Comparison
Uptime Kuma is the cheapest way to run your own monitoring. This page is about what happens when one instance in one place is not enough, and about where it honestly still is.
Researched and verified on 2026-08-15. We recheck competitor pricing quarterly.
You need checks that keep running when your own infrastructure has a bad day. Five independent probes in Europe and the US, built-in flapping suppression with per-category thresholds, real Chromium browser tests, Core Web Vitals and security header scans all ship in one plan, with nothing to install, patch or back up yourself.
You already run a server or homelab, want monitoring data to never leave your own infrastructure, and do not mind maintaining the instance yourself. It is free, open source, covers eleven monitor types including real DNS records, Docker containers and NTP, and connects to more than ninety notification services.
| Feature | PingView | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Price / licenseUptime Kuma has no license cost. The real cost is your own server and your own admin time. | From 0 PLN (Free) to 999 PLN/mo | Free, open source (MIT) |
| Monitoring locationsUptime Kuma checks only from wherever you installed it. Multi-location checking was closed by the author as "not planned" (GitHub #828). | 5 | 1 |
| Native monitor typesKuma covers HTTP(S), HTTP(S) Keyword, HTTP(S) JSON Query, TCP, Ping, DNS record, Docker containers, Steam Game Server, WebSocket, Push and NTP. | 4 | 11 |
| Fastest check intervalA faster interval in Kuma also means more load on the server you are already trying to protect. | 1 min (Professional) | 20 s (declared minimum) |
| Flapping / false-alert suppressionNo built-in dampening in Kuma. Users mitigate single-blip alerts by manually raising the Retries counter. | Available | Not available |
| Notification channelsEmail, SMS, webhook, Slack, Discord and Teams for PingView. Telegram, Gotify, Pushover and dozens more for Kuma. | 6 | 90+ |
| Status page on your own domainKuma supports CNAME plus reverse proxy, a custom logo, theme color and CSS. Full removal of Kuma branding is not documented. | Available | Available |
| Browser-based synthetic testsNo Uptime Kuma monitor type uses a browser. | Available | Not available |
| Real User Monitoring (RUM) | Available | Not available |
| Core Web Vitals / Lighthouse | Available | Not available |
| Role-based permissions (RBAC)PingView limits team seats per plan without granular roles yet. Kuma has no multi-user support at all: request #6813 stays open, patched only by an unofficial fork. | Partially available | Not available |
| Support / SLANeither product publishes a formal support-response SLA. | Email support on paid plans | Community only (GitHub issues, Discord) |
| E-commerce pluginsWordPress, PrestaShop and Magento 2 with auto-provisioning. No equivalent found for Kuma. | Available | Not available |
| Hosting: who maintains itIf the server running Kuma goes down, the monitoring goes down with it. | Fully managed SaaS | You: your VPS, your OS patches |
| Data retentionUsers report SQLite slowdowns and database issues once history grows large. | 30 to 365 days, depending on plan | No fixed limit, bound by your own database |
| BackupsYou back up the SQLite or MariaDB file yourself, on your own schedule. | Handled by the provider | Your responsibility |
Competitor data collected on 2026-08-15 from public pricing and documentation pages. Vendors change plans without notice, so verify current terms before you decide.
PingView runs from five independent probes in Wrocław, Berlin, Worcester, Newark and Milan, operated separately from any customer's infrastructure. Uptime Kuma runs on the same server or network it is watching by design: when your infrastructure goes down, so does the tool that was supposed to tell you. The author closed the request for distributed checking as "not planned" (GitHub #828), and follow-up requests (#5024, #2955) remain open.
PingView counts tri-state signals with per-category thresholds before it opens an incident, so a single one-second network blip does not page anyone. Uptime Kuma has no equivalent built in; the common workaround reported by its users is manually raising the Retries setting, which is a blunter instrument.
Playwright-driven synthetic checks, visual regression, Real User Monitoring, Lighthouse and MDN HTTP Observatory security scans all run on a schedule from the Professional plan. No Uptime Kuma monitor type opens a browser or scores a page's performance or security headers.
The WordPress plugin plus PrestaShop and Magento 2 modules create an account and a monitor straight from the shop admin, then surface status and incidents there. Uptime Kuma has no comparable shop integration; it is a general-purpose tool, not built around a specific storefront platform.
We would rather you read this here than find it out after you have already built your alerting around us.
Uptime Kuma costs nothing to run. Even our cheapest plan (Free, 0 PLN) caps out at 10 monitors and a 5 minute interval, while a self-hosted Kuma on a roughly 17 PLN/month VPS has no license-imposed limit at all, only whatever your hardware can carry.
Kuma checks HTTP(S) with keyword and JSON matching, TCP, ping, DNS records, Docker containers, Steam game servers, WebSocket, NTP and push-based heartbeats: eleven types in total. PingView has four real monitor types. If you need to watch a DNS record or a Docker container directly, we simply do not do that yet.
More than ninety notification services, from Telegram and Gotify to Pushover and generic webhooks. PingView covers six real channels: email, SMS, webhook, Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams. If your team already lives in one of Kuma's ninety-plus integrations, it will likely fit your existing workflow better.
Self-hosted means your availability data never leaves infrastructure you control. For teams with hard data-sovereignty requirements, that is an argument no SaaS product, PingView included, can fully match.
Uptime Kuma has over 90,000 GitHub stars and more than 8,000 forks, with a steady stream of tutorials, ready-made Docker images and community add-ons. As a much smaller product, PingView does not have, and will not soon have, that scale of public support.
There is no concept of a "Starter plan monitor cap" in Kuma. The only ceiling is what your own server can handle, and you are the one who decides where that ceiling sits.
You run a homelab or a side project, your team already owns its own servers and takes on-call seriously, your monitoring data must never leave infrastructure you control, or you need a monitor type we do not have, like Docker containers, a Steam game server or NTP. It is free, it is honestly built, and for that situation it is the right tool.
Choose the perfect plan for your monitoring needs.
Protect your revenue for the price of a pizza.
Starter
$24.99/mo
25 monitors
~1.00 $/monitor
Professional
$74.99/mo
100 monitors
~0.75 $/monitor
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Custom limits
Everything you need:
Cancel anytime. No contracts. No surprises.
Not natively. The author closed the request for distributed, multi-region checking as "not planned" (GitHub #828). You would need to run and maintain several separate instances yourself.
No. Kuma monitors other services, but if the machine it is installed on goes offline, there is nothing left to send the alert.
A small VPS starts at roughly 17 PLN per month (a Hetzner CX22, for example), but that does not count the time you will spend on security updates, database backups and reacting when the instance itself has a problem.
No. None of its monitor types open a browser, so there is no synthetic browser testing, visual regression, Core Web Vitals or Lighthouse scoring.
Its official API key is read-only, exposing a Prometheus metrics endpoint and a push endpoint. Creating, editing or deleting monitors requires the Socket.IO interface with a login, or a third-party library built around it.
Every claim about Uptime Kuma comes from their public pricing page, documentation and help centre, collected on 2026-08-15 and linked below. Every claim about PingView is checked against our own source code rather than our marketing copy, which is why some rows show limits our own landing pages used to overstate. Where a fact could not be confirmed from a primary source, we leave it out instead of guessing.
Disclosure: PingView publishes this page and PingView is one of the two products compared. We have an obvious interest in the outcome, so we list where the other tool is the better choice and link their pricing page so you can check the numbers yourself.
Check Uptime Kuma pricing yourselfRun both for a week on the same site. Compare what each one actually told you the moment something broke, and where each one was silent.