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Frequently asked questions

• Is Uptime Kuma really free?

  The software is, genuinely: Uptime Kuma is MIT-licensed open source with no paid tiers or feature gates. What you pay for is everything around it: a VPS to run it on (typically $4 to $6 per month), plus the time to set up Docker, a reverse proxy and TLS, and then to keep the instance updated, backed up and secure. Pulsetic flips that trade: a free plan and paid plans from $9 per month, with the hosting, redundancy and maintenance done for you.

• Does Uptime Kuma check from multiple locations?

  No. One Uptime Kuma instance checks from exactly one place: the server it is installed on. Multi-region probing has been one of its most requested features for years, and the common workaround is running several independent instances and keeping their configs in sync by hand. Pulsetic checks from 3 locations on the free plan and up to 15 on Team, and confirms a failure from a second location before alerting, so a network blip near your server does not page you at 3am for an outage your users never saw.

• What happens when the server running Uptime Kuma goes down?

  Your monitoring goes down with it, silently: no checks, no alerts, no status page. That is the classic who-monitors-the-monitor problem, and solving it properly means running Kuma on separate infrastructure from what it watches, or running a second monitor to watch the first. Pulsetic is hosted and redundant, so it keeps watching your websites even when your own infrastructure is having its worst day, which is exactly when you need monitoring most.

• Can visitors subscribe to an Uptime Kuma status page?

  Not by email. Email subscriptions for status page visitors have been an open feature request since 2021, so the page only informs people who think to visit it. From the $9 Solo plan, Pulsetic status pages let your customers subscribe and get an email as an incident opens, updates and resolves, which is most of the point of having a public status page.

• Does Uptime Kuma send SMS or phone call alerts?

  Uptime Kuma's notification catalog is huge, with Slack, Telegram, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, webhooks and dozens more. But SMS only works through paid third-party gateways like Twilio that you configure and pay separately, and there are no voice call alerts at all. Pulsetic includes SMS and phone call alerts with credits on paid plans, alongside the usual email, Slack and webhook channels.

• Does Uptime Kuma have an API?

  There is no official REST API; it is among the most upvoted feature requests. Automation today means the internal Socket.IO interface, a couple of limited endpoints or unofficial community wrappers, and the MCP servers that exist for it are community-built rather than official. From the $9 Solo plan, Pulsetic ships a documented REST API with an OpenAPI spec and an official MCP server, so your scripts and AI assistants can manage monitors with supported tooling.

• Is Uptime Kuma good for teams?

  It is built around a single admin account: no roles, no SSO, no audit trail, so a team ends up sharing one login. That is fine for a homelab and risky for a business. Pulsetic's Team plan includes two teammates and Organization three, each with role-based access, so people get their own accounts with the right permissions.

• When should I switch from Uptime Kuma to Pulsetic?

  The usual trigger is the moment monitoring becomes a chore instead of a hobby: you need multi-location verification before alerts fire, customers are asking to subscribe to your status page, you want phone alerts for real emergencies and an API to provision monitors automatically, or you simply stop wanting to patch and back up another server. On Pulsetic, status page subscribers and phone alerts start on the $9 Solo plan, and so does the API. Plenty of people keep Uptime Kuma for the homelab and use Pulsetic for production and customer-facing websites; the two are not mutually exclusive.