5 Best Open Source & Free Status Page Systems

Status pages are a vital tool for any online business in 2021. They provide a modern platform to communicate any incidents or downtime, building trust with your users and saving you time sending emails. The even better news? There are tons of self-hosted, open source and free status page systems to choose from.

At Instatus, we’ve put together the 6 best open source and free status page systems in this article so you don’t have to trawl the internet weighing up your options. First though, let’s take a look at what a self-hosted status page is, the benefits of a free status page over a status page service, and what features the best open source status page should have.

What Is A Self-Hosted Status Page?

When you decide to create a status page for your site, you have two options:

1. Get a status page service, like Instatus, to do the hard work for you and set up a beautiful and automated hosted status page in minutes. (Spoiler alert: Instatus offers a free status page too).
2. Use an open source and free status page system to self-host your status page.

Open source means that anyone has the right to use the status page software and its source code for any purpose. That means it’s always free. It also means you host and build the status page yourself from its source code.

By contrast, using a status page service means the page is built, hosted and maintained for you by the provider. Hosted status pages are quick and easy ways to communicate with your users.

Open Source & Free Status Page Vs. Status Page Service

Self-hosting a free open source status page has many benefits:

• It’s free - ideal for projects with little to no budget
• It’s flexible - you have open access to the source code so you can build and modify it as you want and you aren’t limited to pre-built features, integrations and API endpoints
• You host it yourself - you can choose which platform
• Unlimited team members and subscribers - you control all aspects of the status page with the code. It’s worth noting that Instatus also includes unlimited team members and subscribers even with our free status page service.
• You’re supporting the open-source community

With that said, for some businesses, a status page service, like Instatus, might be better:

• Easy to set up - especially if you have limited knowledge of coding
• Support when anything goes wrong
• Hosted and maintained externally - this means if you have an outage (ie. the reason you need a status page in the first place), the status page is less likely to be affected.
• Connections to third-party components - status page services offer integrations allowing you to showcase the status of the external services you use

What To Look For In A Free Status Page?

The best open source and free status page systems allow your users to quickly and easily digest any issues (planned or otherwise) affecting your service. Look for open source code for a self-hosted status page that:

• Provides transparent information on your service status and what you’re doing to fix any issues
• Monitors service status automatically but also allows you to schedule planned maintenance and update your status manually
• Showcases your historic uptime metrics to demonstrate SLAs
• Can be used to send subscriber alerts via different communications tools to inform users of problems
• Allows you to create components to show the service status of different parts of your site. Bonus: the function to categorize components saves time updating their status and stops your subscribers from receiving multiple alerts about the same incident.

If you want to create a new status page for your project or company, and you want it to be open-source and free to use, I’ve just chosen the best ones for you.

5. LambStatus

LambStatus is a serverless status page system. The idea behind using serverless is that your status page is rarely opened, so you’ll only pay when it is used; not a fixed monthly payment like most other services that require a traditional host.

Pros

• Pay for what you use.
• Has a decent admin dashboard.
• You can integrate your metrics.

Cons

• Not the best designed status page; It doesn’t feel modern to me.
• You’re required to host on Amazon AWS. It’s built on AWS services like CloudFormation and Cognito, so you can’t choose another platform.
• Some data load after the page loads. Here is (slowed down) video version of what users see when they open the page.

4. Cachet

First version of Cachet was released in 2015, so it’s one the most stable and feature-rich open-source options. However, its status page design feels outdated to me, and also it uses a PHP backend, so it requires a server that’s billed monthly.

Pros

• Has a good dashboard.
• Can cateogerize components.
• Add your service metrics.
• Accompanying API

Cons

• Not the best designed page.
• Not easy to customize.
• No notifications.

3. Staytus

This is one of the most stable and feature-rich, because like cachet, it’s been there for a long time. Plus, it’s the only one in the list that supports email notifications.

Pros

• Good and clean dashboard.
• Simple design.
• Email notifications.

Cons

• It’s built on Ruby on Rails, so requires a host with monthly payment.
• Incidents details aren’t fully displayed in the status page. Only showed in incident details page.

2. Cstate

Cstate uses a JAM stack. It’s statically generated, which means you can easily host it for free on Netlify or Github Pages. It doesn’t have a dashboard though, so to update you’ll need to update incidents using Github, and your host will auto publish it. Another way is to use Netlify CMS but it requires additional setup.

Pros

• Simple and modern design.
• Extremely fast to load.
• Free netlify or Github Pages hosting.

Cons

• No GUI dashboard (but can setup Netlify CMS)
• No API.
• Only RSS notifications.
• Incident details aren’t shown on homepage.

1. Statusfy

Statusfy has all hosting options:

1. Statically generate your status page, and host it for free like Cstate.
2. Use server rendering it and host it on a regular server.

Pros

• Modern design.
• Static generated option for free hosting.
• Has an API.
• Browser, Calendar and RSS notifications.
• Fast to open.

Cons

• No GUI dashboard to add and edit incidents.
• No component categories.

∞. Instatus

Instatus is a hosted status page service that offers a free status page that ticks every box. It’s a great option if you want to save yourself time building an open source status page and let the experts do it instead.

Pros

• Create great-looking, simple and informative status pages for free in just minutes with super-easy setup
• It’s created by an indie developer, you don’t need to worry about signing up for a complex account with a software giant
• Friendly user support and demo requests are handled by the developer, so any questions you have are answered by the person who knows the software best, for no extra cost
• Extensive features and integrations
• Unlimited subscribers and teammates at no extra cost
• Superfast status pages
• Create and categorize components, which your users subscribe to as they pick and choose
• Customizable with CSS and Javascript
• Includes a widget to display your status on your website
• Can be updated with status data from multiple monitoring options
• Custom domain available (with paid Pro subscription)

What’s not to love? Learn more about why Instatus is the best free status page service.

So there you have it: the 6 best open source and free status page systems out there. Whichever you choose to use, the important thing is that your status page is transparent and informative so you’re building a trustful relationship with your end-users.