Gatus vs Prometheus
| Tagline | Developer-oriented health dashboard with declarative YAML config and status pages | Industry-standard metrics monitoring and alerting toolkit with PromQL |
| Category | Monitoring & Status Pages | Monitoring & Status Pages |
| Replaces | UptimeRobot, Statuspage, Pingdom | Datadog |
| GitHub stars | 12k | 66k |
| Language | Go | Go |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 4/5 Involved |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual | Docker Docker Compose Kubernetes Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 7 days ago | yesterday |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Gatus
- Configuration is YAML-only; no UI to add/edit monitors (less friendly than UptimeRobot's dashboard)
- Status pages are basic compared to Statuspage.io (no incident timeline workflow, subscriber management, or component grouping UX)
- No built-in multi-region probing without running multiple instances
- Limited historical analytics / long-term reporting
Prometheus
- No built-in dashboards UI; you must pair it with Grafana
- Long-term storage and horizontal scale need add-ons (Thanos, Cortex, Mimir)
- No logs, traces, or APM out of the box (metrics only)
- Steeper operational learning curve than turnkey Datadog
Bottom line
Choose Gatus if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Prometheus for the larger community and ecosystem. Prometheus has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Gatus
Developer-oriented health dashboard with declarative YAML config and status pages