for 1,000, $742 for 2,500, $1,300 for 5,000 and $1,642 for 10,000, billed annually, with support and updates included. Paessler maps 500 sensors to about 50 devices, so the license name counts measurements, not machines. PRTG Hosted Monitor, which Paessler runs for you, costs within $5 a year of the self-hosted price at every tier: $2,399, $4,299, $8,899, $15,599 and $19,699 a year. The full ladder is on our PRTG pricing breakdown.

Zabbix Cloud vs PRTG Hosted Monitor at 50, 100, 250, 500 and 1,000 devices

The fair comparison is the two hosted products, since in both cases the vendor runs the server. Device counts are Paessler's own (PRTG 500 for about 50 devices up to PRTG 10000 for about 1,000). For Zabbix we used the default in Zabbix's calculator, 50 metrics per device, at two intervals, and Zabbix's suggested storage for each tier. Annual billing on both sides.

Zabbix Cloud wins every row, by 1.8 to 4.4 times at one-minute collection and by far more at five minutes. Notice that the gap does not shrink steadily. It narrows to 1.8x at 500 devices and widens again at 1,000, because 500 devices at one minute land at 417 NVPS, well inside Medium, and 1,000 devices land at 834, still inside the same tier. Zabbix's Medium tier covers 250 to 999 NVPS for one price, so the second 500 devices are free on the Zabbix side, while PRTG charges $4,100 more for them.

Is Zabbix cheaper than PRTG?

On the hosted products, yes, until your devices get chatty. Zabbix bills the data rate and PRTG does not, so the answer depends on how many values each device sends a minute. We stepped the metric count up one at a time for each size and found where Zabbix Cloud first costs more than PRTG Hosted, holding PRTG to Paessler's own device mapping:

The crossover depends only on values per minute, not on how you get there. At five-minute collection the break-even metric counts are 595, 748, 1,199, 600 and 300, almost exactly five times the one-minute figures, which is what the formula predicts and is a useful check that the table is not an artifact. For most estates the line sits high. Sixty values a minute per device means, for example, 60 items all collected every minute on every host, which is a heavily instrumented fleet. Large estates with aggressive collection are where PRTG's flat sensor ladder starts to look good, because the Medium to Large step on Zabbix Cloud adds $1,125 a month for a single extra value a second.

One caveat runs the other way. PRTG's ten-sensors-per-device ratio is a planning figure, not a limit. If your devices need twenty sensors each, PRTG at 100 devices needs 2,000 sensors and a PRTG 2500 license at $8,899 a year, which moves every crossover in Zabbix's favor.

Self-hosted Zabbix vs self-hosted PRTG, with support

Run both on your own server and the license comparison is $0 against $2,400 to $19,704 a year. That is not quite fair, because the PRTG subscription includes support and Zabbix's free software does not. Here is PRTG against Zabbix with a support subscription added:

At 50 devices, PRTG is $1,500 a year cheaper than Zabbix with Silver support. From 100 devices up, Zabbix with Silver is cheaper, and the gap reaches $15,804 a year at 1,000. Silver is a thin plan, though: one Zabbix server, no proxies, eight support cases a year and a next-business-day response. A 1,000-device estate with proxies needs Gold or above, which Zabbix prices per server and proxy, so treat the Gold column as a floor. Neither column includes the server, the database or the administrator's time, and Zabbix has a reputation for needing someone who knows it well. That time is the largest cost in most self-hosted Zabbix installs.

Both options are annual commitments with renewal dates that tend to arrive unnoticed, and the PRTG one rises with every sensor tier you outgrow. If your company already has a system that tracks vendor contracts and renewal dates, put the monitoring renewal in it the day you sign, so the next sizing decision happens before the invoice and not after.

What neither price covers

Zabbix and PRTG are both built to watch infrastructure: servers, switches, interfaces, disks and services inside your network. That is what the money above buys, and both do it well. Neither is built to tell you whether customers outside your network can reach your website. Zabbix Cloud runs from one node in one of five regions, PRTG from wherever your probe sits, and neither ships a public status page. Zabbix Cloud also needs a weekly maintenance window of at least an hour during which the node may be offline.

For public sites and APIs, most teams pair the infrastructure monitor with an external check. UptimeHub checks sites, APIs, ports, SSL certificates and cron jobs from six regions, confirms a failure from more than one before it alerts, and powers a branded status page on every plan, from $24 a month billed yearly for 20 monitors. How that confirmation works is on the multi-location monitoring page, and if Nagios XI is also on your shortlist, Nagios XI vs PRTG pricing runs the same comparison for the third common option.

Which is cheaper for your network?

Pick Zabbix Cloud if you want a hosted infrastructure monitor and your collection rate is moderate: it is cheaper than PRTG Hosted at every published size below about 60 values per device a minute, and dramatically cheaper if a five-minute interval is acceptable. Pick PRTG if your estate is large and heavily instrumented, if you want support bundled into one price at 50 devices or fewer, or if your team would rather pay for a product that is quick to set up than for the hours Zabbix takes. And whichever you choose, keep the check that proves customers can reach you outside it.