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Comparison

Upptime or a hosted monitor: how to choose

Upptime is a clever open-source project: it turns GitHub Actions into an uptime monitor, GitHub Issues into incident reports and GitHub Pages into a status site. It costs nothing if you already use GitHub.

Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team

How Upptime works

According to its README, a GitHub Actions workflow visits your sites every 5 minutes, records response times in git, opens an issue when an endpoint is down and closes it when it recovers, and publishes a status site with GitHub Pages. It is MIT-licensed and configured in a single file.

Side by side

UpcertainUpptime
Runs onUpcertain's serversYour GitHub repository's Actions
Check interval30 s to 24 hEvery 5 minutes
IncidentsConfirmed incidents with acknowledgementGitHub Issues opened and closed automatically
AlertsEmail, Slack, Teams, Discord, Google Chat, webhooksSlack notifications
Status pageHosted, custom domain, password or privateGitHub Pages site
Monitor typesHTTP, keyword, ping, port, SSL, heartbeatEndpoint checks

Upptime's details come from its README on GitHub, read on 25 October 2026.

What the table leaves out

Upptime's interval is limited by how GitHub schedules workflows, and scheduled workflows can start late when GitHub is busy. For a status page that is fine; for alerting a team within a minute, a dedicated monitor is more predictable.

When Upptime is enough

  • Open-source projects whose community already lives on GitHub.
  • Side projects where a 5-minute interval is fine.
  • Teams that want every check result in git.

When a hosted monitor fits better

  • You need to know within a minute, not five. See check intervals.
  • You want confirmation before alerting, so a single failed request does not open an issue.
  • You need heartbeats, port or certificate checks.
  • Your status page needs a password, subscribers or a custom domain with HTTPS handled for you.
  • You do not want monitoring to depend on scheduled workflows in the same platform as your code.

Moving from Upptime

  1. List what you monitor in Upptime: URLs, hosts or jobs, with their intervals.
  2. Import URLs and hosts with a CSV file, up to 200 rows at a time (CSV import); add heartbeat monitors one by one.
  3. Add alert channels and send a test to each.
  4. Point your status page subdomain at pages.upcertain.com if you had one (custom domains).
  5. Run both side by side for a week before switching the old checks off.

Questions

Does Upcertain store results in git?
No. Results live in Upcertain, and the REST API returns monitors, uptime and incidents for your own records.
Is a 5-minute interval a problem?
It depends on how fast you need to know. A 5-minute interval misses most outages shorter than a few minutes and takes up to 5 minutes to notice one.
Can I use both?
Yes. Keep Upptime's public history for your community, and use Upcertain for fast, confirmed alerts to your team.

Sources

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