Comparing MRTG with PRTG Traffic Grapher

Written by Dirk Paessler | Sep 24, 2006

The choice between MRTG and PRTG for your network bandwidth monitoring is - to some extent - a matter of how comfortable you are with configuration files, a manual installation and with adding additional software tools for special tasks. And there are some features that clearly separate both products, too. If you are an experienced Linux user then the open source software MRTG can be a great choice since it can be configured to be a powerful and reliable helper for your daily network management.

But in a business environment which mainly uses the Windows plattform I believe that an integrated "out-of-the-box" solution like PRTG offers the better value - even though it is not free.

We have many customers that have migrated from MRTG to PRTG because they were able to cut their cost-of-ownership (i.e. cost for their daily work for configuration and maintenance of their monitoring system) by up to 80% as these case studies show:

Another large part of the PRTG user community are those less-technical-minded people that want to know what's going on in their network but are unhappy with long installation instructions. Because we are asked every once in a while where the differences between PRTG and MRTG are we have tried to create a list of features to compare both programs from a neutral standpoint. Here is the first draft of this list:

Feature	MRTG	PRTG 6
SNMP Based Traffic Monitoring	Yes	Yes
Monitoring of any other SNMP based device	Yes	Yes (selected prebuilt OID libraries included)
Packet Sniffer based traffic monitoring	O	Yes
NetFlow based traffic monitoring (e.g. for Cisco Routers)	O	Yes
Latency Monitoring	(with custom scripts)	Yes
Classifies network traffic by IP address, protocol and other parameters	O	Yes (for packet sniffing and NetFlow)
Monitoring of custom script results	Yes	No (you can use PRTG's sister product IPCheck Server Monitor instead)
Operating Systems	Linux, Netware, Windows	Windows
Installation on Windows	Complex (see Windows installation instructions with seven pages on the MRTG website). "Exe-to service" and web server software must be installed and configured manually.	2 minutes with a standard Windows setup wizard. Built-in "NT-service", web server and fast database system.
Configuration	Configuration file based, can be complex.	Easy to use Windows GUI with wizards
User Interface	Set of linked HTML pages	One intuitive Windows based and one rich javascript powered Web based user interface
Webserver	Not included (needs an external web server). Since monitoring results are written to the disk with a specified interval the graphs can show a slight delay. No user account management.	Built-in web server with optional user account management. Web server creates all graphs and tables on-the-fly, so they are always current.
Reporting Engine	With additional software	Configurable scheduled and on-demand reports (graphs and data tables) in HTML, Excel, TIF, RTF, or PDF format . Daily, monthly, and yearly reports can be exported via email or saved to file. Includes a billing system for bandwidth based billing with optional x% percentile calculation.
Notification System	With additional software	Sends an email, http request or starts an exe when errors occur and when traffic or threshold limits are reached.
License	Open Source	Freeware and Commercial Editions available.
Maintenance/Support	Mailing list, forum	maintenance contracts available, one-to-one support through emails and forums by the developer.

What do you think should be in the list? Do you see incorrect information?

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