What is Cacti used for?

Cacti is an open-source network monitoring and graphing platform built on RRDtool, collecting time-series data from devices and servers. It is a good fit for monitoring bandwidth and device health on a network, and graphing server and application metrics.

Is Cacti open source?

Yes. Cacti is open source under the GPL-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Cacti/cacti and is written mainly in PHP.

Yes. Cacti is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Cacti?

Yes. Cacti can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Cacti an alternative to?

Cacti is an open-source alternative to PRTG Network Monitor, SolarWinds Observability, LogicMonitor and Nagios XI. Other open-source alternatives to PRTG Network Monitor include LibreNMS, Zabbix and Nagios Core.

Is Cacti actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Cacti was on 2 October 2026. The project has 1.9k stars on GitHub.

Cacti: open-source alternative to PRTG Network Monitor

About Cacti

Cacti is an open-source network monitoring and graphing platform built on RRDtool. It provides a scalable framework for collecting, storing and visualizing time-series data from network devices, servers and applications. It is a PHP application, licensed under GPL-2.0, that is typically installed on a web server alongside MariaDB or MySQL.

Core capabilities listed in the README include automated device discovery, local and remote data collection, templating for graphs, data sources and round-robin archives, SNMP polling across versions 1, 2 and 3 with IPv6 support, role-based access control, a plugin framework and dynamic graph viewing and export. Scheduled polling and maintenance scripts run through PHP on the command line or CGI.

The project maintains a stable 1.2.x branch and a develop branch heading toward 1.3.x, with different minimum requirements for MariaDB, MySQL, PHP, RRDtool and Net-SNMP in each. Red Hat family distributions are a common baseline, and Debian and Ubuntu are well supported. Installation from a source checkout is described in the README, with the latest release published on GitHub.

Key features

RRDtool-based graphing of time-series data
Automated device discovery
SNMP v1, v2 and v3 polling with IPv6
Templates for graphs and data sources
Role-based access control
Plugin framework

Good fit for

→Monitoring bandwidth and device health on a network
→Graphing server and application metrics

Built with: PHP
Tags: network-monitoring; rrdtool; snmp; graphing; php; monitoring; self-hosted; network-discovery

Cacti: questions and answers

What is Cacti used for?: Cacti is an open-source network monitoring and graphing platform built on RRDtool, collecting time-series data from devices and servers. It is a good fit for monitoring bandwidth and device health on a network, and graphing server and application metrics.
Is Cacti open source?: Yes. Cacti is open source under the GPL-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Cacti/cacti and is written mainly in PHP.
Is Cacti free?: Yes. Cacti is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Cacti?: Yes. Cacti can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Cacti an alternative to?: Cacti is an open-source alternative to PRTG Network Monitor, SolarWinds Observability, LogicMonitor and Nagios XI. Other open-source alternatives to PRTG Network Monitor include LibreNMS, Zabbix and Nagios Core.
Is Cacti actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Cacti was on 2 October 2026. The project has 1.9k stars on GitHub.