Comparing these is a bit like comparing a smoke alarm with a thermometer. Both concern themselves with heat; only one wakes you up. Prometheus can be made to do uptime checks, and that is where the confusion starts.
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Which should you choose?
Uptime Kuma if the question is "is this answering, and tell me when it stops". Prometheus if the question is "how is this behaving over time, and alert me on a threshold". Prometheus can cover the first with Blackbox Exporter, but you will also be running Alertmanager and probably Grafana to get what Kuma gives you out of the box.
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 | Prometheus | MonitoringDaddy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Up/down checks with alerting | Time-series metrics at scale | Checks and alerting |
| Data model | Check results and history | Labelled time series, queried with PromQL | Check results and history |
| How it collects | Polls endpoints itself | Scrapes metrics your services expose | Polls your endpoints |
| Alerting | Built in, around ninety destinations | Alertmanager, configured separately | Built in, seven channels |
| Dashboards | Its own, simple | Usually Grafana on top | Simple |
| Pieces to run | One | Prometheus, Alertmanager, exporters, Grafana | None — hosted |
Both are free and open source. The cost is entirely in components to run and concepts to learn, and Prometheus asks a great deal more of both.
| Tier | Uptime Kuma | Prometheus | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | MIT — free | Apache 2.0 — free | Commercial |
| Components | One container | Prometheus, Alertmanager, exporters, usually Grafana | None |
| To learn | Nothing much | PromQL, labels, scrape configs, alert rules | Nothing |
| Hosting | A small VPS | Meaningful storage and memory as retention grows | Ours |
| Feature | Uptime Kuma | Prometheus | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime checks out of the box | Yes | No — needs Blackbox Exporter | Yes |
| Metrics and trends | No | Yes, its entire purpose | No |
| Query language | No | PromQL, and it is powerful | No |
| Alerting included | Yes | Via Alertmanager, separately configured | Yes |
| Status page | Yes, built in | No | Yes, with a custom domain |
| Chat and webhook alerts | Around ninety, built in | Through Alertmanager receivers | Yes, built in |
| Long-term storage | Basic history | Yes, and remote-write to more | History, not metrics |
| Setup effort | Minutes | A project | A minute |
| Right for a five-person team | Yes | Only if someone already knows it | Yes |
| Right for a platform team | As a supplement | Yes, it is close to standard | As the outside view |
| Cron / scheduled job monitoring | Push monitors, yes | Pushgateway, 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.
Kuma stores 'it answered, in 240ms'. Prometheus stores a labelled time series you can query with PromQL. The first tells you to get up; the second tells you what happened. Confusing them is why these two get compared at all.
This is what makes Prometheus able to do uptime checks — it probes HTTP, TCP, ICMP and DNS and exposes the results as metrics you then alert on. It works well. It is also a fourth component to run, after Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana.
Kuma alerts by itself. Prometheus needs Alertmanager, configured separately, with its own routing and silencing rules. That separation is powerful at scale and disproportionate if you have six endpoints and one on-call person.
Genuinely powerful, and a genuine learning curve. It is the reason Prometheus can answer questions no check-based tool can — and the reason a team without a platform engineer often never gets past the copied example queries.
Prometheus scrapes from inside your cluster. That is the right place for metrics and the wrong place to judge whether the outside world can reach you — a DNS or certificate failure is invisible from within. This is the gap an external check fills.
Prometheus has no status page, and monitoring scheduled jobs means the Pushgateway with its own caveats. If those are on your list, they are separate decisions from the metrics stack.
Prometheus is for asking what happened and how it trended. Kuma is for being told something stopped. Most outages need the second first, and the first afterwards.
It gives you HTTP probing inside the stack you already operate, and the alerts route through Alertmanager with everything else. This is the right answer for a platform team.
Standing up Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana to find out whether a website is answering is a lot of machinery for a question Kuma answers in a container.
Prometheus has no status page. If customers need to see state, that is Kuma or a hosted service, whatever your metrics stack looks like.
You want to know when something stops answering, you want alerting and a status page included, and you are not running a metrics stack.
You need metrics, trends and threshold alerting across infrastructure, and you have — or want — the platform skills that come with it.
We are firmly on the Kuma side: checks and alerts, not metrics, and no PromQL. Where we differ from both is being hosted and outside your network, which is where an outage looks real — Prometheus scraping from inside your cluster cannot tell you the cluster is unreachable from the internet. Teams with a full metrics stack still tend to keep one external check for that reason.
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.
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Yes, with Blackbox Exporter, which probes HTTP, TCP, ICMP and DNS and exposes the results as metrics. You then alert on those through Alertmanager. It works well and is more work than Kuma.
No. It stores check results, not time series, and has no query language. If you need to ask what memory did last Tuesday, Kuma cannot answer and is not trying to.
In practice they are comparable — both are bounded by check interval and evaluation. Kuma gets you there with far less configuration, which matters more than the difference in seconds.
No. Kuma has its own interface and status page. Grafana is what you add to Prometheus to make its data legible, and it is effectively part of that stack.
For endpoint monitoring: Kuma in a container, plus one external check hosted elsewhere. For metrics: Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana. They are separate problems with separate minimum setups.
Very commonly. Prometheus for what your systems are doing, Kuma or a hosted checker for whether the outside world can reach them. The second is the one that catches a DNS or certificate failure your own cluster is blind to.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy