A status page has one job it cannot afford to fail: staying up while everything else is down. That is precisely the job a self-hosted tool struggles with, because if you run it on the same infrastructure it watches, it goes dark in the very outage it exists to explain. That single fact frames the whole choice between these two, one free and self-run, the other paid and hosted for you.
Uptime Kuma is a free, open-source, self-hosted monitor, released in 2021 and now past 80,000 GitHub stars, that checks your endpoints every 20 seconds and publishes a clean status page from a single Docker container you run yourself. What it costs you is a server and the time to keep it alive. Statuspage is Atlassian's managed communication layer, a polished, externally hosted page that publishes incident updates and subscriber notifications but detects nothing on its own, priced by subscriber tier up to $1,499 a month.
So the comparison is not really about features, because the free tool has more of them. It is about who keeps the monitor running, and whether your status page stays up during the very outage it exists to explain.
| Category | Statuspage, Atlassian | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Managed SaaS, externally hosted | Self-hosted only, your server |
| License and cost | Paid, subscriber-tiered | Free, open source, MIT |
| Built-in monitoring | ✘, integration only | ✔: HTTP, TCP, DNS, ping, SSL, Docker |
| Check locations | N/A | Single, wherever you host |
| Status page reliability | External, always up | Only as reliable as your host |
| Subscriber notifications | Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, webhook | ✘, view-only page |
| On-call and escalation | ✘, via JSM or Opsgenie | ✘, no scheduling or escalation |
| Alert channels | Subscriber notifications | 90+, no native phone or SMS |
| Multi-user and RBAC | ✔ | ✘, single-user |
| MCP server | ✘ | ✘ |
| Support and SLA | Atlassian support and SLA | Community, no SLA |
| Compliance | SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, via Atlassian | Self-managed, no certifications |
| Entry price | Hobby $29/mo | Cost of a VPS |
| Top standard tier | Enterprise $1,499/mo | Free |
| Best fit | Branded page, regulated buyers | Homelabs, side projects, cost-zero teams |
The two products sit at opposite ends of the market, and understanding each one on its own terms explains every row in that table.
Louis Lam released Uptime Kuma in 2021 as a free, self-hosted alternative to hosted monitors, and it has become the default in its category, past 80,000 GitHub stars and more than 100 million Docker pulls. The design is deliberately minimal: one Docker container, a database, and a clean UI that tells you whether your endpoints are up. You get HTTP and HTTPS checks, TCP ports, DNS, ping, SSL expiry, Docker container health, and more, at intervals as low as 20 seconds, with unlimited monitors and notifications through more than 90 channels. The 2.0 release added MariaDB support for deployments that outgrow the default database. It is a strong tool for exactly what it does, and it does not pretend to do incident management, observability, or on-call.
Statuspage created the category in 2013 and publishes a polished, deeply branded, externally hosted page that customers trust during an outage. It has no monitoring, so every signal on the page comes from a tool you connect, and its value is the things Uptime Kuma leaves to you: hosting the page on infrastructure separate from yours, a full subscriber notification system, audience-specific pages, and Atlassian's compliance and support behind it. You pay for that convenience, and the bill climbs with your subscriber count.
| What it is | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Managed, external | Self-hosted, your infra |
| Cost of software | Paid | Free |
| Monitors your services | ✘ | ✔ |
| Runs and patches it | Atlassian | You |
| Support | Atlassian SLA | Community |
Only one of these monitors anything, and it is the free one. The question is not whether Uptime Kuma monitors well, because it does, but where those checks run from.
Uptime Kuma checks HTTP and HTTPS endpoints, TCP ports, DNS records, ping targets, SSL and domain expiry, Docker containers, WebSockets, and more, at 20-second intervals with no monitor limit, and routes alerts through more than 90 channels including Telegram, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie. For a homelab or a small stack, that is more monitoring than most paid tiers give you. The architectural limit is location: it checks from exactly one place, wherever your server sits, so a monitor in Frankfurt tells you nothing about how your service looks to users in the US, and it cannot distinguish a regional outage from a full one. It also has no multi-user support or role-based access, so a whole team shares one login.
