Cachet vs Vigil
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Cachet
Open-source status page system for communicating outages
VS
Vigil
Microservices status page with built-in monitoring
| Feature | Cachet | Vigil |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 76 · Good | 71 · Good |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MPL-2.0 |
| Language | PHP | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 256 MB | 32 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal | docker, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 15,248 | ★ 1,948 |
| First released | 2014 | 2018 |
| Replaces | Statuspage, Better Uptime | Statuspage, Pingdom |
What are Cachet and Vigil?
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
Vigil
Vigil is a microservices status page that monitors distributed infrastructure and reports outages. It can probe HTTP, TCP, and ICMP endpoints and includes a local Prober for push-based reporting.
- Status page and monitoring
- HTTP, TCP, ICMP probes
- Push reporting with Vigil Reporter
- Alerts to Slack and email
Cachet vs Vigil: key differences
Cachet is written in PHP, while Vigil is built with Rust. Licensing differs — BSD-3-Clause for Cachet versus MPL-2.0 for Vigil. Vigil is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 256 MB for Cachet. Cachet is the more established project (first released 2014), while Vigil arrived in 2018. Cachet has the considerably larger community, at 15,248 GitHub stars versus 1,948.
Why pick each one
Choose Cachet if…
- Polished public-facing page
- REST API
Watch out for
- Development has been intermittent
- Needs a database
Choose Vigil if…
- Very low resource use
- Combines checks and status page
Watch out for
- Configuration via TOML files
- Smaller community
Frequently asked questions
Is Cachet or Vigil better?
Neither is universally better. Cachet has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Cachet and Vigil free and open-source?
Yes. Cachet is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and Vigil under MPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Cachet and Vigil with Docker?
Cachet: yes. Vigil: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Cachet or Vigil?
Vigil has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 256 MB for Cachet. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.