Uptime Kuma is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hosted monitoring tool that watches your websites, APIs, ports, databases and Docker containers and alerts you when anything breaks. We rate it 88/100 — the clear default choice for hobbyists, homelab operators and small dev teams who want a polished UptimeRobot replacement they fully control, with deductions for the missing official REST API and single-location monitoring.

What is Uptime Kuma?

Uptime Kuma was built by Hong Kong developer Louis Lam (@louislam) and the GitHub repository was first published on July 3, 2021. It is a Node.js + Vue 3 + Bootstrap 5 application that uses Socket.IO for real-time updates and SQLite for storage, and it is licensed under MIT. As of April 26, 2026 the GitHub repository has 85,947 stars and 7,730 forks, making it the most-starred self-hosted monitoring project on GitHub. The latest stable release is v2.2.1, published March 10, 2026, which patches a Server-Side Template Injection (SSTI) advisory in the LiquidJS dependency.

The product targets a very specific niche: developers, sysadmins and homelabbers who currently pay for UptimeRobot, StatusCake or Pingdom and want a free, self-hosted, good-looking alternative they can run on a $5 VPS or Raspberry Pi without sending their endpoint list to a third-party SaaS.

Uptime Kuma dashboard showing colored uptime ping charts for HTTP, TCP and DNS monitors with response time graphs — Uptime Kuma: the main dashboard with live ping charts, response time graphs and per-monitor uptime percentages.

Key Features of Uptime Kuma

13 monitor types out of the box: HTTP(S), TCP port, HTTP(S) keyword match, HTTP(S) JSON query, WebSocket, ICMP ping, DNS record, Push (heartbeat from your own service), Steam game server and Docker container monitoring — all configurable from one UI.
20-second monitoring intervals: The minimum check interval is 20 seconds, an order of magnitude faster than UptimeRobot's 60-second free tier and Statuscake's 5-minute free tier.
90+ notification integrations: Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Gotify, PagerDuty, Pushover, Twilio, ntfy, Email/SMTP and dozens more, including custom webhooks — configured per-monitor.
Public status pages: Build multiple status pages, map each one to its own custom domain, and include incident timelines and maintenance windows.
Certificate expiry tracking: Each HTTPS monitor reports days-to-expiry for the TLS certificate and can fire a notification before it lapses.
2FA, proxy and reverse-proxy ready: Built-in TOTP two-factor auth, HTTP/SOCKS proxy support for outbound checks, and documented reverse-proxy configs for Nginx, Caddy and Traefik.
Lightweight footprint: Runs comfortably on a 256 MB VPS with 50+ monitors, and a single docker run gets you a working instance in under a minute.
Multi-language: Translated into 50+ languages via Weblate by community contributors.

Uptime Kuma public status page showing operational, degraded and down indicators for several services — The public status page builder — map a custom domain like status.example.com and group monitors into incident groups.

What Users Say About Uptime Kuma

Sentiment in self-hosting communities is overwhelmingly positive. On Reddit's r/selfhosted, Uptime Kuma is the default recommendation in nearly every "what should I use to monitor my homelab" thread, and the dedicated r/UptimeKuma subreddit is active with deployment help. The Hacker News discussions have repeatedly hit the front page since 2021 and consistently praise the UI and ease of installation.

The honest criticism is consistent and fair. The most upvoted feature request in the GitHub issue tracker is a first-party REST API — today you cannot programmatically add monitors from CI/CD without a community fork, which is a real blocker for teams managing hundreds of endpoints. The second most requested feature is distributed monitoring from multiple regions, since a network blip between your single Uptime Kuma host and the target service still triggers a false alert. Heavy users on Better Stack's comparison also note that the SQLite-only backend is a ceiling: PostgreSQL support has been requested for years but remains unimplemented in 2.x, and teams with 500+ monitors report visible UI lag.

Uptime Kuma Pricing

Uptime Kuma is 100% free and open source under the MIT license. There is no paid tier, no managed cloud, no usage limits, no telemetry. You pay only for the server you run it on.

Plan	Price	Includes
Self-hosted (only option)	$0 forever	Unlimited monitors, unlimited status pages, unlimited notifications, all 13 monitor types — you supply the server.

