Uptime Kuma is the best free monitoring tool there is. It is open source, it self-hosts in one container, it speaks a long list of protocols, and it costs nothing forever. Tens of thousands of people run it and they are not wrong to.
We are not going to argue it is bad software. The argument is narrower than that.
What Uptime Kuma does better
It is free, permanently, with no monitor limit. Not a free tier — free. However many monitors you want. Nothing we sell competes with zero.
Your data stays on your hardware. No third party sees your endpoints, your credentials or your uptime history. For some organisations that ends the discussion, and it should.
It is open source. You can read it, patch it, and nobody can take it away, change the pricing, or sunset it. Freshping's users found out in March 2026 what the alternative feels like.
A large community. Years of forum posts, Docker examples and integrations.
Where we differ
A self-hosted monitor shares fate with what it monitors. If Kuma runs in your cluster, on your VPS, behind your network — then your power cut, your expired certificate, your full disk, your misconfigured firewall takes down the thing that was supposed to tell you about it. It goes quiet at exactly the moment you need it, and quiet looks identical to fine.
You can mitigate this: run Kuma somewhere else, add an external heartbeat, monitor your monitor. That works, and it is also a second system to maintain.
Nobody is on call for your monitoring. Upgrades, database growth, the migration that breaks, the container that OOMs at 4am — all yours.
We can prove the alert arrived. An outbox before every send with a ~50-minute retry ladder, a weekly test event through every configured channel with the failures named, an "Alerts are at risk" banner when delivery is degraded, and /api/health answering 503 when our own checker stops so an outside watchdog can page you. Kuma will tell you it sent a notification; it does not keep proving the channel still works.
One honest note on ownership: Uplance is a hosted, proprietary service. You cannot self-host it and you cannot read the source. If that is a requirement, Kuma wins and this page is over.
Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | Uplance | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, unlimited monitors | €0 / €19 / €79 per month |
| Hosting | You host it | We host it |
| Open source | Yes | No — proprietary |
| Data location | Your hardware | Our servers in Germany |
| Survives your own outage | Only if hosted elsewhere | Yes, it is elsewhere by definition |
| Maintenance, upgrades, backups | Yours | Ours |
| Proof alerts were delivered | No | Outbox, retry ladder, weekly drill |
| Watchdog on the checker itself | You build it | /api/health returns 503 |
| Game server checks | Some, via community support | Minecraft, Source/Steam, FiveM |
| Support | Community forums | Us |
Which one to pick
Kuma if budget is the binding constraint, if your data cannot leave your hardware, or if you enjoy running it — all three are good reasons, and plenty of serious teams stop here.
Uplance if you have already had the failure this page is about: the outage where Kuma was on the box that went down, and you found out from a customer. Paying someone else to be outside your blast radius is the entire product.
If you are staying on Kuma, do one thing anyway: put an external heartbeat on it. Our free plan will do that for you at no cost, and you never have to use us for anything else.