8 Best Free & Open Source Status Page Tools in 2024

Status page is a must for any online business today.

There are over 50,000 status pages live as of 2023 hosted on Better Stack alone.

The official GitHub status page gets 832k visits every month, Slack gets 348k, and Stripe around 47k, according to Similar web.

No matter what website or business you run, status pages are the golden standard for incident communication.

We’ve selected the best hosted (with free plans) and open-source status page tools you can use to set up your incident communication the right way. Here they are:

Hosted tools (with free plans):

• Better Stack
• Instatus
• Atlassian status page
• Statuspal

Open source tools:

• Upptime
• Cachet
• Statping
• Statusfy

Best hosted tools

Here are the best-hosted tools that also come with a free plan.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack combines incident management, uptime monitoring, and status pages into a single beautifully designed product.

Their status page is available for all free users and can be even published on a custom sub-domain with HTTP(s).

The free plan also offers uptime monitoring with e-mail, Slack, and Microsoft Teams alerts as well as a basic incident management tool. The paid plans start at $30/month and offer customizable design, e-mail & API subscriptions, and password-protected status pages.

A great feature of Better Stack is also the embeddable system status notice, which can be used to communicate any incidents directly on the website, without the need to redirect users to the status page.

Overall Better Stack offers a great way of getting a status page quickly and for free. The uptime monitoring and incident management then come as a plus, which comes in handy, especially if you want to save money on expensive dedicated uptime monitoring solutions.

Explore the full Better Stack demos library

Pros:

• Free status page for all users on a custom domain
• Uptime monitoring built-in
• Embeddable system status notice
• Easy creation and real-time updates
• Track incidents with postmortem capabilities
• Real-time notifications and integrations (e.g., Slack, Intercom)
• Highly customizable branding options

Cons:

• Branding behind a paywall

Pricing:

Better Stack offers a free plan with uptime monitoring and 1 status page and a pay-as-you-go plan with branding features and multiple status pages.

2. Instatus

Instatus is a new status page provider. They offer a free status page with unlimited subscribers and unlimited teams, but the catch is that it is not on a custom domain.

Their paid plan then starts at $20/month and offers the same product but with the option to get it on a custom domain.

Instatus is a very well-designed tool that is quite similar to the Status page and focuses on distinguishing itself mainly with reasonable pricing for smaller teams.

The feature list includes things you would expect like email subscriptions, scheduled maintenance, or incident templates. Instatus also has an API and integrates with incident management tools like Pagerduty.

Pros:

• Design and branding to fit your organization.
• Notifications for downtime and outages
• Connects with popular tools (e.g., Slack, Zapier).
• Share updates across multiple platforms
• Free status page with unlimited team members on the Instatus domain
• Clean and simple design

Cons:

• May lack detailed reporting compared to competitors.

Pricing:

Instatus offers three tiers, starting with a free plan offering unlimited teammates and subscribers, a pro plan starting at $20, and a business plan starting at $300.

3. Atlassian Statuspage

Statuspage made by Atlassian is the main player on the status page market. Statuspage's free plan offers 100 subscribers, 2 team members, email & Slack notifications, and limited access to their API.

The main limitation of the free plan is that it doesn't offer the ability to have it on a custom domain. For such functionality, the hobby plan starts at $29/month is necessary. However, this plan also has severe limitations, when it comes to customization as CSS and HTML can't be changed. With Statuspage this is only possible with the business plan that comes at a staggering $399/month.

Overall Statuspage provides a great tool, but with a very high price tag. Considering other free, paid, and open-source alternatives it is up to consideration of each team to justify whether it's really worth it.

Pros:

• An established tool made for enterprise
• Seamlessly connects with Jira, Confluence, and other Atlassian tools
• Offers branding options and templates
• Email, SMS notifications
• Postmortem reports
• Friendly UI

Cons:

• May require a learning curve for those unfamiliar with Atlassian products
• The free plan is very basic and may not meet the needs of larger organizations
• Best utilized with other Atlassian tools; less ideal for teams using different platforms
• Some users report slow loading times during high-traffic periods

Pricing:

Atlassian offers a free plan with 100 subscribers, two team members, email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams notifications as well as REST APIs. Afterward, the paid plans start with Hobby for $29/month with 250 subscribers, Startup for $99/month with 1000 subscribers, Business for $399/month with 5000 subscribers, and Enterprise for $1499/month with 25000 subscribers.

4. Statuspal.io

Statuspal offers public as well as private status pages, supports custom CSS and HTML, is built for teams, and offers status page subscriptions.

When it comes to pricing they offer a comparable plan to other non open-source tools. Their business plan starts at $229/month and accommodates 30 team members. This plan also provides 5000 subscribers and over 100 monitored services.

On the other hand for smaller teams and hobbyists, their plans are quite expensive. Their single status page plan costs $29/month and compared to other services it is hard to justify this price tag.

Statuspal offers a broad range of integrations with monitoring tools, incident management tools, ChatOps tools (Slack and Microsoft Teams), and other notification and communication tools like Twilio or Twitter.

Pros:

• Multiple language support
• Quick and straightforward configuration for status pages.
• Instantly notify users of incidents and service status changes
• Email, SMS, Slack notifications
• Visitor engagement, and incident trends
• Track and log incidents with detailed timelines
• Connects with various third-party tools (e.g., Slack, Zapier)

Cons:

• May lack in-depth analytics compared to competitors.

Pricing:

Statuspal has a 14-day trial with four pricing plans— Hobby, Startup, Business, and Enterprise. All plans include an unlimited number of status pages with the difference in subscribers the hobby plan includes 500, startup 1000, etc.

Best open-source tools

If you’re looking to host the solution yourself, here are the tools you should consider.

