Checkmk grew out of the Nagios world and fixed most of what made Nagios painful — auto-discovery being the big one. It is still infrastructure monitoring, and Kuma is still not.
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Which should you choose?
Uptime Kuma if you want to know whether endpoints answer and you want that today. Checkmk if you have servers to look after and want them discovered and monitored properly without Nagios-era configuration pain. The two barely overlap: one watches the front door, the other watches the building.
Written by MonitoringDaddy, who also sell monitoring. We have tried to be straight about where each of these wins, including where they beat us. Prices and features are as at August 2026 and change often.
| Uptime Kuma | Checkmk | MonitoringDaddy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lineage | Built fresh, 2021 | Nagios lineage, heavily reworked | Built fresh |
| Watches | Endpoints | Hosts, services, databases, network gear | Endpoints, from outside |
| Agents | None | Yes, with auto-discovery | None |
| Editions | One, free | Raw (free), Enterprise (paid), Cloud | One, with a free tier |
| Setup | Minutes | Hours, but far easier than Nagios | – |
| Best at | Being told something stopped answering | Knowing what a fleet of machines is doing | – |
Checkmk Raw is free and open source; Enterprise is licensed per host and is where the scale features live. Kuma has no paid tier.
| Tier | Uptime Kuma | Checkmk | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Everything, MIT | Checkmk Raw — free, genuinely capable | – |
| Paid | None | Enterprise, licensed per host | – |
| What paid adds | n/a | Scale, high availability, reporting, support | – |
| Practical cost | A small VPS | A monitoring server, plus licence if you go Enterprise | – |
| Feature | Uptime Kuma | Checkmk | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Endpoint / HTTP checks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Server and service metrics | No | Yes, extensively | No |
| Auto-discovery of services | No | Yes — the standout feature | No |
| Agent required | No | Yes for depth, agentless possible | No agent needed |
| Network device monitoring | No | Yes, via SNMP | No |
| Customer status page | Yes, built in | No | Yes, with a custom domain |
| Alert destinations | Around ninety, built in | Extensive, more configuration | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock, webhooks |
| Learning curve | Negligible | Moderate — much gentler than Nagios | Negligible |
| Scales to a large estate | No | Yes | Endpoints, not hosts |
| Free edition is genuinely usable | Yes | Yes | Free plan, no card |
| Cron / scheduled job monitoring | Push monitors, yes | Possible, with work | Yes, same allowance |
| Page content change watching | No | No | Yes, same allowance |
| All check types on one allowance | No — separate products | No — separate tools | Yes |
A tick in a table hides most of the difference. This is what each row is really saying.
This is Checkmk's standout feature and the clearest reason to choose it over the Nagios tradition it came from. Point it at a host and it works out what is worth monitoring. Across a fleet that is the difference between monitoring that stays accurate and monitoring that rots.
Checkmk's depth comes from an agent on each machine. That is the value and the overhead — something to deploy and keep current everywhere. Kuma has none, which is why it is useful immediately and why it sees only what an endpoint exposes.
Raw is free and genuinely capable, including auto-discovery — not a crippled demo. Enterprise adds scale, high availability, reporting and support, licensed per host. Many teams run Raw permanently and never need more.
There is no customer-facing status page. During an incident, the thing you want to point customers at is not something Checkmk provides, which is why a simpler tool usually sits alongside it.
If you deploy to a managed platform and never touch a server, there are no hosts to discover and its main strength has no surface to work on. That situation is common now and is the clearest signal to choose the simpler tool.
Checkmk watches from inside the estate. Nothing in it tells you what a customer in another country experiences, or reports the estate itself being unreachable. That is a different check, made from somewhere else.
If the answer is none — you deploy to a platform and never touch a server — Checkmk has little to monitor and Kuma is the answer. If you have a fleet, it is the other way round.
Raw is not a crippled demo. Many teams run it permanently, and auto-discovery works there too.
Even with Checkmk watching every host, nothing in it tells you what a customer in another country experiences. That is a different check.
If the requirement is "tell me when the site stops answering", agents are a large amount of machinery aimed at the wrong question.
You want to know endpoints are answering, you own no servers or do not want to instrument them, and you want a status page you can share.
You look after real machines, want them discovered and monitored in depth, and want that without Nagios-era configuration files.
We do the Kuma half — endpoint checks, SSL and domain expiry, API checks, cron heartbeats — and nothing Checkmk does with agents. The difference from Kuma is that our checks run from outside your infrastructure, which is the one perspective neither a self-hosted Kuma nor a Checkmk server can give you about itself.
Uptime, SSL expiry, domain expiry, API checks, cron heartbeats and page-change watching all draw on one allowance here, rather than being separate products or separate bills.
Start freeThe 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.
It began in that lineage but has diverged substantially. Auto-discovery in particular is the thing that makes it feel like a different tool rather than a reskin.
For many teams, yes. Raw includes the core monitoring and auto-discovery. Enterprise is about scale, high availability, reporting and support rather than unlocking basic function.
Yes, it has HTTP checks. Configuring them is heavier, and it has no customer-facing status page, so a lot of teams still keep something simpler alongside for that.
For the depth that makes it worth running, yes. It can monitor agentlessly over SNMP and HTTP, but the agent is where most of the value is.
Kuma or a hosted checker. If your infrastructure is a managed platform, there are no hosts for Checkmk to discover and its main strength has nothing to work on.
Yes, and it is a reasonable pairing — Checkmk inside the estate, something simple watching endpoints from outside it and publishing a status page.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy