Karma vs Oncall
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Karma | Oncall |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 87 · Excellent | 28 · At risk |
| Category | Monitoring & Status | Monitoring & Status |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Language | TypeScript | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 256 MB |
| Deployment | docker, binary | docker, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 2,679 | ★ 1,258 |
| First released | 2017 | 2017 |
| Replaces | PagerDuty | PagerDuty |
What are Karma and Oncall?
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
Oncall
Oncall is a calendar tool for managing on-call schedules and rotations across teams. Developed at LinkedIn, it integrates with paging systems to ensure the right engineer is reachable at any time.
- Calendar-based rotations
- Team and event management
- Paging system integration
- REST API
Karma vs Oncall: key differences
Karma is written in TypeScript, while Oncall is built with Python. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Karma versus BSD-2-Clause for Oncall. Karma is the lighter option, starting around 64 MB of RAM against 256 MB for Oncall. Karma has the considerably larger community, at 2,679 GitHub stars versus 1,258.
Why pick each one
Choose Karma if…
- Clear at-a-glance overview
- Lightweight
Watch out for
- Read-mostly view
- Requires Alertmanager
Choose Oncall if…
- Simple scheduling model
- Battle-tested at LinkedIn
Watch out for
- Needs Iris for actual paging
- UI is utilitarian
Frequently asked questions
Is Karma or Oncall better?
Karma is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Oncall if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Karma and Oncall free and open-source?
Yes. Karma is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Oncall under BSD-2-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Karma and Oncall with Docker?
Karma: yes. Oncall: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Karma or Oncall?
Karma has the smaller minimum footprint at 64 MB of RAM, compared to about 256 MB for Oncall. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.