Vigil vs Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is excellent at what it is: a free, self-hosted pinger with a great notification list and a public status page. Vigil is a hosted product with servers, logs, Kubernetes, RUM, private status pages, team roles and AI root cause for $10/month, and a self-hosted edition at $49/month if you want it on your own box.
Uptime Kuma pricing September 2026
- Free and open source (MIT). You pay for the server it runs on (typically a $5–10/month VPS) and your own time for updates, backups and HTTPS.
- No hosted or paid edition from the project.
Source: as of September 2026, from github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma (MIT licence, no paid tiers). Vendors change prices; the Uptime Kuma site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 10 monitors, 1 server, 1 status page, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Free forever.
- Pro $10/month: 100 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 5 servers, 5 seats, 5 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 1M log lines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 100 AI analyses. 10-day trial, no card.
- Enterprise $25/month: 500 monitors, 50 servers, unlimited seats, SSO, SLOs, private locations, 1-year history. 30-day trial.
- Self-hosted $49/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons from $2: +25 monitors, +5 servers ($3), +5 seats, +5 status pages, +1M log lines.
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $10 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Uptime Kuma | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 10 Free / 100 Pro / 500 Enterprise. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 11 monitor types (uptime, API assertions, multi-step flows, heartbeats, TCP, domain/DNS, app health, dependency, change, price, keyword) | ✓ Unlimited, interval down to 20 seconds. HTTP, keyword, JSON, TCP, ping, DNS, push heartbeats, Docker |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 5 / 50 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✕ Not offered (Docker container up/down only) |
| Logs | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not offered |
| APM / traces | ~ Endpoint latency and 5xx rates, request traces and a service map through the agent's Python and Node SDKs. Not a full APM: no profiling, no distributed tracing across other languages | ✕ Not offered |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✕ Not offered |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise | ✕ Not offered |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on Pro. 1 / 5 / 50 pages | ~ Public status pages with custom domain; no password or private pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 | ✕ Single admin account, no roles |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls | ✓ 90+ services including Telegram, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, email, webhooks |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✓ Self-hosted only |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month | ✕ Not offered |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) | $0 software + a VPS + your time; servers, logs and team features are not available |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Uptime Kuma does well
- Free, self-hosted, no vendor and no limits on monitors.
- Huge community, 90+ notification integrations including Telegram, Discord, Gotify, ntfy and Matrix.
- Monitor types: HTTP(s), keyword, JSON query, TCP, ping, DNS, push (heartbeat), Docker containers, Steam servers, and more.
- A public status page with a custom domain is built in.
Where Vigil is ahead
- You operate it: updates, database, backups, TLS, and the fact that a monitor running on one box cannot tell you that box is down.
- No server metrics agent, no logs, no Kubernetes, no RUM, no APM.
- Single-user by design (no roles or team seats), no private status pages, no escalation, no failure evidence or postmortems.
- No multi-step API flows, domain/DNS change diffs or security grading.
When to pick Uptime Kuma instead
Pick Uptime Kuma if you want free and self-hosted, are one person, are happy to maintain it, and need only uptime checks, heartbeats and a public status page. It is a great project and it costs nothing.
What Vigil does not do
- No browser / Playwright checks: Vigil scripts APIs, not clicks in a real browser.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting; alerts go to chat apps, push services, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- No on-call rotations or schedules: escalation policies and acknowledgements only.
- APM covers Python and Node apps on hosts running the agent; it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Uptime Kuma to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Uptime Kuma monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Why pay $10 for Vigil when Uptime Kuma is free?
Because Vigil is hosted, watched from outside your infrastructure, and includes things Kuma does not have: a server agent, logs, Kubernetes, Web Vitals, private status pages, team roles, escalation, failure evidence and AI root cause. If you only need a pinger, Kuma is the right free choice.
Can I self-host Vigil like Uptime Kuma?
Yes. The self-hosted edition is $49/month per instance with a one-line installer (Docker, Caddy with automatic HTTPS, Postgres, signed updates). It carries Enterprise limits and works air-gapped.
Does Vigil have Telegram, ntfy, Gotify and Matrix like Kuma?
Yes, all four natively, plus Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Pushover, email and webhooks. Kuma has more integrations overall (90+).
How do I import my Kuma monitors?
Export from Kuma (Settings > Backup gives JSON), map name, url, interval and keyword into Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config, or add them via the REST API. Push monitors become Vigil heartbeats with new ping URLs.
Try Vigil next to Uptime Kuma
Start free: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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