Cachet vs Lunalytics
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Cachet | Lunalytics |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 76 · Good | 0 · At risk |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Language | PHP | CSS |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 256 MB | 256 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal | docker |
| GitHub stars | ★ 15,248 | ★ 1 |
| First released | 2014 | 2023 |
| Replaces | Statuspage, Better Uptime | Pingdom, Better Uptime |
What are Cachet and Lunalytics?
Cachet
Cachet is an open-source status page system written in PHP (Laravel) for communicating downtime and incidents. It supports components, incident timelines, scheduled maintenance windows, metrics, and subscriber notifications.
- Public status page
- Incident timeline updates
- Scheduled maintenance windows
- Subscriber notifications
Lunalytics
Lunalytics is a self-hosted uptime monitoring application that tracks websites and services and notifies you of downtime. It offers a clean interface, multi-user support, and several notification channels.
- Website and API monitoring
- Multi-user access
- Notification integrations
- Clean dashboard
Cachet vs Lunalytics: key differences
Cachet is written in PHP, while Lunalytics is built with CSS. Licensing differs — BSD-3-Clause for Cachet versus GPL-3.0 for Lunalytics. Cachet is the more established project (first released 2014), while Lunalytics arrived in 2023. Cachet has the considerably larger community, at 15,248 GitHub stars versus 1.
Why pick each one
Choose Cachet if…
- Polished public-facing page
- REST API
Watch out for
- Development has been intermittent
- Needs a database
Choose Lunalytics if…
- Easy to set up
- Friendly interface
Watch out for
- Newer project
- Smaller feature set
Frequently asked questions
Is Cachet or Lunalytics better?
Neither is universally better. Cachet has the larger community, while Lunalytics is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Cachet and Lunalytics free and open-source?
Yes. Cachet is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and Lunalytics under GPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cachet and Lunalytics with Docker?
Cachet: yes. Lunalytics: yes.