Compare · RealUptime Monitor
RealUptime Monitor vs Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is the most popular self-hosted uptime monitor there is, and it earns that: MIT-licensed, actively maintained, one Docker command to install, with a long list of monitor types and notification integrations. This page is not going to pretend otherwise. The real comparison is not feature against feature but model against model: software you run on your own infrastructure versus a service that checks your infrastructure from the outside.
Open-source, self-hostable code
Don’t have
hosted only today
Have
MIT-licensed, installed with one Docker command; free forever
Checks from a vantage independent of your infrastructure
Have
probes run from RealUptime's own 10-region fleet, sharing no host, network, or provider with the systems they watch
Partial
checks run from wherever you install the instance; hosting it beside the systems it watches means it goes down with them, so an independent vantage requires a second server you also maintain
Multiple named regions shown together per check
Have
named region readings shown side by side, by default on every check
Don’t have
one instance probes from its own location; there is no built-in multi-region probe fleet to compare readings across
Status pages
Have
public status pages on every tier, updated from the same probes
Have
built-in status pages, mappable to their own domains
On-call rotations and escalation policies
Have
rotations, escalation policies, and acknowledgement on paid rungs; pages by email, Slack, webhook, or your PagerDuty, with no phone or SMS paging of its own
Partial
notifications to a long list of services (Telegram, Discord, Slack, email, and many more), but no rotation or escalation scheduling documented
Someone else runs, patches, and backs it up
Have
hosted service; 10 monitors and 5 server-agent slots free, no server of yours involved
Don’t have
the software is free; the server it runs on, its upgrades, its database, and its backups are yours to operate
Is there a free tier?
RealUptime is free to start and never asks for a card. One signup turns on the free rung of every product: 10 monitors with a public status page, 5 server-agent slots, and 10,000 error events a month kept for 14 days. RealUptime Outages is free to read with no account at all.
Uptime Kuma: free software rather than a free tier. It is MIT-licensed, installs with one Docker command, and is free forever; what it costs is the server you run it on, plus its upgrades, its database and its backups.
Is it open source or self-hosted?
RealUptime's core is a hosted service and its source is not published, so there is no self-hosted edition of the platform itself. The parts that run on your side are open source at github.com/RealUptimeHQ: the CLI and the RealUptime Errors SDKs for JavaScript, Python, Go, PHP and Ruby are MIT-licensed, and the Grafana data source is Apache 2.0.
Uptime Kuma: MIT-licensed, installed with one Docker command, and free forever.
If self-hosting is a hard requirement, these are the open-source options in this category: Uptime Kuma (MIT), OpenStatus (AGPL-3.0), Healthchecks.io (BSD 3-Clause) and OneUptime (Apache 2.0).
Looking for an Uptime Kuma alternative?
For the reasoning behind checking from more than one region at all, see why a status page can show all green during a real outage. Comparing more than just this one alternative? The status page tool checklist covers what to test before committing to any of them.