Uptime Kuma is excellent software and genuinely free. The catch is structural: it runs on a server you own, which means it goes down when your infrastructure does, and it needs the same patching, backups and upgrades as everything else you run.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Should I use hosted monitoring instead of self-hosting Uptime Kuma?
It depends on whether your time is free. Uptime Kuma costs nothing in licence fees but needs a VPS at roughly $5–20/month plus your ongoing attention, and it cannot reliably tell you about an outage that takes out the machine it runs on. Hosted monitoring removes both problems; self-hosting keeps full data control and a much larger integration list.
If Uptime Kuma runs on the same VPS, network or provider as your site, the event most worth alerting on is exactly the one that silences the alerter. Independent monitoring has to run somewhere else.
A $5–20/month VPS, plus OS patching, Docker upgrades, database backups and TLS renewal, is a recurring cost measured in both money and attention.
Every release is a maintenance window you schedule, test and occasionally roll back — on top of whatever else you are running that week.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the Uptime Kuma column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | Uptime Kuma | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Software cost | Free and open source | Free plan; paid from $8/mo |
| Infrastructure cost | VPS ~$5–20/mo plus your time | Included — nothing to host |
| Who maintains it | You — patches, upgrades, backups, TLS | MonitoringDaddy |
| Survives your infrastructure failing | No — goes down with the server it runs on | Yes — runs independently of your stack |
| Setup time | 30–60 minutes of server work | Under 2 minutes |
| Data ownership | Complete — it is your database | Hosted by us |
| Notification integrations | 90+ built in | Email, webhooks, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock |
| Check frequency | Configurable, limited by your hardware | As fast as every 60 seconds on Pro |
| SSL certificate expiry monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Domain expiry monitoring | Limited | Yes — dedicated monitor type |
| Content / price change detection | Keyword checks | Yes — appears/disappears plus price monitoring |
| Public status page | Yes — self-hosted, shares the same fate | Yes — hosted independently |
| Team access | Limited multi-user support | Yes |
| Monthly licence fee | None | From $0 |
Every comparison page on the internet claims the author's product wins on everything. Here is where it does not.
If any of those are load-bearing for your team, staying put is the correct decision and this page has done its job. Monitoring you actually trust beats monitoring that is marginally cheaper.
Six monitor types and one dashboard. No add-on products, no separate SKUs for the features you assumed were included.
HTTP checks from external infrastructure, as often as every 60 seconds, with downtime and recovery alerts. See the uptime setup guide.
A dedicated monitor type with configurable advance warnings, so a certificate never lapses because nobody owned the renewal. See SSL expiry monitoring.
Registration expiry tracked as its own monitor, warning you months ahead. The outage nobody has a runbook for. See domain expiration monitoring.
Alert when a phrase appears or disappears on a page — defacement, stock changes, silent policy edits. See website change detection.
Watch a competitor or supplier price string and get told the moment it moves. See the price monitoring guide.
Public status pages included on every plan, hosted independently of your infrastructure so they stay up when you do not. See hosted status pages.
Alerts from any of these can be routed to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock or a generic webhook, and a single monitor can carry several channels at once. Everything is available through the REST API on paid plans, so monitors can be created and torn down programmatically rather than clicked through a form.
Flat monthly tiers. No per-seat charges, no credit top-ups, no usage meters — the number below is the whole bill.
| Plan | Monitors | Fastest interval | Alert channels | API | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | Every 30 minutes | — | $0 | |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
There is no automated importer — monitors are re-created by hand, or scripted through the API on paid plans. Budget about a minute per monitor.
List every active check: URL, interval, condition and alert recipients. Most teams find monitors nobody needs any more.
Start with revenue-critical URLs. Set the interval, add the condition, attach the channels your team already watches.
Keep Uptime Kuma live while the new monitors settle. Compare alerts and confirm nothing is missing.
Move any public status page across, confirm a clean week of overlap, then cancel the old subscription.
This page is written by the team that builds MonitoringDaddy, so treat it as an informed argument rather than a neutral audit. What we can promise is that the claims about our own product are checked against what the software actually does, and the rows where Uptime Kuma is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about Uptime Kuma come from their public pricing and documentation at the time of writing. Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement, so every third-party figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
One thing worth stating plainly, because most comparison pages fudge it: MonitoringDaddy checks run from our own infrastructure, which is external to yours, but from a single origin rather than a global probe network. That is enough to catch outages and content changes independently of your stack. It is not enough to tell you a site is down in Frankfurt but up in Ohio. If regional verification is a hard requirement, a larger platform will serve you better and we would rather you knew that now.
Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
If the appeal of Uptime Kuma was the monitoring rather than the self-hosting, yes. You get the same core checks without a server to maintain, and — critically — monitoring that does not fail at the same moment your infrastructure does. If self-hosting is the point, Uptime Kuma remains excellent.
The same job — uptime, SSL, keyword and port checks with alerting — run as a service rather than as software you install. No VPS, no Docker, no upgrades, no backups.
It goes down with it, and sends no alert about the outage it exists to catch. This is the fundamental limitation of monitoring that runs on infrastructure you also depend on, and no amount of configuration fixes it.
No. Checks run from MonitoringDaddy's own infrastructure, which is external to yours — that is what makes it independent of your stack — but it is a single origin, not a global probe network. If multi-region verification is a requirement, a larger platform is a better fit.
Uptime Kuma's software is free but needs a VPS at roughly $5–20/month plus your maintenance time. MonitoringDaddy is $0 on the free plan and $8/month for 10 monitors, with no infrastructure to run. Below about 10 monitors, hosted is usually cheaper once time is counted.
Yes, hosted on our infrastructure, so it stays reachable when yours is not — which is precisely when customers go looking for it. See hosted status pages.
There is no automated importer. Monitors are re-created by hand, about a minute each, or scripted through the API on paid plans. Historical check data does not transfer.
Yes, with explicit appears/disappears conditions plus dedicated price monitoring. See website change detection.
Plenty of people do — Uptime Kuma for detailed internal checks on the private network, and a hosted monitor for the outside-in view and the status page. They answer different questions.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Set up a monitor on your most important URL and run it alongside Uptime Kuma for a week. Free plan, no credit card.