Best open-source and self-hosted uptime monitoring tools in 2026

If you searched for a self-hosted uptime monitor, you already made the important decision. You want the data on your own boxes, no per-monitor invoice, and no vendor that can change the free tier on a Tuesday. The rest is picking the tool that fits how your team works.

We build one of the tools on this list, Uptimepage, so read accordingly. We have tried to keep the descriptions of everyone else to durable facts rather than feature claims that rot in a month, because this whole category moves fast. Check the current docs before you commit. With that said, here is the honest map as it looks in 2026.

What actually matters when you self-host

Three questions sort this category faster than any feature table.

First, do you want a status page your customers see, or just internal alerts? Some tools do one well and bolt on the other. Second, do you configure by clicking, or do you want the config in Git? That single preference rules out half the list for most people. Third, how much do you want to operate? A single binary on a small VPS is a different commitment from a platform that expects Kubernetes.

Hold those three in mind and the choices get obvious.

Uptime Kuma

The default, and for good reason. Uptime Kuma is the tool most people mean when they say "self-hosted uptime monitor." One Docker container, a clean dashboard, a long list of monitor types, notifications to almost anything. If you run a homelab or a handful of side projects, you can stop reading here and go install it.

Where it runs out of road is teams. As of 2026 it still uses a single shared login, so everyone who can see the dashboard can change anything. There is no official REST API for managing monitors, the config lives in the database rather than a file you can commit, and the status pages are basic compared to a customer-facing tool. None of that matters for a Raspberry Pi watching your blog. All of it starts to matter once a second person needs access.

If you are bumping into those edges, that is the moment the rest of this list becomes interesting. We wrote a longer comparison with Uptime Kuma if you want the specifics.

Gatus

Gatus is the tool for people who want their monitoring in YAML and nowhere else. You describe each endpoint in a config file, commit it, and Gatus watches it. It is tiny, it speaks a lot of protocols, and it fits the GitOps brain perfectly.

The trade is the same as its strength. There is no web UI for editing checks, so a non-engineer cannot touch it, and the status page is functional rather than something you would put in front of customers. If your monitoring should live in a pull request and your audience is your own team, Gatus is a great answer.

OneUptime

OneUptime is the everything platform: monitoring, status pages, on-call, incident management, and logs in one open-source project. If you want to replace several paid tools at once and you have the operational capacity to run it, it is genuinely broad.

That breadth is also the catch. It is heavier than a single-binary tool and expects you to be comfortable with Docker or Kubernetes and a real chunk of resources. On a small VPS it is the wrong tool. For a platform team that already runs Kubernetes and wants one open-source system to own the whole incident lifecycle, it earns its weight.

Cachet and Statping-ng

These two cover the status-page corner. Cachet is a long-running, PHP-based status page that is going through a rebuild. It is a status page first, which means it does not monitor anything on its own; you feed it from elsewhere. Statping-ng is a community-kept fork of the older Statping, a single Go binary that does both monitoring and a status page, with a smaller community behind it.

Pick these if a status page is the actual product you need and the monitoring is secondary or already handled.

Prometheus and Blackbox exporter

Not a product, a pattern, and worth naming because plenty of teams already live here. If you run Prometheus, the Blackbox exporter probes HTTP, TCP, DNS, and ICMP, and Alertmanager handles the alerting. You get enormous power and you build the experience yourself, including the status page and the on-call flow. For a team that is already deep in Prometheus, adding uptime checks is a small step. For anyone else it is a lot of assembly.

Uptimepage

Ours, so here is the pitch and the caveat together.

Uptimepage is a single Rust binary that does uptime monitoring and a customer-facing status page together, with the parts Uptime Kuma users tend to ask for: a real REST API, a Terraform provider, organizations with roles, multi-region probe agents you run yourself, and status pages your customers can subscribe to over email or webhook. It is AGPL, so docker compose up and it is yours, or you can use the hosted free tier and skip running it. The same data model, API, and Terraform provider work either way, so you are not locked into the choice. There is more on the self-hosted setup and on driving it from code.

The caveat: it is younger than Uptime Kuma and has a smaller community, so it has fewer years of edge cases shaken out. If you want the most battle-tested option and you do not need an API or multi-tenant access, Uptime Kuma is the safer pick today. If you have outgrown a single shared login and want your monitoring in Git, that gap is exactly what we built for.

How to choose without overthinking it

For a homelab or a few personal projects, install Uptime Kuma and move on. For a team that wants config in Git and only needs internal alerts, use Gatus. If a polished customer status page with subscribers and an API is the point, look at an open-source status page with monitoring built in, which is the slice we focus on. If you want to own the entire incident lifecycle and you already run Kubernetes, OneUptime is the broad option. And if you already live in Prometheus, the Blackbox exporter is a small addition.

There is no single best tool here, only the one that matches your three answers. The good news is that all of them are free to try and free to leave, which is the whole point of staying open-source.