Cortex vs Zabbix
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Zabbix
Enterprise-grade open-source monitoring solution
| Feature | Cortex | Zabbix |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 90 · Excellent | 89 · Excellent |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Language | Go | Go Template |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 5,865 | ★ 6,411 |
| First released | 2016 | 2001 |
| Replaces | Datadog, Grafana Cloud | Datadog, Nagios |
What are Cortex and Zabbix?
Cortex
Cortex provides a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long-term store for Prometheus metrics. It offers a single API endpoint for querying and writing time series data across clusters.
- Multi-tenant metrics storage
- Horizontally scalable
- Prometheus-compatible API
- Long-term retention
Zabbix
Zabbix is an enterprise-class monitoring solution for networks, servers, cloud, and applications with deep alerting. It targets organizations needing comprehensive infrastructure monitoring. It is deployed via Docker or native packages.
- Agent and agentless monitoring
- Powerful triggers and alerting
- Network discovery and maps
- Highly scalable
Cortex vs Zabbix: key differences
Cortex is written in Go, while Zabbix is built with Go Template. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Cortex versus AGPL-3.0 for Zabbix. Zabbix is the more established project (first released 2001), while Cortex arrived in 2016.
Why pick each one
Choose Cortex if…
- Built for very large scale
- True multi-tenancy
Watch out for
- Operationally heavy
- Overkill for small setups
Choose Zabbix if…
- Comprehensive and mature
- Scales to large estates
- Fully free
Watch out for
- Steep learning curve
- Dated interface
Frequently asked questions
Is Cortex or Zabbix better?
Neither is universally better. Zabbix has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Cortex and Zabbix free and open-source?
Yes. Cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Zabbix under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cortex and Zabbix with Docker?
Cortex: yes. Zabbix: yes.