Typical hosting cost: $4–$6/month on a Hetzner CX11 or DigitalOcean basic droplet, or free if you already run a homelab.

Who Should Use Uptime Kuma?

Best for: Solo developers, indie hackers, homelab operators, IT admins at small companies, and any team that already self-hosts and wants under-an-hour deployment of a polished status page and uptime monitor without recurring SaaS fees.

Not ideal for: Enterprise SRE teams that need a REST API, multi-region probes, RBAC, audit logs, SLA reporting and SOC 2 attestations — for that, Better Stack, Datadog Synthetics or Pingdom remain the right call. Also a poor fit if you cannot afford to monitor your monitor.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Setup is genuinely under five minutes — one docker run command and you're live, confirmed by countless r/selfhosted walkthroughs.
UI is the cleanest in the open-source monitoring space — users routinely describe it as "the only self-hosted tool that doesn't look like 2008".
13 monitor types and 90+ notification providers cover essentially every realistic alerting need without writing custom code.
Tiny resource footprint — runs on a Raspberry Pi or 256 MB VPS, even with dozens of monitors.
Active development by a single dedicated maintainer plus 700+ community contributors — releases consistent, security advisories disclosed responsibly.

Cons:

No official REST API in 2.x — programmatic monitor management requires unofficial Python wrappers.
Single-location monitoring — one host means one network perspective and the inevitable false positives from upstream blips.
SQLite only — no PostgreSQL or MySQL backend, which limits horizontal scaling and creates locking issues at very high monitor counts.
You become your own single point of failure: if the box running Uptime Kuma dies, you stop seeing outages.
No built-in synthetic-transaction or browser monitoring — HTTP keyword checks are the upper bound on application-layer testing.

Alternatives to Uptime Kuma

Three honest comparisons developers ask about most:

Gatus — YAML-configured, GitOps-friendly, and natively distributed, but the dashboard is far less polished and there is no in-app monitor editor.
Healthchecks.io — the gold standard for cron and scheduled-job monitoring (push-only), but a poor fit for HTTP uptime against external endpoints.
UptimeRobot and Better Stack — SaaS competitors with multi-region probes and APIs, but you give up data ownership and pay $7–$30+/month per workspace.

Verdict: Is Uptime Kuma Worth It?

Yes — if you already run a server, Uptime Kuma is the easiest way to replace your UptimeRobot subscription with a better-looking, faster-checking, fully-controlled monitoring stack in about ten minutes. We rate it 88/100: it is best-in-class for individual operators and small teams, and the only reasons it is not 95+ are the missing REST API and the absence of distributed multi-region probes — both of which matter only once your monitoring matures past the homelab stage. For everyone else, it is genuinely the right answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Uptime Kuma free?: Yes. Uptime Kuma is 100% free and open source under the MIT license. There is no paid tier, no managed cloud version, and no feature paywall — you only pay for the server you self-host it on, typically $4–$6/month on a small VPS.
What platforms does Uptime Kuma support?: Uptime Kuma runs on any Linux distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch), Windows 10 x64 and Windows Server 2012 R2+, and inside Docker on any platform that supports it. It requires Node.js 20.4 or higher for non-Docker installs. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Heroku and Replit are not supported.
How does Uptime Kuma compare to UptimeRobot?: Uptime Kuma is self-hosted, free, supports 20-second intervals, and gives you unlimited monitors. UptimeRobot is SaaS, has a free tier capped at 50 monitors with 5-minute intervals, and offers multi-region probes plus a managed REST API that Uptime Kuma lacks. Pick Uptime Kuma if you self-host; pick UptimeRobot if you need multi-region probing and zero-ops.
Is Uptime Kuma open source?: Yes. Uptime Kuma is MIT-licensed and the full source is on GitHub with 85,947 stars and 700+ contributors as of April 2026.
Does Uptime Kuma have a REST API?: No official REST API ships with version 2.x as of April 2026. It is the most-upvoted open feature request in the project. Community workarounds exist via the unofficial uptime-kuma-api Python wrapper, which scripts the underlying Socket.IO calls.
Can Uptime Kuma monitor from multiple locations?: Not in a single instance. Each Uptime Kuma deployment monitors from one network location. Some teams run two or three instances in different regions and aggregate alerts manually. Multi-region monitoring is the second most-requested feature.

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