Statuspage does not monitor at all. To make its page move on its own you connect an external monitoring tool, which means that even the paid, premium option in this comparison depends on a separate monitor, and the free option is the one doing the detection.
| Monitoring | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Built-in checks | ✘ | ✔: HTTP, TCP, DNS, ping, SSL, Docker |
| Monitor limit | N/A | Unlimited |
| Check locations | N/A | Single, your host |
| Multi-region | N/A | ✘ |
| Multi-user and RBAC | ✔ | ✘ |
This is the section that matters most for a status page specifically, and it is structural rather than a bug. A status page exists to be trustworthy at the worst moment, and a self-hosted one fights its own architecture to get there.
If Uptime Kuma runs on the same server or provider as the service it watches, a real outage takes the monitor and the status page down with it, so your customers see nothing at the exact moment they need an update. The community's cardinal rule is to run it on separate infrastructure, ideally a different provider in a different city, and the thorough answer is two instances monitoring each other, which works but is now two servers to maintain instead of a free download. Statuspage sidesteps all of this by being hosted externally by Atlassian, on infrastructure your outage cannot touch, which is the entire reason a hosted status page exists. So the free page is free until you account for placing it correctly, keeping it patched, and making sure the thing that reports your uptime has better uptime than you do.
| Reliability | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting relative to your stack | Fully external | Yours unless placed elsewhere |
| Survives your infrastructure outage | ✔ | Only if hosted separately |
| Single point of failure | None in your hands | The host you run it on |
| Who maintains uptime of the tool | Atlassian | You |
Uptime Kuma checks from the one server you run it on, and Statuspage checks from nowhere at all. Better Stack runs checks every 30 seconds from locations worldwide on infrastructure you never touch, so there is no single point of failure in your hands and no server to keep patched.
Multi-location monitoring you do not host or maintain. Start free.
Both publish a public page, and here the free tool is prettier than you might expect while the paid one is more complete. The question is whether your page needs to notify subscribers, not just display status.
Uptime Kuma's status pages are genuinely good-looking for a free tool, with multiple customizable pages that update in real time over WebSocket, and reviewers regularly note the UI rivals paid products. What they are is view-only: there is no subscriber notification system, so a customer has to keep the page open to learn anything, and the community has flagged gaps like no response-time graphs on the page and no configurable uptime history range. Statuspage is built around the opposite idea, that people should be told rather than have to check, with subscriber notifications across email, SMS, Slack, Teams, and webhooks, per-component subscriptions, and audience-specific pages, though the useful channels sit behind higher tiers. So Uptime Kuma gives you a page people can visit, and Statuspage gives you a page that reaches out to people, which is a real difference during an incident.
| Status pages | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Design quality | Polished | Polished for a free tool |
| Multiple pages | ✔ | ✔ |
| Subscriber notifications | Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, webhook | ✘, view-only |
| Audience-specific pages | ✔ | ✘ |
| Real-time updates | ✔ | ✔, WebSocket |
Uptime Kuma's page is view-only and Statuspage gates SMS subscribers behind its $99 tier. Better Stack publishes a branded, externally hosted status page with email, SMS, Slack, and webhook subscribers on paid plans, and it updates automatically from the monitoring in the same platform.
A hosted, branded page that notifies subscribers across channels. See how it works.
Neither tool runs a real on-call rotation, and this is a shared gap rather than a point of difference. The question is what happens after an alert fires, and who it reaches.
Uptime Kuma sends alerts through more than 90 channels, which is broad, but it has no native phone or SMS delivery through its own infrastructure, no on-call scheduling, and no escalation policies, so reliable paging means routing to PagerDuty or Opsgenie and paying for that separately. Statuspage is thinner still on the engineer side, because it detects nothing, and its notifications are aimed at customers rather than responders, so detection and paging live entirely in whatever tools you connect. In practice both leave you to add a real incident and on-call tool, and Uptime Kuma at least generates the alert that starts the chain.
| On-call and alerts | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Alert channels | Subscriber notifications | 90+ |
| Native phone or SMS paging | ✘ | ✘ |
| On-call scheduling | ✘, external | ✘, external |
| Escalation policies | ✘, external | ✘, external |
| Detects the incident | ✘ | ✔ |
Uptime Kuma alerts but cannot run a rotation, and Statuspage neither detects nor pages. Better Stack includes on-call scheduling, unlimited phone and SMS alerts, escalation policies, and automatic post-mortems in the same platform as the monitoring and the status page, at $29/month per responder.
