Grafana Cloud vs Uptime Kuma
Grafana Cloud and Uptime Kuma are both monitoring and observability software. Grafana Cloud is a commercial product from Grafana Labs. Uptime Kuma is open source under MIT, with 93k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Grafana Cloud when
- A team likes Grafana and open-source standards and wants them managed, with the option to self-host later.
- Pick Uptime Kuma when
- You want an easy, UptimeRobot-style monitor on your own server for a homelab or small business.
Side by side
Hosted Grafana with Prometheus-compatible metrics (Mimir), logs (Loki), traces (Tempo), profiles and alerting.
A self-hosted monitoring tool that checks HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS, Docker and more, sends alerts through 90+ notification services and publishes status pages.
Usage-based pricing needs watching, especially for high-cardinality metrics.
Single-instance design, so it does not monitor from multiple locations or scale to very large numbers of checks.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Self-hosted server
Go, Prometheus, Loki and Tempo
JavaScript, Vue, Node.js, SQLite and Socket.IO
Closed source, sold by Grafana Labs
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
1.7k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
93k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release 2.5.9.
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Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.