Uptime Kuma vs Gatus
Both are alternatives to Pingdom. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Gatus vs Uptime Kuma — same comparison, one verdict.
Uptime Kuma
TOP PICKThe self-hosted monitor that beat the paid ones on features.
Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitoring tool that does, for free and on your own server, most of what the paid services charge monthly for: HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS and keyword checks, 60-second intervals, a genuinely good dashboard, public status pages, and notifications to more than ninety services including Slack, Discord, Telegram, email and webhooks. It runs as one Docker container on hardware you already have. At roughly 89.7k GitHub stars it is one of the most-starred self-hosted projects in existence, and that popularity is deserved rather than fashionable — the free tiers of the commercial services are more limited than this is. MIT licensed, pushed to daily.
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.
Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | Gatus | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 96 | 94 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Pricing | Free and open source. One Docker container on a server you already run. | Free and open source. A single binary or container. |
Uptime Kuma is Macrostack's recommended Pingdom alternative, so it's our pick here.
Uptime Kuma
Strengths
- +60-second checks and unlimited monitors with no plan to upgrade to
- +Public status pages included rather than sold separately
- +Notifications to 90+ services out of the box
- +MIT, one container, and the most-starred tool in the category
Trade-offs
- −It runs on your infrastructure — so it cannot tell you your infrastructure is down
- −Single-node by design; no multi-region checking
- −You own updates, backups and the uptime of the uptime monitor
- −No phone-call escalation or on-call rotation
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
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-01. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.