Uptime Kuma vs Healthchecks: Which Monitoring Tool?

Quick Verdict

These tools solve fundamentally different problems. Uptime Kuma actively polls your services and tells you when something goes down. Healthchecks passively listens for pings from your cron jobs and scripts, and alerts you when something fails to check in. Comparing them head-to-head is like comparing a smoke detector to a time clock — both keep you informed, but about entirely different things.

If you need to know whether your websites, APIs, and services are reachable: Uptime Kuma. If you need to know whether your backups, cron jobs, and scheduled tasks actually ran: Healthchecks. Most serious self-hosting setups benefit from running both.

The Core Difference

This is the single most important thing to understand before choosing between these tools.

Uptime Kuma is an active monitor. It reaches out to your services on a schedule — HTTP requests, TCP pings, DNS lookups, Docker container checks — and records whether they respond. The monitoring server initiates every check. If your Nextcloud instance stops responding to HTTP requests, Uptime Kuma catches it within seconds.

Healthchecks is a passive monitor (dead man’s switch). Your cron jobs and scripts ping Healthchecks when they complete successfully. Healthchecks tracks whether those pings arrive on schedule. If your nightly backup script was supposed to ping at 3:00 AM and it is now 3:30 AM with no ping, Healthchecks alerts you. The monitored systems initiate the check, not the monitoring server.

Neither tool replaces the other. A service can be “up” (Uptime Kuma sees HTTP 200) while its backup cron is silently failing (Healthchecks catches the missed ping). Conversely, all your cron jobs can be running fine while your web server is unreachable.

Feature Comparison

Feature	Uptime Kuma	Healthchecks
Monitoring approach	Active (polls targets)	Passive (receives pings)
HTTP/HTTPS monitoring	Yes — status codes, response time, SSL expiry	No
TCP/UDP monitoring	Yes	No
DNS monitoring	Yes	No
Docker container monitoring	Yes (via Docker socket)	No
Cron job monitoring	No	Yes — core feature
Script/task monitoring	No	Yes — with start/success/fail signals
Status page	Built-in, customizable	Built-in badge endpoints
Notification channels	90+ (Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, webhooks, etc.)	20+ (Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, webhooks, etc.)
Web dashboard	Full-featured with graphs	Clean, focused on check status
API	Yes (WebSocket-based)	Yes (REST)
Multi-user support	Yes (v2+)	Yes, with teams and projects
Authentication	Built-in (username/password, 2FA)	Built-in (email/password)
Grace periods	N/A	Yes — configurable per check
Ping protocols	N/A	HTTP, email, and raw UDP/TCP
Maintenance windows	Yes	No
Certificate expiry alerts	Yes	No
Cron expression validation	N/A	Yes — validates schedules

Docker Setup

Both tools are straightforward to self-host. Uptime Kuma is simpler since it has no external database dependency. Healthchecks uses PostgreSQL for data storage.

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma uses an embedded SQLite database, so the entire stack is a single container.

Create a docker-compose.yml:

services:
  uptime-kuma:
    image: louislam/uptime-kuma:2.1.3
    container_name: uptime-kuma
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"
    volumes:
      - uptime-kuma-data:/app/data
    # Optional: monitor Docker containers directly
    # volumes:
    #   - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro

volumes:
  uptime-kuma-data:

Start it:

docker compose up -d

Open http://your-server:3001, create an admin account, and start adding monitors. That is the entire setup.

Healthchecks

Healthchecks requires PostgreSQL. The official Docker image bundles uWSGI as the application server and runs background workers (alert sending, report generation, optional SMTP listener) automatically.

Create a .env file:

# Database
DB=postgres
DB_HOST=db
DB_NAME=healthchecks
DB_USER=postgres
DB_PASSWORD=change-this-strong-password
DB_PORT=5432

# Site settings
SITE_NAME=Healthchecks
SITE_ROOT=http://localhost:8000
ALLOWED_HOSTS=localhost,your-domain.example.com
SECRET_KEY=change-this-to-a-random-50-char-string

# Email (required for alerts)
[email protected]
EMAIL_HOST=smtp.example.com
EMAIL_PORT=587
EMAIL_HOST_USER=your-smtp-user
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD=your-smtp-password
EMAIL_USE_TLS=True

# Registration
REGISTRATION_OPEN=True
DEBUG=False

Create a docker-compose.yml:

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    container_name: healthchecks-db
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_NAME}
      POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USER}
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - healthchecks-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data

  web:
    image: healthchecks/healthchecks:v4.0
    container_name: healthchecks
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
      # Uncomment to receive pings via email (SMTP listener)
      # - "2525:2525"
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_started

volumes:
  healthchecks-db:

Start it:

docker compose up -d

The uWSGI server runs database migrations automatically on startup. Open http://your-server:8000 and create an account.

