Vigil vs Uptime Kuma
Updated · prices checked September 2026
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 from $19/month, and a self-hosted edition at $149/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: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
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 $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Uptime Kuma | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) | ✓ Unlimited, interval down to 20 seconds. HTTP, keyword, JSON, TCP, ping, DNS, push heartbeats, Docker |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✕ Not offered (Docker container up/down only) |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not offered |
| APM / traces | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling | ✕ Not offered |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✕ Not offered |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business | ✕ Not offered |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ~ Public status pages with custom domain; no password or private pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ✕ Single admin account, no roles |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account | ✓ 90+ services including Telegram, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, email, webhooks |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/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 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ✕ Not offered |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members 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
Limits of Uptime Kuma that Vigil does not have:
- 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
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and 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. Import in about a minute
Upload a Kuma backup (Settings > Backup) into the importer. It shows every monitor it found before anything is created, skips URLs you already watch, and stops at your plan's monitor number.
2. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels and set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs.
3. Run both for a while
Keep Uptime Kuma running until Vigil has caught a real failure for you. Monitors can live in git afterwards: GET /api/v1/config exports them as YAML.
Step-by-step switching guide: switch from Uptime Kuma.
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 $19 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 $149/month per instance with a one-line installer (Docker, Caddy with automatic HTTPS, Postgres, signed updates). It carries Business 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 a backup from Kuma (Settings > Backup gives JSON) and upload it to the importer at /app/import; it previews the monitors and creates them when you confirm. Push monitors become Vigil heartbeats with new ping URLs.
Try Vigil next to Uptime Kuma
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
All comparisons: Better Stack · UptimeRobot · Freshping · Pingdom · StatusCake · Hyperping · Checkly · Atlassian Statuspage · Instatus · OpenStatus · Cronitor · Healthchecks.io · Sentry · GlitchTip · BugSnag · Rollbar · Honeybadger · PagerDuty · Opsgenie · Datadog · New Relic · Grafana Cloud · AppSignal · Dynatrace