Same engine. The only question is who runs the server
Nothing is held back in the free version, so this is not a feature comparison. If you already run a server with working mail, self-hosting is the better deal, and three things about it are genuinely better.
Three things self-hosting does better
These are first because they are the ones a page like this usually leaves out. A comparison written by the seller of one option is worth nothing unless it starts with the case against itself.
- Your data never leaves your server. Every response body, every measurement and every client name stays in your own database. There is no processing agreement to sign, no third country to document, and nothing to explain to a client who asks where their data goes. On the hosted plan the answer is honest but longer.
- You decide when the version changes. An update is a file copy that you run when it suits you. On a hosted plan the version changes when we change it, which is convenient right up to the week you would rather nothing moved at all.
- It costs nothing, at any number of sites. Forty sites or four hundred, the price is the same and it is zero. There is no per-monitor line to reconcile and no tier to cross, which over a few years is the largest difference on this page.
Three things the hosted plan does better
- Mail that arrives. This is the one that catches people, and it caught us: an instance can send alerts that are accepted by a mail server and still delivered nowhere, because a domain was not fully authenticated. An alerting tool whose alerts go to spam is worse than no alerting tool, because you believe you are covered.
- Nothing of yours to keep alive. No machine to patch, no scheduled task to notice has stopped, no disk to watch. The monitoring is the thing you were adding so you would stop thinking about infrastructure, and self-hosting adds one more piece of it.
- It is somewhere else by construction. Not because it is better software, but because it is not on your server. That property is available to a self-hoster too, and the next section is about how to get it.
The mistake that has nothing to do with price
A monitor installed on the server it monitors cannot report that the server is down, because it is down as well. The silence looks exactly like a quiet night, and you find out from a client. This is the single most expensive arrangement in this whole comparison, and it is free to avoid.
So if you self-host, put the engine anywhere other than the machine serving the sites: another host, the cheapest plan at a second provider, a small machine at home. It is not an argument for the paid plan, and treating it as one would be the easiest kind of dishonesty on a page like this.
What it takes to install it yourself
PHP 8.2, a database, and one scheduled task every minute. No Composer, no Docker, no build step, and no agent on the sites being watched. Files uploaded by FTP work, because shared hosting is where the sites it watches usually live and the engine is designed around that constraint rather than in spite of it.
The engine is on GitHub under the MIT licence: coeurduweb/uptimeez. The PHP floor is enforced in src/bootstrap.php, so an unsupported version refuses to start rather than failing halfway.
What installing it looks like, and the three things that go wrong
Questions before you choose
Is the free version cut down?
No, and that claim is checkable rather than promised: the engine in the public repository is the one the hosted plan runs. Every detection on this site is in it, under the MIT licence. There is no feature behind the paid tier, because the paid tier is not selling features, it is selling a server somebody else maintains.
What is the paid plan actually for, then?
A machine, a scheduled task, mail delivery that reaches inboxes, and updates applied without you. None of that is difficult, and all of it is recurring. If you already run a server with working outbound mail and you do not mind one more thing on it, self-hosting is the better deal and this page will not argue otherwise.
Can I install it on the same server as the sites it watches?
You can, and it is the one arrangement to avoid. A monitor on the server it monitors cannot tell you that server has gone down, because it goes down with it. Put it anywhere else: another host, a cheap machine, a different provider. This has nothing to do with which plan you pick.
What happens to my history if I move between the two?
It is a database and a directory, so it moves with you. The hosted plan uses one SQLite file per customer, and an export is a copy of that file. Nothing is stored in a format only we can read, which is a property of the licence rather than a promise from us.
Does self-hosting need Docker, Composer or a build step?
None of the three, and that is the constraint the whole engine is designed around. PHP 8.2 and a database, files uploaded by FTP if that is what you have, and one scheduled task per minute. It runs on shared hosting because that is where the sites it watches usually are.
Either way, start by seeing what it finds
The free check runs the same detection on one address, with no account and nothing installed. What it reports is what either plan would report.