Maintenant — Alternative to Beszel for Unified Docker Monitoring

What Beszel Does Well

Beszel is a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring tool. It focuses on system resource monitoring — CPU, memory, disk, network — with a clean interface and low footprint. It supports Docker container monitoring and has a hub/agent architecture that works across multiple servers.

For pure system resource monitoring across multiple hosts, Beszel is a solid lightweight option.

Where Maintenant Goes Further

Beszel and Maintenant share the same philosophy: lightweight, self-hosted, simple. But Maintenant covers significantly more ground.

Endpoint monitoring

Beszel does not monitor HTTP/TCP endpoints. If your API returns 500 errors but the container is still “running”, Beszel will not alert you. Maintenant probes your endpoints actively with latency tracking, status code verification, and content assertions.

SSL certificate tracking

Beszel does not track SSL certificates. Expired certificates are one of the most common causes of preventable downtime. Maintenant auto-detects certificates on all HTTPS endpoints and alerts you before they expire.

Heartbeat / cron job monitoring

Beszel does not monitor scheduled tasks. Maintenant includes a heartbeat system with start/end signals, duration tracking, and exit code reporting.

Update detection

Beszel does not detect available updates for your Docker images. Maintenant scans OCI registries and compares digests to alert you when updates — especially security patches — are available.

Public status page

Beszel does not offer a public status page. Maintenant includes one with real-time SSE updates and component groups. Pro adds incident management, maintenance windows, and subscriber notifications.

Zero configuration

Beszel uses a hub/agent model — you install a Beszel agent on each server. Maintenant connects to the Docker socket directly and auto-discovers everything. No agents to deploy.

Maintenant vs Beszel — Feature Comparison

When to Choose What

Choose Beszel if you need lightweight system resource monitoring across many bare-metal servers and do not need endpoint monitoring, SSL tracking, or cron monitoring.

Choose Maintenant if you deploy with Docker or Kubernetes and want a unified view of your entire stack — containers, endpoints, SSL, cron, metrics, updates — in a single container with zero configuration.

What You Get with Maintenant

• Container auto-discovery — Docker and Kubernetes, no agents to install

• System resources — CPU, RAM, network, disk per container and per host

• Plus HTTP endpoints, SSL certificates, heartbeats, update detection, alerts, status page, network security, REST API + MCP

Migrating from Beszel

Deploy Maintenant alongside Beszel. Compare the views. Once satisfied, remove Beszel hub and agents:

services:
  maintenant:
    image: ghcr.io/kolapsis/maintenant:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - maintenant-data:/data
    environment:
      MAINTENANT_ADDR: "0.0.0.0:8080"
      MAINTENANT_DB: "/data/maintenant.db"
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  maintenant-data:

FAQ

Beszel monitors multiple servers. Can Maintenant do that? Maintenant is designed per-host or per-Kubernetes-cluster. For multiple hosts, you deploy one Maintenant instance per host. Multi-host aggregation is on the roadmap.

I like Beszel’s simplicity. Is Maintenant more complex? No. Maintenant is equally simple to deploy — one container, zero config. It just monitors more things out of the box.

Does Maintenant support Kubernetes? Yes. Maintenant auto-detects Docker or Kubernetes and adapts. Beszel does not support Kubernetes natively.