These get compared because both are free, self-hosted and described as monitoring. They answer completely different questions, and picking on features misses that entirely.
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Which should you choose?
Uptime Kuma if you want to know whether an endpoint is answering, and you want that working before lunch. Zabbix if you need to know what is happening inside your servers — CPU, disk, memory, services, network gear — and you have someone willing to learn it. If you are asking both questions, run both; they do not overlap enough to be an either/or.
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 | Zabbix | MonitoringDaddy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it watches | Endpoints — HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS | Whole infrastructure — hosts, services, network gear | Endpoints — HTTP, SSL, domains, APIs, cron |
| Method | Polls from outside the thing | Agents on the machines, plus SNMP and agentless | Polls from outside |
| Setup | One Docker command | A server, a database, agents, templates | – |
| Learning curve | None to speak of | Substantial | Negligible |
| Cost | Free, MIT | Free, open source | – |
| Right question | "Is it answering?" | "What is going on in there?" | "Is it answering, from outside?" |
Both are free to licence. The cost is entirely in what it takes to run and understand them, and there the difference is enormous.
| Tier | Uptime Kuma | Zabbix | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | MIT — free | GPL — free | Commercial |
| Hosting | A very small VPS is plenty | Needs a real server and a database that is looked after | Ours |
| Time to first alert | Minutes | A day, realistically longer to do properly | A minute |
| Ongoing effort | Occasional updates | Templates, agents, tuning, database housekeeping | – |
| Feature | Uptime Kuma | Zabbix | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| HTTP / endpoint checks | Yes, its whole purpose | Yes, though not the point of it | Yes |
| Server metrics — CPU, RAM, disk | No | Yes, in depth | No |
| Agent on the host | No agent, none needed | Yes, and it is where the power is | No agent needed |
| SNMP and network devices | No | Yes | No |
| Auto-discovery | No | Yes | No |
| Trend data and capacity planning | Basic history | Yes, with long retention | No |
| Alerting integrations | Around ninety providers | Extensive, and scriptable | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock, webhooks |
| Status page | Yes, built in | Not really | Yes, with a custom domain |
| Time to be useful | Minutes | Days | Minutes |
| Scales to hundreds of hosts | It will strain | Yes, that is what it is for | Not for hosts — endpoints only |
| 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.
Kuma stands outside a thing and knocks. Zabbix installs an agent inside it and reads everything. Neither can do the other's job: Kuma will never tell you a disk is at ninety percent, and Zabbix will not give you a status page to send customers to.
The agent is where Zabbix's power lives and also where its cost lives — something to deploy, update and troubleshoot on every host. Kuma has no agent, which is why it is useful in ten minutes and why it can only see what an endpoint chooses to reveal.
Zabbix can find hosts and services and start monitoring them without being told. Across a fleet that is the difference between monitoring being maintained and monitoring quietly going stale. With six endpoints it is a feature you will never use.
This is the honest headline. Kuma needs no training. Zabbix rewards real study, and a half-learned Zabbix is worse than no Zabbix because people stop trusting its alerts. Budget the learning or do not start.
Zabbix keeps long-retention history you can plan capacity from. Kuma keeps enough to draw a recent graph. If anyone asks 'is this getting worse over months', only one of these can answer.
Both are self-hosted, so neither can report its own infrastructure failing, and neither watches cron jobs or page content out of the box. One external check closes the first gap; the second usually means another tool.
If it is "the site stopped answering", that is Kuma and you are done in ten minutes. If it is "the disk on the database server is at ninety percent", nothing Kuma does will ever tell you that.
It will work, and you will spend a week on something a Docker container does in a minute. The effort only pays back across a fleet.
Zabbix for what is inside the machines, Kuma for whether the public endpoint answers. They are complementary and most experienced teams end up with both.
Both are self-hosted, so both go quiet when your infrastructure does. One external check, even a free one, closes that gap for both.
You want to know whether endpoints are answering, you want it working today, and you have no interest in agents, templates or a monitoring server to look after.
You run real infrastructure, need visibility inside hosts and network devices, and have someone prepared to learn a serious tool properly.
We are on Kuma's side of this line and do not pretend otherwise — we do endpoint monitoring, not server metrics, and Zabbix does things we never will. The difference from Kuma is that we are hosted, so checks come from outside your infrastructure and keep working when it does not. If you already run Zabbix, a hosted external check alongside it is the usual missing piece.
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.
No. It has no agent and does not look inside a machine. It asks whether an endpoint responds and how quickly. If you need resource metrics, that is Zabbix, Checkmk, Netdata or Prometheus, not Kuma.
For a handful of sites and nothing else, yes. You would be maintaining a monitoring server and database to do something a container does in minutes. Zabbix earns its keep across a fleet of hosts.
Yes — it has HTTP checks and web scenarios. They work, but configuring them is heavier, and the result is not as pleasant to look at or share as Kuma's status page.
Kuma, by a wide margin. Most people have it alerting before they would have finished reading Zabbix's installation guide. That gap is the honest headline of this comparison.
Often. Zabbix for what happens inside the estate, Kuma for a clear read on whether public endpoints answer, plus a status page. They solve different problems and cost nothing to license.
It applies to both. A monitor hosted on the infrastructure it watches cannot report that infrastructure failing. One external check — hosted elsewhere, often free — covers both of them.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy