Uptime Kuma vs a Managed Monitor: What You Trade (2026)

Uptime Kuma is the best free thing in this category. It is MIT-licensed, runs from a single Docker container, and has a UI that most paid products would be glad to ship. If you are already running it and it is not causing you trouble, this post will not talk you out of it.

We make UptimeWarden, a managed monitor, so what follows is the case for paying, stated as specifically as we can. The Uptime Kuma facts are from the project's README on 5 September 2026.

What Uptime Kuma gives you

Check types: HTTP(s), TCP, HTTP keyword, HTTP JSON query, WebSocket, ping, DNS record, push (a heartbeat: your job calls Kuma), Steam game servers and Docker containers. More than 90 notification services, from Telegram and Discord to plain SMTP. Multiple status pages that can be mapped to your own domains. It needs Docker, or Node 20.4 or newer with PM2, and listens on port 3001. There is no hosted version; running it is the deal.

That list is not far behind the paid tools. The earlier version of this article said Kuma had no WebSocket check; the README lists one, and we have corrected the table below.

What it costs to run well

The software is free. The three things below are not, and they are where a self-hosted monitor quietly becomes a liability.

A monitor has to be more available than the things it watches. If Kuma runs on the same VPS as your app, an outage takes both down and nobody is paged. Running it properly means a separate host in a separate failure domain, kept patched, backed up, and itself monitored by something. That is a small always-on server plus an hour or two a month, forever.

One vantage point is not the internet. Kuma checks from wherever it is hosted. A site that is unreachable from your Hetzner box may be fine from another region, or the reverse. Checking from several regions means several Kuma instances and your own logic for "how many have to agree before this is real."

After the alert, you are on your own. Kuma sends a notification. It does not know who is on call this week, does not escalate when nobody acknowledges, and does not keep an incident record. Teams wire it to PagerDuty (from $25 per user a month on the paid tiers) or build the rota in Slack.

What UptimeWarden charges for the difference

Plan	Price	Monitors	Fastest check	Regions
Free	$0	20	3 minutes	consensus of 2
Hobby	₺150/mo	35	2 minutes	consensus of 2
Starter	$7/mo	50	2 minutes	tunable
Professional	$29/mo	100	1 minute	tunable
Enterprise	custom	unlimited	30 seconds	up to 6

On every plan, a failed check is repeated from other regions before we alert you; most alerts are confirmed from at least two regions, and one we cannot confirm is still sent, labelled unverified. A status page is in every plan, and on-call rotations with escalation start at Hobby. There is no server; the monitoring infrastructure's uptime is our problem, not yours.

Side by side

	UptimeWarden	Uptime Kuma
Licence and hosting	managed SaaS	MIT, self-hosted
Cost	from $0, plans above	$0 plus a server and your time
HTTP, TCP, keyword, DNS, ping	yes	yes
WebSocket	yes	yes
gRPC, UDP, SSL expiry, MCP	yes	no (SSL expiry via HTTP check settings)
Heartbeat / push	all plans	yes
Steam, Docker container checks	no	yes
Multi-region checks	6 regions, built in	one per instance, run several yourself
Consensus before alerting	all plans	no
On-call rota, escalation	from Hobby	no
Incident record	yes	no
Status pages	1 on Free, up to 10 on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise; own domain from Professional	multiple, own domains
Notification channels	9	90+
Forecasting	Professional and above	no
Audit log	90 days Professional, 365 Enterprise	no

Two of those rows favour Kuma outright: the breadth of notification services, and the Steam and Docker checks. If either is why you run it, keep running it.

Stay on Kuma if

You are comfortable operating a server and it already lives somewhere separate from what it monitors. Your alerts go to one place and one person. Data sovereignty or an air-gapped network rules out SaaS. Or you simply like it, which is a good enough reason.

Move if

Kuma has been down during an outage and you found out from a customer. You need a rota and escalation rather than a notification. You want checks from more than one region without running more than one Kuma. Or the hour a month you spend on the monitor is worth more than Hobby's ₺150 a month.

You can keep Kuma running while you decide; the Free plan takes 20 monitors and imports a CSV of what you already watch.