Uptime Kuma is the best free monitoring software there is. It is MIT licensed, has no monitor caps, no paid tier and no features held back, and its interface is nicer than several products people pay for. The catch is not a feature gap. It is that a monitor running on your own infrastructure shares the fate of your own infrastructure.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is Uptime Kuma worth it?
If you are comfortable running a container and you host it somewhere separate from the thing you are monitoring, it is outstanding and costs almost nothing. The two honest caveats are the same ones that apply to all self-hosting: your time is not free, and a monitor on the same server as the site will go down with the site and tell nobody. Put it on a $5 box somewhere else and most of the objection disappears.
Uptime Kuma is an open-source, self-hosted monitoring tool by Louis Lam, released under the MIT licence. You run it yourself, usually as a Docker container, and it monitors HTTP(S), TCP, keyword and JSON-query checks, WebSocket, ping, DNS records, push monitors, Steam game servers and Docker containers.
It includes certificate information, multiple status pages, two-factor authentication and more than ninety notification integrations. Domain expiry monitoring arrived in version 2.1 in February 2026, closing one of the last real gaps against hosted tools.
The project is actively maintained — the 2.5 line is current, with releases through September 2026 — which matters, because an abandoned self-hosted tool becomes your problem rather than the maintainer's.
Everything a hosted tool charges for, with nothing held back.
No monitor caps, no paid tier, no premium-gated features. What you can run is bounded by your server, not by a plan.
Slack, Discord, Telegram, Gotify, ntfy, email, webhooks and dozens more. Broader than most commercial products.
HTTP(S), keyword, JSON query, TCP, ping, DNS, WebSocket, push, Docker containers and Steam servers.
Registration expiry monitoring added February 2026, alongside the certificate information it already reported.
Multiple status pages with a clean design, at no cost, where hosted tools often gate these behind a tier.
The 2.5 line is current with releases through September 2026, and the project has a large, engaged community.
The software is free. The hosting and your time are not.
| Cost | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Software licence | $0 | MIT licensed, no tiers, no caps |
| A small VPS to run it | $4-6/mo | Must be separate from what you are monitoring |
| Setup | An hour or two | Docker, reverse proxy, TLS certificate |
| Ongoing | Occasional | Updates, backups, and being the person who fixes it |
Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement. Every figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
We are not going to pretend Uptime Kuma is worse software. For many people it is the right answer, it costs nothing, and it has features — ninety notification integrations, Docker and Steam monitors — that we do not match.
What we sell against it is not features but independence and attention. Our checks run from infrastructure that is not yours, so an outage at your host does not take the monitoring with it. Nobody on your side patches anything, restores a database, or discovers the monitoring stopped three weeks ago. That is the entire pitch, and for $5 a month it is either worth it to you or it is not.
Be careful with one comparison people make too quickly. Self-hosted is only genuinely cheaper if you already have somewhere safe to run it and you count your own time at zero. A separate $5 VPS plus an hour of setup and occasional maintenance is not obviously cheaper than a $5 subscription.
The honest split: you enjoy running infrastructure and will host it somewhere sensible — theirs, and it is excellent. You want the monitoring to be somebody else's problem — ours.
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.
Completely. MIT licensed, no monitor caps, no paid tier and no features held back. The only costs are hosting it and your own time.
A small VPS at roughly $4 to $6 a month, an hour or two of setup for Docker, a reverse proxy and a certificate, then occasional maintenance. Close to a hosted subscription once you count honestly.
You can, and you should not. If that server fails, the site and the monitor go down together and nobody is told. Host it separately or the monitoring has a hole exactly where you need it.
It reports certificate information including expiry. Domain registration expiry was added in version 2.1 in February 2026.
Yes. The 2.5 line is current with releases through September 2026, and the community is large and active.
Not directly, but with more than ninety notification integrations you can route through a third-party service. That is configuration you own rather than a feature you buy.
There is no software limit. The practical ceiling is your server — a small VPS comfortably handles a few hundred checks.
Theirs is free, unlimited and has more integrations. Ours runs on infrastructure that is not yours, so it survives your outages, and nobody on your team maintains it. That is the trade, and for a homelab theirs usually wins.
Last updated May 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Uptime Kuma is excellent and free. We run the checks from elsewhere and nobody on your side maintains anything.