Grafana Cloud vs Uptime Kuma
Grafana Cloud and Uptime Kuma are both uptime & monitoring tools. Grafana Cloud is aimed at developers and enterprise, while Uptime Kuma is aimed at developers. Both have a free plan.
Grafana Cloud
Open-source observability dashboards
Uptime Kuma
Self-hosted uptime monitoring
| Pricing | Freemium · $19 | Open source |
| Starting price | $19/mo | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days | — |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise | Developers |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2014 | HK · 2021 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Grafana Cloud if
Engineering teams comfortable with open-source observability who want control and lower cost.
- Open source with no lock-in
- Generous free cloud tier
- Visualizes almost any data source
Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting turnkey, fully integrated APM (Datadog, New Relic).
Choose Uptime Kuma if
Developers and small teams comfortable self-hosting who want free, reliable uptime checks.
- Free and open source
- Very easy to deploy
- Huge range of notifications
Look elsewhere if: Teams needing on-call rotations, SLAs and multi-user management.
Grafana Cloud vs Uptime Kuma pricing
Grafana Cloud
- Free$010k metrics series, 50 GB logs/traces, 3 users, 14-day retention
- Pro$19/moPlatform fee plus usage; 3 users included, then $8/user
- Enterprise$25,000/yrMinimum annual spend commit; custom retention
Uptime Kuma
- Open source$0MIT license, self-hosted via Docker or Node
Grafana Cloud · Key features
- Dashboards over 150+ data sources
- Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir)
- Logs with Loki and traces with Tempo
- Alerting, on-call and incident response
- k6 load testing and synthetic monitoring
- Self-hosted open source or managed cloud
Cons
- More setup than Datadog
- Query languages to learn (PromQL, LogQL)
- Fragmented product surface
Uptime Kuma · Key features
- HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS, keyword, JSON and Docker monitors
- Push monitors for cron and heartbeat checks
- 90+ notification providers including Slack, Telegram, Discord
- Status pages with custom domains
- Certificate expiry monitoring
- Single-container Docker deployment
Cons
- Self-hosted only; you monitor the monitor
- Single-user by default
- Basic incident management
Grafana Cloud vs Uptime Kuma: FAQ
Do Grafana Cloud and Uptime Kuma have a free plan?
Yes, both Grafana Cloud and Uptime Kuma have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.