Gatus vs Healthchecks.io
Both are alternatives to Pingdom. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Healthchecks.io vs Gatus — same comparison, one verdict.
Gatus
Monitoring as a YAML file, for people who already run everything from Git.
Gatus is a developer-first health-check service configured entirely in YAML, which means your monitoring lives in the repository, gets reviewed in pull requests, and is deployed like any other code. It handles HTTP, TCP, ICMP, DNS and TLS-expiry checks, evaluates rich conditions on responses — status code, body content, response time, certificate age — and ships a clean dashboard and status page. Apache-2.0, around 11.7k stars, actively developed. It is the natural pick for a team already doing GitOps, and the wrong one if a non-engineer needs to add a monitor.
Healthchecks.io
Monitors the jobs that fail silently — the cron nobody noticed stopped.
Healthchecks solves the opposite problem from the rest of this page. Instead of pinging your site, it waits for your scheduled jobs to ping it, and alerts you when one does not — the nightly backup that quietly stopped running three weeks ago, the certificate renewal that failed, the data export nobody checked. That class of failure is invisible to every uptime monitor here, and it is usually the more expensive one. BSD-3-Clause, around 10.2k stars, self-hostable in Python with a hosted tier that has a free plan. It complements an uptime monitor rather than replacing one.
Side by side
| Gatus | Healthchecks.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 94 | 93 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Pricing | Free and open source. A single binary or container. | Free and open source to self-host. Hosted plans have a free tier for a small number of checks. |
Gatus edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Gatus
Strengths
- +Configuration is YAML in Git — reviewed, versioned and diffable
- +Rich condition evaluation, including response body and TLS expiry
- +Apache-2.0 with no enterprise carve-out
- +Very light: one small binary, minimal memory
Trade-offs
- −No UI for adding monitors — everything is a config change
- −Same blind spot as any self-hosted monitor: it can go down with you
- −Fewer notification integrations than Uptime Kuma
- −Not usable by non-technical team members
Healthchecks.io
Strengths
- +Catches silent cron and backup failures nothing else on this page sees
- +Dead simple integration — one curl at the end of your job
- +BSD-3-Clause, self-hostable, with an honest hosted free tier
- +Notifications to email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks and more
Trade-offs
- −Not an uptime monitor — it does not check whether your site responds
- −Only sees jobs you have instrumented to report in
- −Self-hosting means running a Django application and a database
- −Complements rather than replaces the rest of this comparison
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-01. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.