Pingdom vs Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is the answer to "why am I paying a subscription to send HTTP requests?", and it is a good answer. It is MIT-licensed, has around 89,800 GitHub stars, shipped 2.5.0 on 1 August 2026, and costs whatever your smallest VPS costs. The part the comparison articles skip: you are now the vendor, including the probe network you cannot reproduce and the uptime of the thing that watches your uptime.
Pick Uptime Kuma for internal services, homelabs, and any team happy to run one more container in exchange for an unlimited monitor count at zero licence cost. Stay on a hosted tool if you need probes in more than one region, an SLA, transaction checks or real user monitoring, or if nobody on the team wants to be paged because the monitoring box filled its disk.
Side by side
Pingdom vs Uptime Kuma at a glance
| Pingdom | Uptime Kuma | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Commercial SaaS, SolarWinds (Turn/River Capital) | ✓ MIT, self-hosted |
| Cost | From $18/mo monthly, $16.50/mo annual, no free plan | ✓ $0 licence, plus your server and your time |
| Monitor limit | Bands of 10 to 30,000 uptime checks, priced per band | ✓ No licence limit, bounded by the host |
| Interval floor | 1 minute | ✓ 20 seconds by default, configurable |
| Probe locations | ✓ more than 100, with regional targeting | ✗ one, wherever you installed it |
| High availability | ✓ vendor's problem | ✗ single instance, no built-in HA |
| Check types | HTTP, ping, port, DNS, page speed, transactions | ✓ HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS, keyword, JSON query, Docker, gRPC, Steam, push |
| Transaction / browser checks | ✓ advanced checks | ✗ none |
| Real user monitoring | ✓ separate meter, 13-month retention | ✗ none |
| Notification channels | Email, SMS by allowance, webhooks, integrations | ✓ 90-plus providers, SMS through your own gateway |
| Status pages | ✓ included | ✓ included, unlimited, self-hosted |
| Data ownership | Vendor's database, CSV export capped at 10,000 lines per download | ✓ your SQLite or MariaDB file |
| Import from Pingdom | Not applicable | ✗ no importer, issue #1190 open since January 2022 |
| Support | ✓ paid vendor support | Community: GitHub issues and Discord |
| Best for | Public-facing SLAs that need multi-region evidence | Internal services and homelabs, at any monitor count |
Sources: Uptime Kuma repository · import issue #1190 · Pingdom pricing. Compiled August 2026.
Where Uptime Kuma wins
The monitor count stops being a pricing decision
This is the real change, and it is bigger than the money. On Pingdom, adding checks moves you between priced bands, so somebody has to decide whether a staging environment is worth a band jump. On Uptime Kuma there is no licence limit, so the answer to "should we monitor this too?" is always yes. Teams that switch usually end up monitoring three or four times as many endpoints, which is the kind of coverage improvement no plan upgrade sells you.
Ninety-plus notification providers, and SMS on your own terms
Pingdom bundles an SMS allowance per band, and that allowance freezes at 1,500 messages a month from the 3,000-check band all the way to the 30,000-check band. Uptime Kuma has no allowance because it has no gateway: you point it at Twilio, or ClickSend, or one of ninety-odd other providers, and you pay per message at that provider's rate. More setup, no ceiling, and one fewer thing your monitoring plan gets to ration.
The history is a file you own
Uptime and response-time history live in your SQLite or MariaDB database, so retention is a disk-space decision and querying it is just SQL. Compare that with pulling Pingdom results out as CSV in 10,000-line downloads, which is roughly seven days at one-minute granularity per file.
Actively maintained, and clear about what it is
Around 89,800 stars, version 2.5.0 released 1 August 2026, an MIT licence with no open-core tier waiting to withhold single sign-on. The project does not pretend to be a synthetic-monitoring platform, and that clarity is worth something when you are choosing between it and a SaaS.
Where Pingdom still wins
The probe network, and it is not close. Uptime Kuma checks from exactly one place: the machine you installed it on. Pingdom checks from more than 100 locations and lets you target regions, which is how you distinguish "the site is down" from "the site is down from Singapore" and how you produce evidence a customer will accept. You cannot rebuild that with one VPS, and running several Kuma instances gives you several dashboards rather than one correlated view.
You now own the uptime of your uptime monitor. A single instance with no built-in high availability means one bad host is a total blind spot: everything alerts at once for the wrong reason, or nothing alerts at all while a real outage runs. Install it somewhere unrelated to what it watches, and put something external in front of the monitor itself.
No transaction checks, no real user monitoring. If your Pingdom account contains advanced checks that log in and complete a checkout, or RUM data you rely on, Uptime Kuma replaces neither. That is not a gap to work around; it is a signal that part of your monitoring needs a different tool, and Checkly on the main list is the usual answer for the scripted-flow half.
Support is a Discord server. Community support is genuinely responsive and also has no SLA and nobody to escalate to at 3am. For an internal tool, fine. For the system that decides whether anyone finds out production is down, it is a decision to make deliberately rather than by default.
Migrating Pingdom to Uptime Kuma
1. Host it away from what it watches. A small VPS with a different provider than your production infrastructure, so a provider-wide incident does not take out your monitoring at the same moment you need it. Docker is the usual install.
2. Recreate the checks, because nothing imports them. There is no importer; issue #1190 has been open since January 2022. Export your check list from the Pingdom API, then either script the creation through Uptime Kuma's API or click them in. Under about fifty monitors, clicking is genuinely faster than writing the script.
3. Wire notifications before you trust it. Pick your providers, and if SMS matters, connect a gateway and send a real test message to a real phone. Then use Uptime Kuma's maintenance windows so planned deploys do not train everyone to ignore the alerts.
4. Accept that the history stays behind. Uptime history, SLA reports and RUM data do not transfer. Pull whatever you need for the record out of Pingdom first, in 10,000-line CSV chunks, before the account lapses, and start the new baseline knowingly at zero.
Common questions
FAQ: Pingdom vs Uptime Kuma
Can I import my Pingdom checks into Uptime Kuma?
Not with a built-in importer. The feature request for importing monitors from other services is issue #1190, open since January 2022, and the maintainer has confirmed no import functionality exists. What people do instead is export their check list from the Pingdom API and create the monitors through Uptime Kuma's own API or its socket interface with a short script. For a few dozen checks, clicking them in by hand is often faster than writing that script.
Is one server enough to run Uptime Kuma?
Technically yes, and that is the honest weakness. Uptime Kuma runs as a single instance, so every check leaves from one network location and there is no built-in multi-region probing or high availability. If that server or its uplink has a problem, you get false alarms for everything at once and no alerts about the real outage. Teams that care run it somewhere unrelated to the infrastructure it watches, and monitor the monitor with something external.
Is Uptime Kuma actively maintained?
Yes. It is MIT-licensed with roughly 89,800 GitHub stars and version 2.5.0 was released on 1 August 2026. Support is community support: GitHub issues and Discord, no SLA and no vendor to escalate to. That is the trade you are making for a zero-dollar bill, and it is a reasonable one for an internal tool while it is a harder one to defend for a monitor that pages people at 3am.