A hosted Uptime Kuma alternative
Uptime Kuma is a popular open-source monitoring tool you install and run yourself. Uptime Dog is a hosted service: nothing to install, update or back up. The right choice depends mostly on who you want running your monitoring.
Based on public information as of October 2026. Check Uptime Kuma's own site for current plans and prices. Uptime Kuma is a trademark of its owner; Uptime Dog isn't affiliated with it.
Uptime Dog and Uptime Kuma at a glance
| Area | Uptime Dog | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Hosted for you | Self-hosted: you run it on your own server |
| Cost | Flat plans in GBP: £0, then £9, £29, £79 a month | Free and open source; you pay for the server and your time |
| Updates and backups | Done for you | Yours to do |
| Check locations | Confirmed from more than one place where set up, otherwise by a retry | Wherever you install it |
| On-call | Rotations, overrides and escalation policies on paid plans | Not a focus |
| Private networks | Reached through heartbeats and the server agent | Direct, if installed inside the network |
The main differences
Who watches the watcher
Self-hosted monitoring has a catch: if it runs on the same server, network or provider as what it watches, the outage that takes your site down can take the monitor with it, and nobody is told. Uptime Dog runs elsewhere, so it's still there to raise the alarm.
Maintenance
With Uptime Kuma, you look after the server, the updates, the database, backups and TLS. That's simple for one person who enjoys it and easy to let slip in a team. With Uptime Dog that's our job.
Incidents and on-call
Uptime Dog has incidents with updates and timelines, on-call rotations with overrides, escalation policies that repeat until someone acknowledges, SMS and phone calls through credits included in paid plans, and reports with mean time to recover and acknowledge.
What Uptime Dog includes
Four plans, priced in pounds sterling and billed monthly or yearly through Paddle. Limits per plan, from Free to Business:
- Monitors: Free 20, Essentials 50, Pro 200 and Business 1,000, checked as often as every 20 seconds.
- Status pages: Free 1, Essentials 1, Pro 5 and Business 20, with custom domains from Essentials.
- Seats: Free 1, Essentials 3, Pro 10 and Business 25.
- SMS and call credits a month: Essentials 20, Pro 100 and Business 300.
- Logs a month: Free 100 MB, Essentials 5,000 MB, Pro 20,000 MB and Business 50,000 MB.
- Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Telegram, webhook, PagerDuty and Opsgenie alerts, the REST API and the AI assistant (with your own key) on every plan.
See the full pricing table or the feature overview.
When Uptime Kuma is the better choice
No tool is right for everyone. Uptime Kuma is likely to suit you better if:
- You want monitoring for free and are happy to run and maintain a server for it.
- You need to check things on a private network directly. Uptime Dog refuses private addresses for security; heartbeats and the server agent cover many, but not all, of those cases.
- You want full control of the software and data, or to change the code.
- You need more monitors than our plans offer at a price you would pay.
Moving from Uptime Kuma
Export your list of monitors from Kuma, then create them in Uptime Dog by hand or with the REST API. Recreate notification channels once and set them as team defaults. Keep Kuma running in parallel for a week if you want to compare alerts before switching it off.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute
Uptime Dog is free for up to 20 monitors. No card needed.
Start monitoring free