Checkly vs Uptime Kuma

Checkly is a synthetic monitoring platform from Berlin built on the idea of monitoring as code. Engineering teams write API checks and browser checks in JavaScript or TypeScript, using Playwright for browser flows, keep them in the same repository as the application, and deploy them with the Checkly CLI or Terraform.

The same checks run in CI against preview deployments before a release and then continuously from global locations after it, so a broken login or checkout flow is caught by a test first and by monitoring second. Assertions, retries, alert channels such as Slack, PagerDuty and email, multistep API checks and heartbeat monitors are available, and traces connect a failed check to backend spans through OpenTelemetry. A free Hobby plan includes a monthly quota of API and browser check runs; Starter and Team plans add runs, locations and collaboration, and Enterprise adds SSO and private locations inside your own network.

Checkly fits teams that already write Playwright tests and want one source of truth for end-to-end testing and production monitoring. It requires coding and is not a full observability suite, so it is a poor fit for non-technical teams who only want uptime pings. Better Stack and UptimeRobot are simpler for basic uptime and status pages, Datadog Synthetics suits teams already on Datadog, and Grafana Cloud offers synthetic monitoring inside its own stack.

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.