Grafana, Zabbix or Uptime Kuma: which monitoring for small hosters

If you're managing three, five or ten servers and need to know when a disk is full or a website goes down, you have three open-source options: Grafana, Zabbix, and Uptime Kuma. These are tools with different philosophies, not just different interfaces. The comparison that follows looks only at verifiable numbers from the official documentation of all three projects: minimum requirements, what they monitor out of the box, cost, and setup time.

Minimum installation requirements

Tool	Minimum CPU	Minimum RAM	Minimum disk	Source
Uptime Kuma	1 vCPU	1 GB	5 GB SSD	self-hosted documentation cited in deployment guides based on the official GitHub project
Zabbix (appliance)	2 cores	4 GB	8 GB	official Zabbix documentation
Grafana (server, UI/alerting only)	1 core	512 MB	—	official Grafana documentation

For Zabbix, the official requirements page is explicit about the ready-to-use appliance: "Make sure the host machine has sufficient resources to meet the virtual machine's system requirements: RAM: 4 GB, Disk space: at least 8 GB should be allocated for the virtual machine, CPU: 2 cores minimum". For a manual installation from source, Zabbix nonetheless requires a complete stack: Linux, a web server (Apache or NGINX), a database (MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL) and PHP.

Grafana declares much lower requirements on paper: recommended minimum memory of 512 MB and recommended minimum CPU of 1 core. But this figure is misleading when taken in isolation: the same page clarifies that for a genuinely usable deployment, even a small one ("Small", fewer than 25 concurrent users), much more is needed: 2-core CPU, 2–4 GB memory, 10–20 GB SSD disk, and SQLite "works well for local development and evaluation instances, but is not recommended for production environments".

Uptime Kuma, in its non-Docker installation, requires only mainstream Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, ArchLinux), Windows 10 or Server 2012 R2 or later, Node.js >= 20.4, Git and pm2. In Docker Compose installation, simply run docker compose up -d after creating the official compose.yaml file.

What they monitor by default

Uptime Kuma was born for availability monitoring: it's a lightweight self-hosted monitoring system (HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, ICMP, DNS, PUSH) that shows service uptime in real time and sends alerts in case of downtime. It does not collect system metrics (CPU, RAM, I/O) without plugins or additional configuration: it checks whether a service responds, not how the server underneath is performing.

Zabbix does the opposite: it collects granular metrics from agents installed on hosts (CPU, memory, disk, network, processes, logs) and correlates them with configurable triggers and alerts. The price is initial complexity: a dedicated database, PHP frontend, agents on every host.

Grafana on its own collects nothing: it's a dashboard engine and alerting system that relies on external data sources (Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, even Zabbix itself). For a small provider, this means that "installing Grafana" is not enough: you also need a system producing the metrics to visualise, which adds to the actual setup time compared to the bare CPU/RAM figures.

Cost: self-hosted is free, cloud is paid

All three projects are open source and free in self-hosted mode. For those who don't want to manage monitoring infrastructure, Grafana Labs also offers a cloud plan: the official page states that creating a free account includes "free forever access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 500VUh k6 testing & more". Beyond these limits, you move to paid plans, whose exact prices should be verified on Grafana Labs' official pricing page at the time of purchase, as they vary by usage tier.

Estimated initial configuration time

For Uptime Kuma, the time stated by industry guides for a Docker deployment with reverse proxy and HTTPS is around 15 minutes, as reported in a deployment guide: "The setup takes about 15 minutes and is one of the better investments of time in the self-hosting toolkit". This is the fastest of the three: no database to configure, no agents to roll out.

Zabbix and Grafana take longer because they involve more components that need to work together: database, web server, agents on monitored hosts (Zabbix) or external data sources to connect (Grafana). For both, it's worth doing an initial run in the lab before going into production, as suggested by the Zabbix documentation itself, which recommends benchmarking your Zabbix system's performance in a staging or development environment to fully understand your requirements before moving to production.

Which one to choose

For a provider with a handful of servers whose primary need is to know whether a website or service is reachable, Uptime Kuma is the tool with the gentlest learning curve and the lowest hardware cost. For those who need to closely monitor CPU, memory, disk and processes across multiple hosts, Zabbix remains the most comprehensive tool, but you need to account for the time to configure the database and agents. Grafana comes into play when you already have a metric source (even Zabbix itself, via plugin) and need a single dashboard to show to customers or colleagues: on its own it does not replace either Zabbix or Uptime Kuma.

None of the three products mentioned is a Prime Software product.