--- title: Uptime Kuma Alternative description: An honest comparison of self-hosted Uptime Kuma and hosted WatchFor: what self-hosting really costs, and when staying on Kuma is the right answer. canonical: https://watchfor.io/uptime-kuma-alternative --- [← All comparisons](/comparisons) # The Uptime Kuma alternative for when self-hosting stops being free Uptime Kuma is excellent and we recommend it without reservation for homelabs and side projects. It is open source, it costs nothing, and it does the core job well. The honest catch is structural rather than technical: it runs on your infrastructure, usually in one place, which means it cannot tell you that a region is unreachable, and it goes down in the same outage that takes your site down. If that has not bitten you yet, do not switch. ## Where Uptime Kuma is better than us - Free forever, with no monitor limit at all. - Your data never leaves your infrastructure — sometimes a compliance requirement. - Open source: read it, change it, keep it running on your own terms. Feature WatchFor Uptime Kuma Free plan 15 monitors, 8 check types, commercial use allowed Unlimited monitors, self-hosted Free plan check interval 3 minutes 20 seconds (your hardware, your rules) Entry paid plan €7/mo — 50 monitors, 1-minute checks No paid tier — you pay in hosting and maintenance Fastest check interval 30 seconds 20 seconds Status pages 3 on Free, 25 from €7/mo Included, self-hosted Team seats Included on every plan, no per-seat fee Unlimited Monitor types 25 incl. CDN, MCP, MTR, NTP, blacklist, email policy; 8 on the free plan HTTP(S), keyword, JSON query, TCP, ping, DNS, push, WebSocket, Docker, Steam — 10 types Probe locations 20 locations across 7 regions; 1 region per monitor on Free, 2 from €7/mo, 7 on Business Wherever you run it — usually one place Cost in money From €0, then €7/mo €0 plus your server and your time Survives an outage of your own infrastructure Yes — we run elsewhere Only if hosted away from what it watches Regional failure detection Up to 20 locations across 7 regions, per-region verdicts (1 region on Free) Single vantage point by default Who patches it We do You do Free diagnostic tools [60 tools, no signup](/free-tools) Not applicable — self-hosted software Agent-readiness score (ora.ai) [100/100 · A+](https://ora.ai/score/watchfor.io) watchfor.io · 21 Sept 2026 Not applicable — self-hosted software Agent-readiness score (is-agentic.com) [100/100](https://is-agentic.com/scan/watchfor.io) watchfor.io · 21 Sept 2026 Not applicable — self-hosted software Uptime Kuma details checked on 11 September 2026 against [their published pricing](https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma). Plans change — see the note at the end of this page. ## Choose Uptime Kuma if - You are monitoring a homelab, a side project, or anything where an hour of downtime costs nothing. - Policy or compliance requires that monitoring data stays on your own hardware. - You enjoy running it, and the upgrades and backups are not a burden. ## Choose WatchFor if - Your monitoring lives in the same datacentre as the thing it monitors — so an outage takes both. - You need to know whether a problem is regional, which needs probes in more than one place. - You are the person who gets paged, and would like the pager itself not to be your responsibility. - You need checks Kuma does not have: CDN cache behaviour, MTR, NTP, blacklists, email policy, MCP. ## Moving over Kuma's monitor list exports as JSON. Flatten it to `name,type,target,interval,locations` and Monitors → Import takes the CSV; or hand the export to our MCP server and let an agent create them through the REST API. Notification channels have to be reconnected by hand. ## Questions people ask Is Uptime Kuma good? Yes. It is one of the best open-source projects in this space and for a lot of people it is the correct answer. This page exists for the narrower case where a single self-hosted vantage point is the problem. What does self-hosting actually cost? A small VPS, the time to upgrade it, the time to notice when it has stopped, and a second host somewhere else if you want monitoring that survives your own outage. None of that is much on its own; together it is usually more than €7 a month. Can I run both? Plenty of people do — Kuma internally for services that never leave the network, and a hosted service for anything customers touch. The two answer different questions. ## Try it on the thing you are actually worried about 15 monitors free, commercial use allowed, no card. If it does not beat what you have, keep what you have. [Start free](/auth/signup)[See pricing](/pricing) ## About these figures Everything stated here about Uptime Kuma was read from [their published pricing](https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma) on 11 September 2026 . Pricing, limits and features in this market change often and without notice, so treat this as a starting point and confirm the current terms with both vendors before you buy. We are not affiliated with Uptime Kuma , and product names belong to their owners. Agent-readiness scores are published by [ora.ai](https://ora.ai) and [is-agentic.com](https://is-agentic.com) for the domain named under each score, as of the date shown. They grade a domain, not a product: a vendor whose developer surface lives on a subdomain can score lower than its product deserves. We show each service's own cached result and never request a scan of another company's site, so a domain neither service has scanned reads as not scanned. Scoring rules change over time; compare the dates as well as the numbers. If something here is wrong or out of date — including if you work at Uptime Kuma — email [hello@watchfor.io](mailto:hello@watchfor.io) and we will correct the page and update the date on it. This page is provided for information only and is not advice. See our [Terms of Service](/legal/terms) for the full position on published information. --- Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/uptime-kuma-alternative · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt