UptimeRobot vs Uptime Kuma: Hosted or Self-Hosted Monitoring
A straight comparison of UptimeRobot and Uptime Kuma on price, check types, regions and status pages, plus where Uptimehub fits if you want monitoring and a branded status page in one flat per-monitor plan.
Checked from regions with auto-retry. No single-location false alarms.
All systems operational. Steady pulse across every region.
api.example.com returned no response from all 6 regions. Auto-retry confirmed the outage, then we alerted your team.
api.example.com is back up. The incident is logged to your status page history automatically.
90-day uptime · branded · your domain
Live demo · drive it, no signup needed
The short answer
UptimeRobot is a hosted service you pay for, and Uptime Kuma is free open-source software you run yourself, so the real comparison is not features but who carries the operational load. UptimeRobot checks from its own infrastructure outside your network, which means it still works when your servers do not, and there is nothing for you to patch. Uptime Kuma costs nothing to license but needs a container, a host, OS updates, certificate renewals, and disk maintenance, and it checks from exactly one location: wherever you run it. That creates a blind spot, because a monitor hosted next to the app it watches can go dark in the same outage. Its SQLite storage also strains past roughly 100 to 150 monitors on short intervals. Choose Uptime Kuma if you want full data ownership and enjoy running infrastructure. Choose UptimeRobot, or Uptimehub, if you want checks from outside your own stack with no server to maintain.
Side by side
UptimeRobot vs Uptime Kuma
| Dimension | UptimeRobot | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting model | Fully hosted | Self-hosted only |
| License cost | Paid plans from around $8/mo | Free and open source |
| Real cost | Subscription | Server plus maintenance hours |
| Check locations | Multiple regions | One, wherever you run it |
| Works when your infrastructure is down | Yes | Depends where it runs |
| Practical monitor ceiling | Plan based | SQLite strains past 100 to 150 |
| Data ownership | Vendor hosted | Fully yours |
Verdict
The bottom line
Pick Uptime Kuma if data ownership matters more than convenience, you already run containers, and you will place it somewhere genuinely independent of the systems it watches. Pick UptimeRobot if you want an external, hosted check with zero maintenance and a familiar interface. If the deciding factor is that monitoring should never share a failure domain with your application, Uptimehub runs every check from six global regions with auto-retry and second-region confirmation before it alerts, and includes a branded public status page in one flat per-monitor plan so a self-hosted status page is one less thing to run.
Start monitoring in two minutes
Monitoring plus a branded status page in one honest per-monitor plan. Checks from six regions with auto-retry by default, read-only external checks that never touch your servers.