Keel vs Uptime Kuma — a hosted Uptime Kuma alternative, no server to run

The comparison

Uptime Kuma's details below are from its GitHub repository as of October 2026. Keel's are from our pricing page. Both projects move; check theirs before you commit.

What you get	Keel	Uptime Kuma
Deployment	Hosted. Create an account, add a URL, done — nothing to install or run.	Self-hosted. A Docker container or Node.js process you run, patch, back up, and keep alive on a machine you choose.
Price	Free — 3 monitors, 5-minute checks. Pro — £5/month flat, 50 monitors, 60-second checks. No seats, no usage tiers.	Free, forever, for unlimited monitors. MIT-licensed; your costs are the server and your time.
Check types	HTTP and HEAD, against a status code you choose. Redirects are not followed — a 3xx counts as down unless you set it as the expected code.	HTTP(s), TCP, keyword, JSON query, WebSocket, ping, DNS records, push, Steam game servers, Docker containers.
Check interval	Every 5 minutes free; every 60 seconds on Pro.	Down to 20 seconds, on your own hardware.
Notifications	Webhooks only — down, up, or both, to any HTTPS endpoint. Plain-JSON payloads that Slack, Discord, and curl read without adapters. Failed deliveries retry once.	90+ notification services, including Telegram, Discord, Gotify, Slack, Pushover, and email over SMTP.
Incident threshold	Two consecutive failures open an incident; one blip is ignored on purpose. A single passing check closes it.	Configurable per monitor.
Status pages	Not offered.	Multiple status pages, mappable to specific domains.
Data location	Keel's servers. Monitor and webhook URLs must be public hosts; internal network addresses are rejected. 30 days of check history, no export yet.	Entirely yours — it runs on your machine and your data never leaves it.

When Uptime Kuma fits

More often than its fans admit, and more often than ours would like.

You want it free and unlimited

One docker run and you have unlimited monitors at 20-second intervals, forever, for the cost of a small box you probably already have. On price-per-monitor, nothing hosted competes, Keel included.

You want more than HTTP

Ping, raw TCP, DNS records, WebSocket, Docker containers, a Steam game server — Uptime Kuma checks all of them. Keel checks HTTP and HEAD against a status code, and stops there.

You want notifications everywhere

Telegram, Pushover, Gotify, SMTP, and 90+ more services. Keel fires a webhook — one channel type, deliberately — and expects your endpoint to do the fan-out.

Your data must stay home

Self-hosting means the check history never leaves your network, which is a hard requirement in some workplaces. Keel's history lives on its servers for 30 days, and there's no export yet — a fair criticism.

When Keel fits

When "self-hosted" is the unappealing half of that sentence.

You don't want to run a server

A self-hosted monitor shares a failure domain with whatever you point it at: the VPS that dies quietly, the container that stops restarting, the SQLite file on the NFS mount that isn't supported. Keel runs elsewhere and keeps checking regardless.

You have no server to run it on

Not everyone has a spare box or wants a $5/month VPS line item to save a £5/month line item. Keel's free tier needs nothing but an account; Pro is a flat £5 for 50 monitors at 60-second checks.

You want upgrades to be someone else's job

Uptime Kuma ships updates you apply yourself, on your schedule, against your data. Hosted means there's nothing to patch and nothing to back up — that's the entire product category.

The monitor needs its own pager

Every self-hosted tool eventually asks whether you were monitoring the monitor. Keel turns that question off: hosted, enforced server-side limits, and a webhook that fires when — and only when — two consecutive checks fail.

Free if you'll run it. £5 if you won't.

Both are honest answers. If running a server is the fun part, run Uptime Kuma — it's genuinely good. If it's the chore part, that's what we're for.

Sign up free See pricing