Building a homelab? You will probably install Uptime Kuma first. It is easy, the docs are fantastic, and you will see it in every "self-hosted starter kit" on Reddit. But after running it for a few days, you will know its limits. When your ESXi or Proxmox node goes down, Uptime Kuma sends a notification to your phone, but when your system goes down it does not give you a reason.
This is the exact blind spot Beszel fixes. It is self-hosted with Docker Compose simplicity, but it watches your hosts instead of just pinging your URLs.
Most Homelab guides say that both are against each other, as if you have only one option and must pick one. You don't. They solve entirely different problems, and if you only pick one, you are missing half the picture.
What Are You Actually Trying to Monitor?
Uptime Kuma is a ping machine. HTTP, TCP, DNS, keyword matching: it checks your services on a loop. It alerts you on Discord or Telegram when something stops answering. That is what it does best. But it does not show CPU load, memory pressure, or container resource limits.
Deploying Beszel is easy. It is a host metrics platform. It uses a lightweight hub-and-agent model. You spin up the dashboard on your main machine and deploy small agents on every host you want to keep monitoring. When you click on an agent, it shows CPU, RAM, disk, and network usage, and live logs are also shown on Beszel's dashboard. It also tells you which service is consuming the most RAM.
Let's Talk About Alert Fatigue
Uptime Kuma offers more than 95 different ways to send notifications. You can set up email alerts, Telegram or Signal alerts, Slack channel alerts, Discord notifications, Splunk, SendGrid, Twilio, and even Pushover. It also gives you total control over tracking system health and setting up downtime alerts. If you run home servers for family or friends and want rules to keep things online, this tool is the top option.
Beszel is designed to be completely simple. You just set a limit for CPU, RAM, or disk usage. Whenever the system crosses that limit, Beszel sends you a Telegram message or a webhook alert. Once the system cools down and returns to normal, it sends another message to clear the alert. It is a simple notification setup — no rocket science required.
Keep in mind that Beszel alerts do not have a built-in waiting period between messages. If your CPU fluctuates around 85%, it will send constant notifications to your phone. To save your sanity, make sure to set your limits much higher, like 95% for CPU and 90% for disk storage.
The Verdict
If you have to pick just one, look at your biggest headache right now and select the right one accordingly. Choose Uptime Kuma if your main goal is checking whether your services are online and accessible. It is a must-have if you host apps that other people depend on daily. Choose Beszel if you want to also check why your server is running slow or which container is wasting memory. It is a fantastic tool for viewing all your different homelab servers on a single, clean dashboard.
To be completely honest, you should run both tools. Both use very little space — Beszel agents take around 15MB of RAM. They do not overlap in functionality and work perfectly side-by-side. When the system goes down, Uptime Kuma tells you your server is down and Beszel tells you why it happened.
