SHSelfHostIndex

Karma vs Mailrise

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
KA Karma Alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager VS MA Mailrise SMTP gateway that forwards email alerts to push services
FeatureKarmaMailrise
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score87 · Excellent48 · Fair
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0MIT
LanguageTypeScriptPython
Setup difficultyEasyEasy
Min. RAM64 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, binarydocker
GitHub stars★ 2,679★ 1,592
First released20172021
ReplacesPagerDutyPagerDuty

What are Karma and Mailrise?

Karma

Karma is a web dashboard that aggregates and displays alerts from one or more Alertmanager instances. It provides grouping, filtering, and silencing in a single clean view for on-call engineers.

  • Multi-Alertmanager aggregation
  • Alert grouping and filtering
  • Inline silence management
  • Auto-refreshing display

Read the full Karma guide →

Mailrise

Mailrise acts as an SMTP server that receives email alerts from legacy systems and forwards them as push notifications through Apprise. It bridges old monitoring tools to modern notification channels.

  • SMTP-to-push bridge
  • Apprise integration
  • Many notification targets
  • Tiny footprint

Karma vs Mailrise: key differences

Karma is written in TypeScript, while Mailrise is built with Python. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Karma versus MIT for Mailrise. Karma is the more established project (first released 2017), while Mailrise arrived in 2021.

Why pick each one

Choose Karma if…

  • Clear at-a-glance overview
  • Lightweight

Watch out for

  • Read-mostly view
  • Requires Alertmanager
Karma details

Choose Mailrise if…

  • Released under the MIT license
  • Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (1.6k GitHub stars)
Mailrise details

Frequently asked questions

Is Karma or Mailrise better?

Neither is universally better. Karma has the larger community; both share a easy setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Karma and Mailrise free and open-source?

Yes. Karma is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Mailrise under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Karma and Mailrise with Docker?

Karma: yes. Mailrise: yes.

Related comparisons