Uptime Kuma is great, until it is the thing that's down
Uptime Kuma is free and excellent for a homelab, but at a few hundred monitors admins report a slow UI and SQLite trouble, upgrades take planned downtime, and a monitor on the same box cannot tell you that the box died. Import your Kuma monitors into Vigil in one step, or keep Kuma and let a free Vigil heartbeat watch it from outside.
Free plan: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, commercial use allowed, no card. New accounts also get a 14-day trial of a paid plan.
Signs you have outgrown it
- Hundreds of monitors. MSP admins report trouble "around 300 monitors": a slow dashboard and a SQLite database that grows and occasionally corrupts. Kuma 2.0 adds MariaDB as an option, but moving to it is a planned migration.
- Upgrades are an event. The 2.0 database migration took people one to two hours of downtime on large installs.
- It goes down with your network. A monitor running on the same server, or the same home connection, cannot tell you that the server or the connection died. That is the one failure you most need to hear about.
- More than one person. Kuma has a single admin login, so colleagues and clients share it or do without.
Option 1: move the monitors to Vigil
- Export your monitors. On Kuma 1.x: Settings → Backup → Export gives a JSON file (the page is marked deprecated, and newer releases may not have it). Without it, list the URLs from Kuma's
/metricsendpoint (themonitor_urllabel) and use the URL-list importer. - Create a free Vigil account; you land on the importer with Uptime Kuma selected. Upload the JSON and check the preview: HTTP, keyword, JSON query, port and push monitors are converted (push monitors become heartbeats with new URLs).
- Recreate notifications: Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, email and webhooks are built in.
- Status pages come across as Vigil status pages with your components; they can be private, password-protected or on your own domain.
- Plans: 20 monitors free; Pro is $49 for 200 one-minute monitors and Business $149 for 1,000, both with unlimited team members.
Option 2: keep Kuma, watch it from outside (free)
If Kuma works for you, keep it and add the one thing it cannot do for itself: an outside watcher. Point a Kuma HTTP monitor at a Vigil heartbeat URL every minute. While Kuma runs, the heartbeat stays green; when Kuma, the server or your connection stops, the pings stop and Vigil alerts you. It fits easily on the free plan. Step-by-step: How to monitor Uptime Kuma from outside.
Questions
My Kuma has no Backup page. Can I still import?
Yes: read the monitor URLs from Kuma's /metrics endpoint (or copy them from the dashboard), paste them into the URL-list importer, and set keywords or expected statuses afterwards. A JSON list of monitors in Kuma's format also works.
Is there a self-hosted Vigil, like Kuma?
Yes. The self-hosted edition runs on your own server with a one-line Docker installer and signed updates, for $149 a month per instance. Most people leaving Kuma choose hosted, precisely so the watcher is not on their own box.
What happens to my push monitors?
They become Vigil heartbeats with new ping URLs. Update the URL in each script or cron job; Vigil accepts GET, POST and HEAD, so Kuma-style curl calls keep working.
Before you switch: honest limits
- Vigil's checks run from one location (Hetzner, Germany) plus any private locations you install; there is no multi-region confirmation yet. Every failure is re-checked after 12 seconds before it counts.
- Hosted Vigil does not make phone calls or send SMS. WhatsApp alerts go through CallMeBot and suit personal use.
- Fastest interval is 1 minute (5 minutes on Free).
Feature-by-feature: Vigil vs Uptime Kuma · Other switching guides: UptimeRobot · Freshping · Opsgenie