Love Uptime Kuma? Keep it - and add an external witness.
Uptime Kuma is a genuinely great self-hosted monitor - free, open source, and yours to run however you like. Self-hosting has real trade-offs though: it watches from your server's vantage point, it shares an outage with the infrastructure it runs on, and SMS or voice alerts mean wiring your own provider. HostTracker has watched the web independently since 2004 - 300+ checkpoints, 14 monitor types, and alerts that reach you even when your own infrastructure cannot.
Four honest reasons teams add a second, external monitor
One vantage point, unless you run a fleet
Kuma checks from wherever you deployed it - typically one server, one network, one region. Fleet-wide coverage means standing up and maintaining a Kuma instance in every location you care about. HostTracker already runs from 300+ checkpoints across every continent, and re-verifies a failure from several of them before opening an incident.
The monitor can go down with what it watches
If your server, hosting account or network loses power, the Kuma instance watching it goes down at the exact moment you most need a page. An external monitor like HostTracker stays up independently, so you get told even when your own infrastructure cannot tell you.
SMS and voice need wiring yourself
Kuma ships a rich set of alert integrations, but a phone call or text message means connecting your own SMS/voice provider and paying for it separately. HostTracker's paid plans include a monthly SMS allowance and voice-call alerts out of the box - the kind of alert that can wake someone at 3 a.m. with no extra setup.
You own every upgrade, backup and patch
Being self-hosted is a big part of Kuma's appeal, and for internal-only monitoring it is a fair trade. It does mean you are responsible for the Docker host's uptime, backups and security patches - work a managed, external service takes off your plate entirely.
HostTracker vs Uptime Kuma, feature by feature
Two good products built for different jobs - the marks below go both ways. As of August 2026:
| HostTracker | Uptime Kuma | |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring | ||
| HTTP / HTTPS and keyword checks | Yes | Yes |
| Ping, port and DNS checks | Yes | Yes |
| SSL certificate expiry alerts | Yes | Yes |
| Domain expiration (registry RDAP data) | Yes | No |
| Browser transaction checks (log in, pay) | Yes | No |
| Page-speed measurement in real browsers | Yes | No |
| Database query monitoring | Yes | No |
| SNMP counters and server resources | Yes | No |
| DNS blacklist (DNSBL) checks | Yes | No |
| Google Web Risk verdicts | Yes | No |
| Push / heartbeat inbound monitoring | No | Yes |
| Monitoring vantage points | 300+ checkpoints worldwide | One location - wherever you deployed it |
| Fastest check interval | 1 minute | 20 seconds - runs on your own server |
| Alerting | ||
| Email alerts | Yes | Yes |
| SMS alerts | Monthly allowance on paid plans | Requires wiring your own SMS provider |
| Voice-call alerts | Included via credits | Requires wiring your own voice provider |
| Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost | Yes | Yes |
| PagerDuty incidents | Auto-resolve on recovery | Yes |
| Telegram, Discord, Viber | Yes | Yes |
| Pushover and Pushbullet | Yes | Yes |
| Signed webhooks | 15 typed events, HMAC signatures | Yes |
| Multi-location confirmation before alerting | Locations named on the incident | Single vantage point, no distributed confirmation |
| Status pages | ||
| Status page on every plan | Including free | Built in, self-hosted |
| Subscriber notifications | Email, Slack, Teams, webhooks | No subscriber email/SMS notifications of its own |
| JSON / RSS exports and embeddable badges | Yes | Not published |
| Custom domain | Enterprise plans | Your own domain, self-hosted |
| Developers | ||
| REST API | v2 - 182 operations, OpenAPI 3.1 | Not published |
| Official SDKs | TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET | Not published |
| Command-line client | ht-cli | Not published |
| GitHub Action | Yes | Not published |
| MCP server for AI assistants | Hosted or run locally (stdio) | Community options |
| Product | ||
| Hosting and maintenance | Fully managed - nothing to patch | You own upgrades, backups and patching |
| Price | Free plan; paid plans from $9.90/month | Free forever, unlimited monitors, self-hosted |
| Data ownership | Hosted on HostTracker's infrastructure | Everything stays on your own server |
| Track record | Monitoring the web since 2004 | Beloved open source project, ~90K GitHub stars |
Facts verified against the Uptime Kuma GitHub repository (README and star count) and its Settings/Backup docs, August 2026. Found something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.
