Uptime Kuma alternative: hosted vs self-hosted uptime monitoring

The software is free: it is MIT-licensed (Uptime Kuma LICENSE). The costs are the server, backups and your time. As one example, the DigitalOcean pricing page lists a Basic Droplet with 1 GiB of memory and 1 vCPU at $6.00 a month, with weekly backups at 20% of the Droplet price. Treating 1 GiB as enough is our assumption, because Uptime Kuma publishes no sizing guidance. The scenarios above compare dollars with Site Qwality and give a break-even in minutes of your time. How many hours self-hosting takes for you depends on your setup, and we do not claim a number.

The 2.5.6 add-monitor form offers more than 30 monitor types (a few depend on the platform or on running outside Docker): HTTP, keyword, JSON query, TCP port, ping, DNS, push, Docker container, MQTT, SMTP, gRPC, SNMP, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Steam and other game servers, among others (Uptime Kuma 2.5.6 source). Site Qwality’s check types are HTTP, cron heartbeat, browser, TLS, DNS, DNS record and page speed. We have no TCP, ICMP or port checks, so if you need to know whether a database port or a host answers, use Uptime Kuma or another tool for that part.

A monitor that shares a server, network or provider with what it watches can fail together with it, and then nothing sends the alert. AWS’s own post-event summary says its N. Virginia (us-east-1) event ran from 11:48 PM PDT on October 19 to 2:20 PM PDT on October 20, 2025 and affected DynamoDB, EC2 instance launches, Network Load Balancer, Lambda and other services, so a monitor in the same Region as the app can be caught by the same event. The same risk applies to us: our storage, scheduling and alerting run in us-east-1, even though HTTP checks run from the locations you choose. Uptime Kuma has no multi-location mode of its own that we could find in 2.5.6. The exception is a Globalping monitor type, added in Uptime Kuma 2.1.0 (February 2026), which runs ping, HTTP and DNS checks through the Globalping probe network instead of from your server. The Globalping README lists 250 tests an hour without an account and 500 with a free one, and Uptime Kuma asks for one probe per check. Otherwise you run a second Uptime Kuma at another provider and read two dashboards. Site Qwality HTTP checks run from the locations you pick on each monitor (24 locations in 18 countries); browser, TLS, domain and DNS-record checks run from Virginia only.

Install is one Docker command (Uptime Kuma README). After that the upkeep is yours. The security policy says to run the latest version, and the project published a high-severity advisory on October 9, 2026 (unauthenticated resource exhaustion in the ping badge endpoint, affecting 2.5.3 and earlier, fixed in 2.5.4; GHSA-wf2j-5mc7-5c4w). The Docker latest tag is deprecated and still points at v1, so use the 2 tag (Uptime Kuma Docker tags). The v1 to v2 migration guide calls backing up the data directory the only supported backup method, and says migration can take hours on slower hardware or with more monitors. Someone has to notice when the server, the container or the disk fails, which is the job a second monitor from outside is for.

The README says NFS is not supported for the data directory and lists FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Replit and Heroku as unsupported platforms for a non-Docker install. Setting an interval under 20 seconds raises the warning “Performance may be degraded, particularly if there are a large number of monitors” (Uptime Kuma 2.5.6 text). The first-run setup creates a single login and refuses to run again once one exists, and 2FA is supported. We found no built-in on-call scheduling and no visitor subscriptions on status pages, only an RSS feed. History retention is a setting; in the 2.5.6 source the settings page falls back to 180 days and the cleanup job to 365, so check the value on your instance. Support is GitHub issues and the subreddit, and the README asks people not to use email.

For a production service, running both is usually sensible and is not only a sales line: Uptime Kuma for what only works from inside your network, Site Qwality for public URLs from outside, with a check on Uptime Kuma itself (see “Run both” above). For a hobby site or one internal tool, pick one: Uptime Kuma if you want it free and under your control, the Site Qwality free plan if you would rather not run a server. There is no importer, and Uptime Kuma v2 removed its JSON backup and restore, so moving means recreating monitors by hand, through our REST API (every plan, including free) or from an AI assistant through our MCP server. Point Site Qwality at the same public URLs, compare alerts for a while, then retire what you no longer need.

They are different models: Uptime Kuma is software you host and UptimeRobot is a hosted service. UptimeRobot’s pricing page (page metadata modified August 10, 2026; read October 17, 2026) lists a free plan with 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, described as “Good for hobby and non-profit projects”, and a Solo plan with 60-second checks and 10 monitors, shown as $12 a month with annual billing selected ($13 a month struck through). Uptime Kuma publishes no monitor limit and checks as often as every 20 seconds by default, but you run and patch it, and it checks from one place unless you add more. Our UptimeRobot comparison sets UptimeRobot against Site Qwality.

Yes. The Uptime Kuma install wiki lists one-click and managed hosts such as PikaPods and server.camp, and says community install methods are provided by the community and are not tested officially. A managed host takes over the server and some of the upkeep. It does not change that Uptime Kuma checks from one place, and it is one more vendor and bill to track.