Uptime Kuma vs UptimeRobot
Both are alternatives to Pingdom. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as UptimeRobot 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.
UptimeRobot
Hosted checks from outside your network, with a free tier that is actually usable.
UptimeRobot is the hosted answer, and it solves the one problem no self-hosted monitor can: it watches your site from outside your own infrastructure, so when your server, your network or your data centre goes down, the thing telling you about it is not also down. The free tier is unusually generous — 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, email alerts and a public status page — which is more than enough for most personal sites and small businesses. Paid plans add 30-second checks, SMS and voice alerts, and multi-location verification to cut false alarms. It is proprietary and hosted, which is why it scores where it does; it is on this page because external monitoring is a real requirement and pretending otherwise would not serve the reader.
Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | UptimeRobot | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 96 | 48 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Local-first | Yes | No |
| License | MIT | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. One Docker container on a server you already run. | Free tier: 50 monitors at 5-minute checks, with a public status page. Paid plans add 30-second intervals, SMS/voice alerts and multi-location checks. Checked 2026-08-01. |
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
UptimeRobot
Strengths
- +Checks from outside your network — the one thing self-hosting cannot do
- +Free tier covers 50 monitors, which is genuinely enough for most people
- +Nothing to install, patch or keep running
- +Multi-location verification cuts false alarms from transient network blips
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted — you do not own the monitoring or its history
- −Free tier is capped at 5-minute checks, so a short outage can be missed
- −SMS and voice alerts are paid add-ons
- −Your uptime data lives in a third party's system
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-01. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.