To add a check, create one in the dashboard, then have your cron job or script call the unique ping URL:

# Add to the end of your backup script
curl -fsS --retry 3 http://your-server:8000/ping/your-unique-uuid

Performance and Resource Usage

Resource	Uptime Kuma	Healthchecks
RAM (idle)	~70-100 MB	~80-120 MB (app) + ~50 MB (PostgreSQL)
RAM (100 monitors)	~120-180 MB	~100-150 MB + ~80 MB (PostgreSQL)
CPU (idle)	Minimal	Minimal
Disk (application)	~200 MB	~300 MB (app + PostgreSQL)
Disk (data, 6 months)	~100-500 MB (SQLite)	~200-800 MB (PostgreSQL, depends on ping volume)
External dependencies	None (embedded SQLite)	PostgreSQL
Startup time	~3 seconds	~8-10 seconds (migrations + uWSGI workers)

Uptime Kuma’s single-container architecture makes it lighter on total system resources. Healthchecks adds the overhead of PostgreSQL, but PostgreSQL gives it better concurrent write performance under heavy ping loads — relevant if you have hundreds of tasks reporting in simultaneously.

For a typical self-hosting setup with 20-50 monitors, both tools run comfortably on the smallest VPS or a Raspberry Pi 4.

Use Cases

Choose Uptime Kuma If…

• You want to monitor whether your websites, APIs, and services are online
• You need a public or internal status page showing uptime percentages
• SSL certificate expiry monitoring matters to you
• You want to monitor Docker containers directly via the Docker socket
• You prefer a zero-dependency single-container deployment
• You need maintenance windows to suppress alerts during planned downtime
• Response time tracking and latency graphs are useful for your setup
• You monitor external third-party services (not just your own)

Choose Healthchecks If…

• You run scheduled tasks (backups, database dumps, report generation, sync jobs) and need to know when they fail silently
• Your cron jobs currently fail without anyone noticing for days
• You want to validate that tasks complete within expected time windows
• You need to track task duration (Healthchecks records start and completion pings)
• You manage many servers with cron jobs and want a central dashboard for all of them
• You want a dead man’s switch — alerting on the absence of an expected signal

Run Both If…

• You self-host more than a handful of services (you almost certainly have both “is it up?” and “did it run?” monitoring needs)
• Uptime Kuma watches your services; Healthchecks watches your automation
• They complement each other perfectly with minimal resource overhead

Alerting

Both tools support the major notification channels (Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, generic webhooks), but Uptime Kuma has a much larger selection — over 90 notification providers versus roughly 20 for Healthchecks. If you rely on a niche notification service, Uptime Kuma is more likely to support it natively.

Healthchecks compensates with tight cron-aware alerting. You configure a schedule and a grace period per check. If a ping is 5 minutes late, Healthchecks waits through the grace period before alerting — reducing false positives from tasks that occasionally run a few seconds slow. This cron-schedule awareness is something Uptime Kuma does not offer because it is not designed for that use case.

Final Verdict

Stop thinking of these as competitors. They monitor orthogonal concerns.

Uptime Kuma is the best self-hosted active monitoring tool available. Single container, gorgeous dashboard, 90+ notification providers, status pages, certificate monitoring. If you self-host anything that listens on a port, you should be running Uptime Kuma.

Healthchecks is the best self-hosted cron/task monitoring tool. Clean interface, cron-expression-aware scheduling, grace periods, and a dead-simple ping API that takes one curl line to integrate. If you run scheduled tasks — and every self-hosting setup does — you should be running Healthchecks.

For most self-hosters: run both. Uptime Kuma on port 3001, Healthchecks on port 8000, total overhead under 400 MB of RAM. Your future self will thank you the first time Healthchecks catches a silently failing backup that Uptime Kuma had no way to detect.

Related

• Best Self-Hosted Monitoring Tools
• How to Self-Host Uptime Kuma
• How to Self-Host Healthchecks
• Uptime Kuma vs Grafana
• Docker Compose Basics
• Reverse Proxy Setup