These two get compared constantly, and the feature lists make them look closer than they are. The decision is not really about features — it is about where the check is made from, and who gets woken up when the thing making it stops working.
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Which should you choose?
Uptime Kuma if you are monitoring things for yourself, already run Docker, and want unlimited checks for nothing. UptimeRobot if the monitoring has to keep working when your own infrastructure does not — because a monitor you host cannot tell you your hosting is down. Plenty of teams run Kuma internally and one hosted check externally, which costs almost nothing and covers both.
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.
| UptimeRobot | Uptime Kuma | MonitoringDaddy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Hosted service | Open source, self-hosted | Hosted service |
| Licence | Commercial | MIT — free forever | Commercial |
| Free tier | Yes, generous | Everything is free; you pay in hosting and time | Yes, permanent |
| Where checks run from | The vendor's network, outside your infrastructure | Wherever you install it — usually inside it | Our network, outside yours |
| Setup time | A minute | An evening, plus upkeep | A minute |
| Who fixes it at 3am | Them | You | We do |
Kuma is free to licence but not free to run. The honest comparison is not "£0 vs £X" — it is the cost of a small server plus your time against a subscription.
| Tier | UptimeRobot | Uptime Kuma | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Generous free tier: dozens of monitors at five-minute checks | Everything, unlimited, forever | – |
| Entry paid | Roughly $7–10/month for faster checks and more monitors | n/a — but a small VPS is $5–6/month | – |
| Team | Roughly $30/month and up | Same VPS, plus your time | – |
| Real cost | The subscription | Hosting, updates, backups, and being the on-call for your own monitor | – |
| Feature | UptimeRobot | Uptime Kuma | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime checks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fastest interval | Down to one minute on paid plans | Down to twenty seconds, free | One minute |
| Number of monitors | Capped by plan | Unlimited | Up to 100, shared across all check types |
| External vantage point | Yes, multiple regions | Only if you host it elsewhere yourself | Yes — hosted, outside your network |
| Status pages | Yes | Yes, built in | Yes, with a custom domain |
| Alert channels | Email, SMS, webhooks, integrations | Ninety-odd notification providers | Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock, webhooks |
| SSL expiry | Yes | Yes | Yes, same allowance |
| Maintenance windows | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Keeps working if your server dies | Yes | No | Yes |
| Upkeep required | None | Updates, backups, the database | None |
| Cron / scheduled job monitoring | No | Push monitors, yes | 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 the row that decides the whole comparison. UptimeRobot checks from its own network, so a failure of your server, your host or your datacentre is visible to it. Uptime Kuma runs wherever you install it — usually on the infrastructure it is watching — so the same failure takes the monitor down with it and you hear nothing. Everything else here is a preference; this one is structural.
Kuma will poll every twenty seconds for nothing. UptimeRobot's free tier is five minutes, with one minute on paid plans. Before paying for speed, ask what you would do differently with a forty-second-old alert versus a four-minute-old one — for most teams the answer is nothing, because the response takes longer than the difference.
Kuma is unlimited because you are paying for the server it runs on. Hosted plans cap it because each check costs the vendor money. The comparison is only meaningful once you know your real number, including staging, APIs and the marketing site people forget about.
Kuma ships around ninety notification integrations, which is more than any hosted service offers. In practice almost everyone uses two: email and one chat tool. The number matters far less than whether the two you need are there and reliable.
Both include one. The difference is where it is served from: Kuma's runs on your infrastructure, so during a genuine outage the page telling customers about the outage may be down as well. That is precisely when people go looking for it.
Kuma is free to licence and not free to own. Updates, database backups and the evening you eventually spend recovering it are the real price. That is a fair trade for many people — it stops being one the second time it happens.
If the failure you fear is "my app broke", either works. If it is "my server, my host or my datacentre went away", a monitor living on that infrastructure will go away with it and tell you nothing.
It is one docker run away. An hour with it tells you more than any comparison table, and it costs nothing to abandon.
Even on a free hosted plan, a single outside check pointed at your Kuma instance closes the blind spot. This is the setup most experienced teams end up with.
Kuma is free until the evening you spend recovering its database. If that happens twice, the subscription was cheaper.
You want monitoring that is somebody else's problem to keep running, checks from outside your own network, and alerts that survive your infrastructure failing.
You are comfortable with Docker, want unlimited fast checks for nothing, and are monitoring things where a shared-fate blind spot is acceptable — or you are pairing it with an external check.
We are a hosted service, so we share UptimeRobot's side of this argument and none of Kuma's cost advantage. What we add over both is that uptime, SSL expiry, domain expiry, API checks, cron heartbeats and page-change watching sit in one account rather than four tools. If you only need up/down, Kuma is free and very good, and we would rather say so.
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.
The software is, under an MIT licence, with no monitor limits and no paid tier. What is not free is running it: a small VPS, the updates, the backups, and your time when something breaks. For many people that is still the cheaper side of the trade.
Only if you host it outside your network. Most people install it on infrastructure they already own, which is exactly where it cannot see an outage of that infrastructure. Running it on a separate provider from the thing it watches removes most of the problem.
Kuma, and it is not close — twenty seconds free against a minute on most paid hosted plans. Whether that matters depends on whether you would act any differently on a forty-second-old alert.
Yes, and a generous one: enough monitors at five-minute checks that a lot of small sites never pay anything. Paid plans buy faster checks, more monitors and more alerting.
Yes, and it is the most sensible answer. Kuma for depth and volume inside your network, one external check watching Kuma itself. The external check is often free.
Both include one. Kuma's is free and perfectly good, but it is served from your infrastructure — so during a real outage the page telling customers about the outage may be down too. A hosted status page does not have that problem.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy