Uptime Kuma is excellent. Sometimes it's still the wrong tool. Kuma is the best free self-hosted monitor for one operator watching their own boxes — if that's you, use it and pay nothing. This page is for the moment monitoring stops being personal: teams, roles, clients.

You're one person monitoring your own homelab or company boxes. You don't need roles, nobody else logs in, and a status page is a nice-to-have. Kuma's 90+ notification integrations and huge community are exactly right for you — spending $149 here buys you nothing you'll use.

Kuma has a single admin account — everyone who can see the dashboard can silently change or delete anything, and there's no trail of who did what. Vigil ships four-role RBAC (owner, admin, responder, viewer) and records every incident state change: who, what, when. When monitoring is shared, accountability is the feature.

Serving clients from Kuma means one shared instance where everything sees everything. Vigil is multi-tenant by design: each client is an isolated organization with its own monitors, members and a branded public status page on your domain. One install, a page per client — this is the agency setup, and it's covered by one license.

Kuma tells you a check failed. Vigil opens an incident with severity and a timeline — investigating → identified → monitoring → resolved — publishes it to the status page, closes it on recovery, and drafts the postmortem from the real events (AI, on your own key, optional). The difference matters the second someone asks "what happened?"