PingWise vs Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is free, open source and runs on your own server. PingWise runs on 15 servers on 6 continents, so it can see an outage of the place your monitor lives in.
Which one should you pick?
Uptime Kuma is free forever, open source, and your data never leaves your own server. It also checks things we can’t see from the internet: databases, Docker containers, services on your private network, game servers and much more. If you have a spare server and enjoy running it, it is excellent, and we say so plainly.
The real argument is about where the monitor sits. A monitor in one place cannot tell your site’s outage from its own network’s outage. If the data centre, the provider or the route your Uptime Kuma depends on goes down, it either goes quiet or reports everything down. And when the server it runs on shares a fate with the sites it watches, the outage you most need to hear about is the one it can’t report.
PingWise checks every scheduled round from several cities and pages you only when 10 of 15 probes, on 3 continents and 3 different providers, agree. Nobody has to patch, back up or watch it. Many people run both: Uptime Kuma inside the network, us outside.
Start free 650,000 free credits every month.
Price per month
HTTP monitors at the given interval, on each service's cheapest plan that covers it. Annual billing where it's cheaper. Prices in each vendor's own currency, not converted. Checked 26 Oct 2026.
| Service | Cheapest paid | 10 × 1 min | 50 × 1 min | 50 × 5 min | Free tier | Locations | Before alerting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PingWise | credits from €5 | free | €7.55 | free | 650,000 credits every month | 15 cities, 6 continents | Two thirds of 15 probes (10), 3 continents, 3 providers, 2 rounds in a row |
| Uptime Kuma | free, self-hosted | $0 + server | $0 + server | $0 + server | unlimited, your server | 1 · wherever you run it | Retries from the same server |
PingWise prices use the rate of the credit pack a year of that usage would use up.
Features
On each service's cheapest paid plan, as documented by that vendor.
✓ documented by the vendor · – documented as not offered · n/d not found in the vendor's public documentation · text = yes, with that limit
| Feature | PingWise | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Every check from several locations at onceon every scheduled check, not only when confirming | ✓ | – |
| Confirmation before pagingwhat the vendor documents happens after a failed check | 2 rounds, all 15 probes | retries, same server |
| Confirmation must span continentsa failure in one region can't page you | ✓ | – |
| Confirmation must span providersone provider's network trouble can't page you | ✓ | – |
| Broken probes removed automatically | ✓ | – |
| WAF challenge shown as “blocked”, not down; Cloudflare allow-list managed for youconnect your Cloudflare account; we keep the skip rule in place | ✓ | n/d |
| What each probe saw, in the alert | ✓ | n/d |
| Prepaid credits, no subscription | ✓ | free |
| Unlimited team memberson the cheapest paid plan | ✓ | n/d |
| Telegram and webhook alertson the cheapest paid plan | ✓ | ✓ |
| Slack, Teams and Discord alertson the cheapest paid plan | ✓ | ✓ |
| PagerDuty alertson the cheapest paid plan | ✓ | ✓ |
| 15-second checks | verified domains | 20 s |
| Ping (ICMP) to any host | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS and phone alerts | soon | via Twilio |
| Public status pageswith your logo and colours | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monitor groups: a status page, an alert channel and a maintenance window per groupone group per monitor; the dashboard shows a section per group | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk changes across every monitor that matches a filterinterval, channels, group, pause, delete; the monthly credit cost is shown before you confirm | ✓ | pause, resume, delete |
| Import from other monitoring tools, with a preview firstwhat the vendor documents it can read in | UptimeRobot, updown.io, Uptime Kuma, CSV | its own backups |
| Heartbeat / cron monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Domain expiry alertsregistrable domain of every monitor, checked daily | free · date by hand where the registry hides it | ✓ |
| Slow-response alerts | median of all probes, not one slow city | n/d |
| Public APIkeys, monitors, incidents, groups; an OpenAPI document | ✓ | n/d |
Where Uptime Kuma is the better choice
Being honest about this saves everyone time.
Free, with no limits
Uptime Kuma costs nothing beyond the server you run it on, with as many monitors as that server can handle. For a homelab or a side project, that is hard to beat.
Your data stays with you
Everything stays on your own machine. Nothing is sent to a third party. If your policy forbids sending target lists or results to an outside service, that settles it.
Inside your network
Uptime Kuma can check databases, Docker containers, system services, MQTT and other things that aren’t reachable from the internet. We only check what’s public. A database that stopped answering on a private network is invisible to any outside monitor, including us.
A huge list of check types
From SNMP to game servers, its monitor list is far longer than ours. If you want one tool for everything you run, Uptime Kuma is closer to that than we are.
What PingWise does differently
- Every scheduled check runs from several cities at once, not from one place with a retry.
- The moment one probe sees a failure, every healthy probe checks again, free, before anyone is paged.
- Nothing pages you until two thirds of our 15 probes (10) fail, on at least 3 continents and 3 different providers, two rounds in a row.
- A WAF or Cloudflare challenge is reported as “blocked”, never as down.
- Every alert says what each probe saw: resolved IP, status code, timing and error.
- Prepaid credits, no subscription: 650,000 free every month, packs from €5, bought credits last 24 months.
More comparisons
PingWise vs HetrixTools · PingWise vs Cronitor · PingWise vs UptimeRobot · All services side by side
Sources
Compiled from each vendor's own pricing and documentation pages on 26 Oct 2026, linked under Sources. Vendors change plans and features; we re-check quarterly. All product names are trade marks of their owners and are used only to identify them. If you work at one of these companies and something here is wrong or out of date, email [email protected] and we will correct it within one working day.