Free privacy-focused uptime monitoring for personal projects

For personal projects, I’d narrow it down to three options: Uptime Kuma, UptimeRobot, and Better Stack. The key trade-off is whether you want maximum privacy through self-hosting or the convenience of a free hosted service.

My top picks

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1. Uptime Kuma

(Best for privacy)

Free, open-source, and self-hosted. Monitor websites, APIs, and services from a dashboard you control. Your monitoring configuration and history can stay on your own server.uptimekuma.org

Trade-off: You need a machine or VPS to run it and maintain it.

Official project

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2. UptimeRobot

(Best simple free tier)

Hosted service with 50 monitors, five-minute checks, and a basic status page for $0. No credit card required. A good fit if you just want to add a URL and receive downtime alerts.uptimerobot.com+1

Trade-off: Your monitoring account and check results are handled by a third party.

Free plan and pricing ·Privacy policy

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3. Better Stack

A polished hosted alternative with 10 monitors, 10 heartbeats, and one status page free. It supports email and Slack alerts, plus checks as frequent as every three minutes on the free offering.uptimerobot.com+3

Trade-off: More features than you may need for a few personal projects.

Free plan ·Pricing

Which one should you choose?

My recommendation: If privacy is your main concern and you already have a home server or VPS, choose Uptime Kuma. If you don't want to maintain anything, start with UptimeRobot and review its privacy policy before signing up.

One important privacy detail: self-hosting doesn't make monitoring completely private—your monitoring server still sends requests to the sites it checks, and the sites you monitor may log those requests. It does, however, give you much more control over where your monitoring data is stored.