5. Upptime

Upptime allows users to use GitHub Actions to schedule workflows to run automatically in pre-set time intervals. The shortest interval that is allowed is 5 minutes. This means that Upptime checks your website automatically every 5 minutes and reflects your website status on the status page.

Once a day, Upptime generates graphs of the site's response times. With this, you can easily see and broadcast your long-term stats. Lastly, Upptime website also offers some customization options. Those include the option to change the logo, copy, graphs, and more.

Overall Upptime is a very nicely designed tool, with plenty of functionality, customization options, and well-maintained documentation.

Pros:

• 100% free and open-source
• GitHub Actions
• Fully customizable status pages that can be hosted on GitHub Pages
• Reports, logs incidents and commits to your GitHub repository
• No vendor lock-in

Cons:

• Self-hosted
• Requires Github knowledge
• No dedicated support

Pricing:

Upptime is free.

6. Cachet

Cachet uses Bootstrap 3 to deliver responsive status pages that work well on any device. They offer basic uptime monitors and a great chart dashboard. With their API you can easily set up any metrics you want be it uptime, error rates, or response times.

There is also an option to schedule maintenance and communicate it easily to users or other stakeholders.

A great benefit to anyone looking for extra security is that Cachet offers two-factor authentication, which is compatible with the Google Authenticator app.

Pros:

• Ability to show any metric in a chart
• Offers two-factor authentication
• Open source
• Branded status page

Cons:

• Self-hosted
• No support

Pricing:

Cachet is free.

7. Statping

Statping has slightly more features included in its dashboard compared to Cachet and Upptime. The main benefit of Statping is that it offers status announcements, which come in different color schemes to quickly inform users of the current situation. The 3 main announcements are downtime, update, and resolved messages.

Visually is Statping also slightly better as it offers a dedicated chart for each monitored site. These charts include average response time, uptime, and a time picker to allow for detailed exploration of the historical data.

However, the main benefit of Statping is the notifiers, which are built-in. Those include Slack, Discord, Telegram, Webhooks, and emailing.

For those who don't want to host and maintain your status page, there is a hosted option as well, which costs $6/month.

Pros:

• Notification options integrated
• Option to go for a hosted version as well
• Open-source
• Customizable status page

Cons:

• Self-hosted
• No support

Pricing:

Statping is free.

8. Statusfy

Statusfy is another tool to consider, especially when looking for advanced announcement options. Compared to other tools on this list, Statusfy offers tagging, timestamps, categorization, and timelines, of different incident and status update announcements. This comes in handy when you need to communicate with your users and want to use the status page as the main way to do so.

On the other hand, Statusfy doesn't have charts which is a significant downside for anyone looking to broadcast uptime or incident times data.

The notification options are also quite limited with only a basic subscription options via Web Push, iCalendar, and Twitter available.

Pros:

• Advanced announcement options
• Self-hosting
• Free
• Built on a static site generator (Vue.js and Nuxt.js)
• Highly customizable status pages

Cons:

• Self-hosted
• No support
• Limited built-in features

Pricing:

Statusfy is free

Tools summary:

Other open-source tools to consider

If you want to explore more tools feel free to check this list from 
awesomeopensource. Note that some of the status page tools on this list are no longer maintained and might not be suitable for commercial use

What is the difference between open source and paid solutions?

There are two main differences between the open source and paid status pages. The first one is that open-source pages are not hosted, while the paid ones are. The second one is that paid pages provide subscription abilities for both users as well as admins.

There are of course plenty of other differences like customisability, team access, or integration availability (especially with synthetic monitoring tools), which are usually provided by the paid solutions, but not the open-source ones.

When considering what solution to pick, the hosting and update subscription questions should be answered first. The hosting vs not-hosted question really depends on your technical capabilities and willingness to set it up.

When it comes to subscription capabilities it is slightly more complicated. As a rule of thumb if you have users and/or customers that rely heavily on your service with their day-to-day operations you should opt for subscriptions. The reason behind this is that once you set up the status page you can either subscribe or ask them to subscribe for status updates. When there is an incident they will all receive a notification about it and you don't have to worry about getting your support channels overwhelmed.

If you have an e-commerce site or a hobby project you can go with an open-source tool as subscriptions are probably not necessary for you. However please be careful. With a hosted solution (especially when providing reasonable SLA uptime) you can stay calm that it will work all the time, but with open source, all the responsibility lies on you.

What are the benefits of having a status page?

There are two main benefits of having a status page: Lower support cost and higher customer trust.

The lower support costs will come as a result of users and customers checking your status page and reading your system announcements instead of just directly going to your support page and submitting a ticket.

In order to achieve this you will first need to have a reachable and easily rememberable URL for your page. The best practice is to go for status.yourdomain.com format. Since it's used by major companies many people often try to check this URL by default.

For less tech-savvy people it's recommended to also include a link to your status page on your website or in your product to make sure they can easily reach it. Of course, in case of downtime, this won't be an option and because of that, it's recommended to have a subscription option for your status page users.

What status page subscription does is that it allows everyone to receive a notification (usually an email) whenever your website goes down.

Once a status page is set up and its existence communicated to users, one can start building trust by being transparent about incidents and communicating them before they are even noticed by users. When this becomes a standard, users will know that if something goes wrong you will be the first one to let them know, which marks a first step towards building trust with your users. Explore how major tech companies approach status pages.

Learn more

Still not sure about how to properly approach a status page? These two articles will explain everything you need to get started:

• What Is a Status Page? (And 5 Benefits of Getting One)
• Why Are Status Pages Important: 5 Reasons (And How to Get Started)

Any questions or comments? Let us know at hello@betterstack.com.

If you’re considering getting a status page, you can book a free consultancy call with us.