Best Free Uptime Monitors 2026: 6 Options Compared

An uptime monitor checks your site from outside and alerts you when it goes down, and free plans usually trade check frequency and monitor count for price. UptimeRobot's free plan allows 50 monitors at five-minute intervals, described as good for hobby and non-profit projects, so confirm that your use fits. StatusCake gives 10 uptime monitors with five-minute tests plus one page-speed, domain and SSL monitor. Better Stack's free plan covers 10 monitors and heartbeats and one status page, and OneUptime offers a hosted free plan and a self-hosted Community Edition. Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted monitor with no paid plan, and Zabbix is a heavier open-source monitoring system for servers and networks. The main trade-off is where the checker runs. A hosted service tests from outside your network, which catches DNS and routing problems, while a self-hosted monitor on the same server cannot tell you when that server dies. If you self-host, run it on a different provider. Five-minute checks mean you may learn of an outage several minutes late. Decide how you will be alerted, since email alone is easy to miss, and test the alert path once.

UptimeRobot

Free plan: 50 monitors, 5-minute interval and one basic status page, for hobby and non-profit projects. Paid Solo is $12 a month billed annually. Easy to set up.

Price: Free (Free plan: 50 monitors, 5-minute interval, one basic status page; described as good for hobby and non-profit projects); paid from $12 per month, billed annually (Solo) (UptimeRobot pricing, checked 2026-10-23).

Platforms and license: Web browser. Proprietary SaaS.

Best for: Personal sites and small projects.

StatusCake

Free plan: 10 uptime monitors, 5-minute tests, 1 page-speed, 1 domain and 1 SSL monitor. The paid Superior plan is from $20.41 a month.

Price: Free (Free plan: 10 uptime monitors, 5-minute tests, 1 page speed, 1 domain and 1 SSL monitor); paid from $20.41 per month (Superior, from; monthly vs annual figure not labelled on the page) (StatusCake pricing, checked 2026-10-23).

Platforms and license: Web browser. Proprietary SaaS.

Best for: Sites that also want SSL and domain checks.

Better Stack

Free plan: 10 monitors and heartbeats and 1 status page. Paid responder licenses start at $29 a month. Strong alerting and on-call features.

Price: Free (10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page); paid from $29 per responder license/month, billed yearly ($34 monthly) (Better Stack pricing, checked 2026-10-22).

Platforms and license: Web, iOS, Android. Proprietary SaaS.

Best for: Teams that want alerts and a status page.

Worth knowing: Team members who only view are $0; on-call scheduling is tied to responder licenses.

OneUptime

Apache-2.0 with an ee directory under a separate license. Hosted free plan or self-hosted Community Edition; Growth is $22 per user a month. Covers monitoring and incidents.

Price: Free (hosted free plan: 1 status page, 100 subscribers; Community Edition self-hosted); paid from $22 per user/month (Growth; billing term not stated on page) (OneUptime pricing, checked 2026-10-22).

Platforms and license: Web, Self-hosted. Apache-2.0 (ee/ directory under a separate license) (open source).

Project activity: 7.8k GitHub stars · latest release 14.0.94 (Oct 27, 2026) · last commit Oct 27, 2026

Best for: Open-source monitoring with incident tools.

Worth knowing: Community Edition includes on-call schedules and escalation policies. SMS and calls are $0.10 each unless you bring your own Twilio.

Uptime Kuma

MIT-licensed self-hosted monitor. Free with no paid plan, but you run the server and should host it away from what it watches.

Price: Free (Free: open-source under MIT; self-hosted, no paid plan on the license page) (Uptime Kuma pricing, checked 2026-10-23).

Platforms and license: Linux, Docker. MIT (open source).

Project activity: 93k GitHub stars · latest release 2.5.8 (Oct 26, 2026) · last commit Oct 28, 2026

Best for: Self-hosters.

Zabbix

AGPL-3.0 from version 7.0 (GPL-2.0 up to 6.4). A full monitoring platform for servers and networks, free but heavy to set up.

Price: Free (Zabbix pricing, checked 2026-10-22).

Platforms and license: Self-hosted, Zabbix Cloud. AGPL-3.0 (7.0 and later); GPL-2.0 up to 6.4 (open source).

Project activity: 6.5k GitHub stars · last commit Oct 27, 2026

Best for: Infrastructure monitoring beyond websites.

Which one to pick

• You monitor a few personal sites: UptimeRobot
• You want alerts and on-call: Better Stack
• You want to self-host: Uptime Kuma
• You monitor many servers and devices: Zabbix