Better Stack vs Uptime Kuma

Better Stack is an observability platform built by a Prague-based company of the same name. It started as two products, Better Uptime and Logtail, and now combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, status pages and log and metrics management (Telemetry) under one account and one interface.

Monitors check HTTP endpoints, keywords, ports, DNS, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats from multiple regions, with check intervals down to 30 seconds on paid plans. Alerts go out by phone call, SMS, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams, escalate through on-call rotations, and open incidents that can update a hosted status page automatically. The telemetry side is built on ClickHouse: logs and metrics are queried with SQL, followed in live tail and turned into dashboards, with OpenTelemetry and common log shippers supported. The free plan covers 10 monitors, a status page and a small log allowance; uptime is billed as a monthly plan, while logs and metrics are usage-based per GB.

It fits startups and small to mid-size engineering teams that would otherwise pay for Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately, and its interface is widely praised. It is not as deep as Datadog for APM, profiling and enterprise security, and PagerDuty remains more sophisticated for complex on-call and event routing. Uptime Kuma is the free self-hosted alternative for monitoring only, and Grafana Cloud is the main competitor on cost-efficient logs and metrics.

Uptime Kuma is a free, open-source, self-hosted monitoring tool created by developer Louis Lam and released under the MIT license. It has become one of the most popular monitoring projects on GitHub, with more than 60,000 stars, because it does the essential job of checking whether websites and services are up through a clean web interface that takes minutes to deploy with a single Docker container.

Monitor types include HTTP(s) with keyword and JSON query checks, TCP ports, ping, DNS, Docker containers, databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis, game servers, and push monitors that receive heartbeats from cron jobs or scripts. Checks can run as often as every 20 seconds, TLS certificate expiry is tracked, and maintenance windows pause alerts. More than 90 notification providers are supported, including email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, PagerDuty and webhooks, and multiple status pages with custom domains can be published. Everything is free; the only cost is the server you run it on.

Uptime Kuma fits indie developers, homelab users and small teams comfortable running their own infrastructure. Because it is self-hosted, you need to monitor the monitor, ideally from another server or region, and it lacks on-call rotations, escalation policies, multi-region checks and full multi-user permissions. Better Stack and UptimeRobot are hosted alternatives with free tiers, PagerDuty and incident.io handle on-call and incidents, and Gatus is another self-hosted option configured in code.