UptimeGlobe vs Uptime Kuma
Excellent open-source software. The question isn’t what it costs, it’s who gets paged when the monitor itself goes down.
Figures below come from Uptime Kuma’s own pages, checked on .
What Uptime Kuma costs
Self-hosted
Free (MIT)
Unlimited monitors · 20-second checks · 90+ notification services
Hosted option
—
No official hosted service
Uptime Kuma is MIT-licensed free software. Your cost is the server you run it on plus the time you spend maintaining it.
For reference, UptimeGlobe is free for 10 monitors with checks from 2 regions, and $10/mo for our Starter plan — the full table is on our pricing page.
Side by side
| Feature | UptimeGlobe | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | ✓10 monitors · 2 regions · status page | ✓entirely free |
| Multi-region checks on free | ✓2 regions | —one instance = one vantage point |
| Origin-vs-network diagnosis | ✓on every alert | —single vantage point |
| Status page on free | ✓badge + JSON too | ✓ |
| Charges per responder / seat | —never | — |
| Browser / transaction checks | ✓Pro and up (1,500/mo) | ? |
| MCP server for AI agents | ✓paid plans | ? |
| Self-hostable | — | ✓self-hosted only |
✓ yes · — no · ? not published by Uptime Kuma. Where they publish nothing on an axis we say so rather than assuming the answer.
One box can only ever have one opinion
An Uptime Kuma instance checks from wherever you run it, so every result it produces is the view from one place on the internet. Put it in the same datacentre as the app and a broken route between your users and your server is invisible to it. Put it elsewhere and a broken route between that one box and your server is indistinguishable from your app being down.
That isn’t a flaw in Kuma — you can’t triangulate from a single point, and no software fixes that. Our own product says as much when someone configures a single-region monitor:
This monitor checks from a single region, so we can't tell a server problem from a network problem. Adding more regions enables that diagnosis.
You can run several Kuma instances in several places, at which point you are operating a small distributed system and paying for it in servers and attention.
The failure mode nobody plans for
Self-hosted monitoring has an awkward habit of failing in exactly the circumstances you bought it for. Your hypervisor has a bad afternoon, the VM hosting Kuma goes with it, and the alerts stop. No alert and no problem look exactly the same from where you are sitting.
That’s an argument about where you put things, not about the software. The fix is to have something outside the blast radius watching: point a free UptimeGlobe monitor at the box itself, from two regions, and you find out when the watchman stops. It costs nothing.
What you are actually choosing between
Kuma costs a server and your time; ours costs money and not much time. Which works out cheaper depends on what an hour of your attention is worth and whether you enjoy upgrading things.
What isn’t a matter of preference is multi-region checking, and the diagnosis that only becomes possible once several regions disagree. A single instance can’t produce that at any price.
Prices move. Tell us if one of these is out of date.
Try the difference on the free plan
10 monitors, checks from 2 regions, a status page you can use commercially, and a diagnosis on every alert. No card.
Start monitoring free