What a paid plan actually costs
- All 14 check types on paid plans - transactions, database, SNMP, DNSBL included
- Monthly SMS allowance included; voice calls via the same credits
- Status page on every plan, free included
- Free plan allows commercial use; 30-day / 100-monitor trial, no card
- Free forever, unlimited monitors, 20-second intervals
- Full data ownership - everything stays on your own server
- Checks from your own server's vantage point only
- No built-in SMS/voice; you maintain upgrades and patching
Full plan details: HostTracker pricing. Uptime Kuma is free, open-source software - there is no vendor pricing page to cite.
Alerts where your team already lives
Down and Up events, repeated-failure escalations, SSL and domain warnings and blacklist verdicts - delivered to:
Plus a REST API, four official SDKs, ht-cli and an MCP server for AI assistants - see the developer platform.
Add your monitors in an afternoon, decide in a month
- Keep Kuma running. Nothing to migrate away from - it keeps watching whatever it already watches well, internal services included.
- Recreate your monitor list in HostTracker. Uptime Kuma's backup gives you a JSON snapshot of your configuration (Settings, Backup, Export JSON), not a bulk-export REST API, so add your monitors directly - one call with the bulk API, or one command with ht-cli:
ht-cli monitors bulk-create --json @monitors.json - Run both for a month, as an external witness. The 30-day trial fits 100 monitors with every feature enabled - compare incident logs, response-time charts and alert latency on your own traffic, with no need to give up your self-hosted setup. Keep the free plan afterwards either way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Either works, and there is no wrong answer. Many teams keep Uptime Kuma exactly as it is for internal services and add HostTracker purely as an external witness - SLA-grade, multi-location evidence for anything customer-facing. Others move their outward-facing monitoring to HostTracker entirely and keep Kuma for private, internal-network services an external monitor cannot reach.
Yes - this is a common and legitimate setup. Keep Uptime Kuma watching internal services from inside your network, and let HostTracker watch your public-facing sites and APIs from outside, across 300+ checkpoints. If your own infrastructure goes down, HostTracker (being external and independent) is what actually notices and pages you - Kuma, sharing the same fate as what it monitors, cannot.
Whatever it was watching goes silently unmonitored, because the monitor shares an outage with the infrastructure underneath it - it cannot alert on its own downtime. This is exactly the gap an external, independently hosted service like HostTracker closes: it keeps checking, and can page you, even when your entire hosting account or region is unreachable.
Email, SMS, voice calls, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty with automatic incident resolve, Mattermost, Pushover, Pushbullet, Telegram, Discord, Viber, browser push, and signed webhooks with 15 typed events for anything custom.
They are included. Paid plans carry a monthly SMS allowance that tops up automatically, and voice-call alerts ride the same credit balance - no separate provider account to wire up. On a self-hosted Kuma instance, a phone call or text message means connecting and paying for your own SMS/voice provider first.
HostTracker adds full browser transaction checks (log in, add to cart, pay), page-speed monitoring, database queries, SNMP counters, server resource checks, DNS blacklist (DNSBL) monitoring, Google Web Risk verdicts, and domain-expiry checks through registry RDAP data - 14 monitor types in total, plus 11 free instant-check tools you can run without an account.
Yes, on every plan including the free one. HostTracker's status pages add components, incident history, and subscriber notifications over email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks - on top of the kind of page Kuma's own self-hosted status page already gives you. Enterprise plans add white-label branding and custom domains.
Uptime Kuma's backup is a JSON snapshot of your configuration from Settings, Backup, Export JSON, not a documented bulk-export REST API, so most teams just recreate their monitor list directly in HostTracker - one call with the bulk API, or one command with ht-cli: ht-cli monitors bulk-create --json @monitors.json. The 30-day trial fits 100 monitors, so you can run HostTracker alongside Kuma for a month before deciding how the two fit together long-term.
Keep exploring HostTracker's monitoring
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Automate it all
The REST API v2 behind every monitor - 182 operations, SDKs, CLI and MCP.
Keep Kuma. Add an external witness.
Start the 30-day trial - 100 monitors, every check type, no credit card - and run it beside Uptime Kuma for a month before deciding.