Comparison · checked September 2026

PylonMon vs openITCOCKPIT

Short answer: openITCOCKPIT is a full monitoring platform you install on your own Linux server — Naemon underneath, a modern UI on top, SNMP and VMware collectors, SLA reports and ITSM connectors in the paid editions. It is capable and, in its Community edition, free of licence cost; what it costs is a server and someone to run it, and it only sees what that server can reach. PylonMon is the opposite shape: hosted, watching from outside, nothing to operate, paging you when the site or the whole office goes dark. Small IT shops that ran openITCOCKPIT and then moved usually did so to stop babysitting the monitoring box; large operations with a dedicated team often keep it.

Side by side

	PylonMon	openITCOCKPIT
Deployment	Hosted (US, two regions); install only the optional agent	Self-hosted on Ubuntu/Debian (RHEL on higher tiers); you run backups, updates and its uptime
Sees your site from outside	Yes, from the public internet, confirmed from a second region	Only from wherever you install it (usually inside); a satellite architecture is an Enterprise feature
Engine and model	Purpose-built pollers + push agent; monitors are the unit	Naemon/Statusengine; hosts and services (Nagios-style), templates, contacts
Agentless network gear	SNMP through the agent’s [snmp] section; SNMP traps not supported	Strong: SNMP, VMware, cloud, NetFlow; SNMP traps and Checkmk/Prometheus integrations in Enterprise
Node vitals	Agent: CPU, memory, disk, temperature, network, custom commands, LAN probes	Agent or agentless checks; thousands of Nagios plugins
Alerting	Email, SMS, voice, Discord, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, webhooks, push; escalation ladders, on-call rotations, incidents	Notification commands, escalations, contact schedules (Nagios model); SMS via gateway you provide
Status pages, customer-facing	Yes, per client on Team	Internal dashboards and maps; Enterprise adds SLA and downtime reports
Free tier	20 monitors, 3 nodes, commercial use allowed	Community edition: free, no licence cap, on your hardware
Paid	$9 Pro (75 monitors) · $49 Team (250, 5 members) · from $129 Enterprise	Enterprise subscriptions: Bronze 1,000 €/yr (up to 1,000 services) · Silver 3,499 € (5,000, 2 satellites) · Gold 4,999 € (10,000, 5 satellites) · Platinum 9,999 € (30,000, 10 satellites)
Who runs it	We do	You do: a Linux server, patching, upgrades, the database, and the question of who monitors the monitor

The cost that isn’t on the price list

The Community edition is free to license, and that is real. Running it is not free: a VM (or a box), someone to patch it and upgrade it across releases, backups of its database, and — the part that bites — the fact that it lives inside the network it watches. When the office loses power or the ISP link drops, an on-prem monitor goes dark with everything else and nobody is paged. That is the specific failure an off-site service exists to catch. Many teams keep both: openITCOCKPIT for depth inside, PylonMon outside to watch the door and the monitor itself.

PICK OPENITCOCKPIT WHEN

You have a team that runs infrastructure for a living and wants a Nagios-family platform with SNMP, VMware, NetFlow and ITSM hooks.
Data must stay on-prem, or you need SLA/downtime reporting and business-process views.
You are monitoring thousands of services and can staff the platform.

PICK PYLONMON WHEN

You are one person or a small team and the monitoring box is one more thing to keep alive.
You need to know when the site, the VPN, the mail server or the whole office is unreachable from outside.
You want SMS and voice paging, status pages for clients, and a bill that is $9 or $49, not a server and a weekend.

Using both

Keep openITCOCKPIT inside; add PylonMon outside. Monitor openITCOCKPIT’s own web UI with a PylonMon check (or a beacon probe if it isn’t public), put your public services on external monitors, and let the beacon cover the handful of internal things you want paged for at 3 AM without opening the platform. Start free.

Other comparisons: vs Netdata · vs openITCOCKPIT · vs UptimeRobot · Uptime Kuma alternative · Checkly, PagerDuty, healthchecks.io · what it costs, worked examples

openITCOCKPIT facts from openitcockpit.io/editions, checked September 2026 (prices in euro, annual). Tell support@pylonmon.com if something here is out of date and we will fix it.