The short answer
Pick Pingdom if
You need to know how the site behaves from several countries, or you want a scripted login or checkout tested on a schedule. Synthetic monitoring starts at €14.33 a month on annual billing for 10 uptime checks.
Pick Uptime Kuma if
One vantage point is enough and you already keep a server patched. Kuma is MIT-licensed, has no monitor limit of its own, and also watches things Pingdom cannot reach, such as Docker containers and hosts on a private network.
| Pingdom | Uptime Kuma | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | from €14.33/mo annual (€16 monthly), no free plan | $0, MIT you pay for the server |
| Entry bundle | 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced 50 SMS alerts | no built-in monitor limit |
| Checks from | about 10 rotating probes in a region group you pick | the one machine it is installed on |
| Scripted user flows | transaction checks (login, checkout, search) | not in its monitor list |
| Real user monitoring | separate product from €14.33/mo annual | none |
| Owner | SolarWinds, since 2014 | open-source project by Louis Lam |
| Blind spot | services with no public address | goes quiet if its own server fails |
Checked 26 October 2026 against pingdom.com/pricing, the SolarWinds Pingdom documentation, the Uptime Kuma repository and its security advisories. Pingdom's pricing page quoted euros to us; annual billing unless stated.
What Pingdom is used for
Pingdom is hosted website monitoring. It began in Sweden, and SolarWinds bought it in June 2014, according to the company's annual report for that year; the pricing page calls the product "SolarWinds® Pingdom®". It sells two products. Synthetic monitoring sends requests to your site on a schedule: uptime checks, page speed checks and transaction checks. Real user monitoring adds a script to your pages and reports what visitors' browsers actually saw.
A transaction check replays a sequence of steps at set intervals and alerts when one fails. SolarWinds gives registering an account, checking out a shopping cart and logging in to a company account as examples. Uptime Kuma's README lists HTTP and keyword checks, JSON queries, TCP ports, ping, DNS records, WebSocket, push monitors, Steam game servers and Docker containers. A recorded multi-step flow is not among them.
Where each one checks from
When you set up a Pingdom check you choose a region group: North America and Europe together, or North America, Europe, Asia Pacific or Latin America alone. Pingdom's documentation says it then picks "about 10 different probe servers as geographically varied as possible", and they take turns testing the site. You cannot choose a single city. For the interval, the HTTP check guide recommends one minute.
Uptime Kuma sees the internet from wherever its container runs. A route problem between that data centre and your site looks like an outage, and a problem that only affects visitors in another country does not show at all. In return Kuma can reach what Pingdom's probes never will. It can watch a database port inside your network, a Docker container on the same host, or a cron job that reports in through a push monitor.
How much Pingdom costs
Pingdom has no free plan; its pricing page offers a trial that covers both products. Synthetic monitoring is sold on a slider, and each step bundles uptime checks, advanced checks and SMS alerts. These are the first five steps as the page quoted them to us, in euros.
Every synthetic plan includes email and SMS alerting, maintenance windows, public status pages and unlimited users. The slider runs up to 30,000 uptime checks. Real user monitoring is priced separately by pageviews, from €14.33 a month for 100,000, with 13 months of data kept. The page's own calculator puts the smallest synthetic plan at €171.96 a year.
Is Uptime Kuma safe to use?
It is a widely used project: the repository has nearly 93,000 stars and offers 2FA for the dashboard login. It is also software you have to keep current. The project's security advisories page has added an entry every few months, among them a high-severity denial of service through the badge endpoint published on 9 October 2026, and two template injection bugs in notification settings that allowed reading files on the server. An instance left on an old image keeps those holes.
The README also has practical limits. The current Docker image is tagged louislam/uptime-kuma:2. Running without Docker needs Node.js 20.4 or newer. The data folder must not sit on NFS, which the project says is not supported. FreeBSD and the other BSDs are unsupported too.
UptimeRobot, the hosted service with a free tier, is the other common alternative to Kuma; UptimeRobot vs Uptime Kuma prices that pair.
Frequently asked
How much does Pingdom cost?
Pingdom has no free plan. Synthetic monitoring starts at €14.33 a month on annual billing, or €16 month to month, for 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check and 50 SMS alerts, which is €171.96 a year. Real user monitoring is a separate product from €14.33 a month for 100,000 pageviews. Prices as pingdom.com quoted them on 26 October 2026.
Who owns Pingdom?
SolarWinds. It acquired Pingdom, a website monitoring company from Sweden, in June 2014, and the product is sold as SolarWinds Pingdom.
Is Uptime Kuma safe to use?
It is safe when kept up to date. The project publishes its security advisories on GitHub, including a high-severity denial-of-service issue disclosed on 9 October 2026, so an instance should run a current image, sit behind a login with 2FA enabled, and not be left on an old release.
Is Uptime Kuma a good alternative to Pingdom?
For uptime checks from one location, yes: it is free under the MIT licence, has no monitor limit of its own and can watch private hosts and Docker containers. It cannot test from several countries, replay a scripted login or checkout, or collect real user data, which are the parts of Pingdom people pay for.
What self-hosting actually costs
One year of monitoring, priced at two Pingdom sizes against Kuma on its own server.
| Pingdom, 10 checks | Pingdom, 50 checks | Uptime Kuma, self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | €171.96/yr (~$192) | €726/yr (~$813) | $0 (MIT) |
| Server | included | included | ~$72/yr (2 vCPU, 4 GB) |
| Your time | none | none | ~2 h setup + ~12 h/yr |
| Checked from | ~10 probes | ~10 probes | one location |
| Year one | ~$192 | ~$813 | ~$72 + 14 hours |
Assumptions, so you can argue with them: euros converted at the ECB rate of 1.1193 on 23 October 2026; the 50-check column is the €60.50 annual step, which also brings 10 advanced checks and 200 SMS alerts. Kuma runs on the same 2 vCPU, 4 GB server at about $6 a month that every self-hosted cost on this site uses, with two hours to install and an hour a month for updates and backups. Against ten Pingdom checks, the box saves about $120 a year for 14 hours of work, which pays only below roughly $9 an hour. At fifty checks the line moves to about $53 an hour. Kuma has no per-monitor price, so the gap widens with every site you add.