head to head · open source
Uptime Kuma vs kindling
Uptime Kuma has 91,498 GitHub stars, 8,431 forks, 805 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kindling has 1,064 stars, 166 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Uptime Kuma leads on adoption by 8,499% (91,498 vs 1,064 stars). Uptime Kuma is written in JavaScript under MIT; kindling is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Uptime Kuma has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, kindling 16%. Uptime Kuma was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | kindling | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 91K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-07-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 166 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Uptime Kuma if
- You weight community size — 91K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kindling if
- You want the kindling feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and kindling fits your workflow better
About Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is a free, MIT licensed, self hosted monitoring tool with a reactive web dashboard, built for operators and teams that want to watch their own HTTP, TCP, and DNS endpoints and keep the resulting data on their own infrastructure.
read the full Uptime Kuma overview →
About kindling
Kindling is an Apache 2.0 licensed, eBPF based cloud native monitoring tool written in Go that helps Kubernetes operators, SREs and application developers understand application behaviour from the kernel up to the code stack.
read the full kindling overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Uptime Kuma or kindling more popular?
Uptime Kuma has 91,498 GitHub stars and kindling has 1,064. Uptime Kuma has the larger community by that measure.
Are Uptime Kuma and kindling free?
Both are open source. Uptime Kuma is licensed under MIT and kindling under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Uptime Kuma and kindling?
Uptime Kuma is written in JavaScript and kindling in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Uptime Kuma or kindling?
Choose Uptime Kuma if you want the larger community (91,498 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kindling if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.