Pingdom → Uptime Kuma
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Pingdom starts around $10/month for 10 checks and rises with checks and users. Uptime Kuma runs on a $5 VPS with unlimited checks.
Moves cleanly
Nothing automatically, but check configuration is simple enough to recreate quickly.
You rebuild
Checks, notification channels and status pages — an hour of work for a typical estate.
What Pingdom costs you today
Synthetic monitoring and real-user monitoring are priced separately and both scale with volume — synthetic by the number of checks, RUM by page views — with entry plans in the tens of dollars per month and realistic multi-site setups running well into the hundreds. There is no free tier. The structural point is that you are buying two products where most teams needed one: the uptime check is the part they actually wanted, and it is the cheaper half. Prices move; confirm against SolarWinds directly before budgeting. Checked 2026-08-01.
What actually holds you in
Low, and this is a category where that is genuinely true. Monitors are URLs and thresholds — recreating them elsewhere is an afternoon at most. Historical uptime data does not export in a form anything else ingests, so you lose the record rather than move it, and status-page subscribers have to be re-collected. Neither is a reason to stay; both are reasons to switch sooner rather than later, because the data you lose grows every month you wait.
What you are moving to
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.
Free and open source. One Docker container on a server you already run.
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
What you give up
- 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
The migration, step by step
- 1Deploy Uptime Kuma with docker run — it is a single container
- 2Recreate checks, using the same intervals so historical comparison means something
- 3Wire notifications; it supports over 90 channels including Slack, Discord, Telegram and webhooks
- 4Set up a public status page if you had one on Pingdom
- 5CRITICALLY: host it somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors
The gotcha
Monitoring hosted inside the estate it watches goes down with the estate, and you learn about the outage from a customer instead. Put Uptime Kuma on a different provider entirely — that is the whole point of external monitoring.
When to stay on Pingdom
You need checks from many global locations — Uptime Kuma monitors from wherever you host it, and one vantage point is genuinely less useful.
More Layer 3 migrations
Figures verified 2026-08-01 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.