On-call and escalation in the same tool that catches the outage. See incident management.
One of these is free and the other reaches $1,499 a month, so the interesting number is not the license, it is the real cost of running each to the same standard. Free software is not the same as a free setup.
Statuspage's public pages run from a free tier at 100 subscribers up through Hobby at $29, Startup at $99, Business at $399, and Enterprise at $1,499 per month, gating SMS at $99 and full customization at $399, with private and audience-specific pages billed separately. Because it monitors nothing, the real Statuspage cost also includes the monitoring tool and the pager you connect to it, so the true figure is the subscription plus a monitoring stack.
Uptime Kuma charges nothing for the software, and its real cost is infrastructure and time: a small VPS to host it, ideally a second one in another datacenter so the monitor does not share a fate with your app, plus the hours to install, patch, upgrade, and secure it, and the accepted risk of single-location checks and a view-only page. For a homelab or a hobbyist with a spare server and time to spend, that cost rounds to almost nothing. For a business paying an engineer to maintain it and still needing subscriber notifications, multi-region checks, and on-call, the free tool starts to carry a quiet bill of its own.
| Pricing | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Software license | Paid | Free |
| Entry cost | Hobby $29/mo | A VPS |
| Top standard tier | Enterprise $1,499/mo | Free |
| Monitoring included | ✘, buy separately | ✔ |
| Hidden costs | Separate monitor and pager | Servers, maintenance, your time |
| Cost driver | Subscribers and features | Infrastructure and upkeep |
For a business rather than a homelab, this section is where the free tool shows its edges. What does a support contract, a certification, and a second team member require from each?
Statuspage inherits Atlassian's posture: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001, SSO and SCIM through Atlassian Guard, role-based access, and a vendor with an SLA and a support desk. Uptime Kuma offers none of that as a project. There are no compliance certifications, no SLA, and no official support beyond the community and GitHub, and it has no multi-user model or role-based access, so a team shares a single login rather than getting individual accounts and permissions. Keeping monitoring data on your own infrastructure is itself an advantage for teams that must not send endpoint details to a third party, but that is a different thing from a certified compliance program. For a regulated organization or one that needs real team access controls, Statuspage clears bars Uptime Kuma does not set out to clear.
| Support and access | Statuspage | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| SLA and vendor support | ✔ | ✘, community |
| SOC 2 / HIPAA / ISO 27001 | ✔, via Atlassian | ✘ |
| SSO / SCIM | Via Atlassian Guard | ✘ |
| Role-based access | ✔ | ✘, single-user |
| Data stays on your infra | ✘ | ✔ |
For a homelab, a side project, or a small team that already runs a server and wants monitoring plus a page for nothing, Uptime Kuma is the right tool and nothing competes on price. It monitors more than Statuspage ever will, its dashboard rivals paid products, and the only bill is a small VPS. The catch is everything around the software: you run it, you patch it, you host it somewhere separate so it does not die with your app, and you accept single-location checks and a page that cannot notify subscribers.
Statuspage is worth its very different price when the page has to be a dependable, external, branded surface with real subscriber notifications, when you need audience-specific pages, or when procurement wants Atlassian's compliance and SSO. It monitors nothing, so you still buy a monitor to feed it, but the page itself is hosted, supported, and up in a way a self-hosted container is not by default.
The deciding question is what your time and your uptime are worth. Uptime Kuma trades money for maintenance and risk, and Statuspage trades a large bill for having someone else carry both. And neither one, free or premium, tells you why a service broke or pages the engineer who can fix it, which is the part of the incident that costs you the most.
Uptime Kuma monitors but you host it, and Statuspage is hosted but monitors nothing, and neither investigates the cause or pages a responder. Better Stack brings multi-location monitoring, a hosted branded status page, on-call scheduling, incident management, and a full observability data layer into one managed platform, so nothing you rely on during an outage runs on the infrastructure that is having the outage.
Monitoring, status pages, on-call, and observability in one managed platform. Start free, no credit card required. Try Better Stack.
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