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Beszel

Lightweight server monitoring with Docker stats and alerts

Beszel is a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring platform built in Go that tracks CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU, temperature, and Docker container metrics with historical data visualization and configurable alerts. Its simple hub-and-agent architecture deploys in minutes and consumes minimal resources compared to traditional monitoring stacks like Prometheus and Grafana.

About Beszel

Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform built in Go that provides historical data visualization, Docker container statistics, and configurable alerts through a clean web interface. Unlike heavyweight monitoring stacks that require complex setup with multiple components, Beszel uses a simple two-part architecture: a hub that serves the web dashboard and stores data, and a tiny agent binary that runs on each monitored system. The entire setup takes minutes — deploy the hub via Docker, run the agent on target servers, and you immediately get historical charts for CPU, memory, disk, network, temperature, GPU usage, and container-level metrics.

The platform tracks an impressive range of metrics out of the box: per-container CPU and memory for Docker and Podman workloads, disk I/O across multiple partitions, network bandwidth per container, system load averages, hardware temperature sensors, GPU utilization for NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, S.M.A.R.T. disk health including eMMC wear indicators, and even battery charge levels. Alerts can be configured for any metric with customizable thresholds and notification channels. The multi-user system lets administrators share specific server views with team members, while OAuth and OIDC support integrates with existing identity providers.

With over 20,000 GitHub stars and 10 million Docker Hub pulls, Beszel has become a go-to choice for developers and homelabbers who want comprehensive monitoring without the resource overhead of Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog stacks. The agent binary is remarkably small and consumes minimal resources on monitored hosts. Automatic backups to disk or S3-compatible storage protect monitoring data, and a REST API enables programmatic access to all metrics. Recent releases have added outbound heartbeat monitoring, Apple Silicon GPU support, systemd service monitoring, and enhanced Windows support — making it a genuinely cross-platform monitoring solution.

Pricing & Platform Specs

Pricing Summary

Beszel is 100% free and open source under the MIT License ($0 software fee). There are no paid enterprise tiers, feature paywalls, or per-node limits. Users host the PocketBase-powered Hub and lightweight agents on their own infrastructure (VPS, bare-metal, or homelab), incurring only underlying host server costs.

full pricing breakdown →

Supported Platforms

Linux, macOS, Windows. Hub runs via Docker or binary. Agent available for all major architectures.

Explore categories, tags & use cases

Open-source observability platform for metrics, logs, and traces visualization.

Grafana is the leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability visualization. It connects to virtually any data source — Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, Datadog, and 150+ others — to create beautiful, interactive dashboards. Used by millions of users at companies like Bloomberg, JPMorgan, eBay, and PayPal. Grafana Cloud offers a fully managed experience with generous free tier. The CNCF ecosystem standard for metrics visualization.

freemiumOpen Source

Cloud-scale monitoring, security, and analytics platform for modern infrastructure.

Datadog is a cloud observability and security platform that unifies metrics, traces, logs, RUM, synthetics, APM, and security signals. Current pricing pages list 1,000+ integrations for Infrastructure Monitoring, with Pro from $15/host/month and Enterprise from $23/host/month when billed annually.

freemium

Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit — the CNCF standard for metrics collection.

Prometheus is the open-source monitoring system and time-series database that has become the CNCF standard for metrics collection in cloud-native environments. Features a powerful query language (PromQL), pull-based metrics collection, multi-dimensional data model, and built-in alerting via Alertmanager. The foundation of modern Kubernetes observability.

Open Source

Side-by-Side Comparisons

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Beszel
vs
Prometheus logo
Prometheus

Beszel vs Prometheus — Lightweight Monitoring vs Full Observability Stack

Beszel and Prometheus serve the same fundamental purpose — monitoring server infrastructure — but at dramatically different scales of complexity. Beszel provides a complete monitoring solution in a single lightweight binary with Docker stats and a web UI, while Prometheus offers a powerful metrics collection engine that requires Grafana, Alertmanager, and exporters to achieve comparable functionality. Your choice depends on team size and operational maturity.

Community experience

Sources & verification

Sources checked
Content verified

Verification dates are editorial checks. Routine CMS saves and automatic updatedAt timestamps do not advance them.

FAQ

What is Beszel?

Beszel is a lightweight, self-hosted server monitoring platform built in Go that tracks CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU, temperature, and Docker container metrics with historical data visualization and configurable alerts. Its simple hub-and-agent architecture deploys in minutes and consumes minimal resources compared to traditional monitoring stacks like Prometheus and Grafana.

Is Beszel free?

Yes — Beszel is free to use. Beszel is 100% free and open source under the MIT License ($0 software fee). There are no paid enterprise tiers, feature paywalls, or per-node limits. Users host the PocketBase-powered Hub and lightweight agents on their own infrastructure (VPS, bare-metal, or homelab), incurring only underlying host server costs.

Is Beszel open source?

Yes — Beszel is open source.

Is Beszel still maintained?

Yes — Beszel is active. Its listing was last verified on September 6, 2026.

What are the best Beszel alternatives?

The first editor-selected Beszel alternatives are Grafana, Datadog, Prometheus.

How does Beszel score in our review?

The published editorial review lists Beszel at 86/100 overall across speed, privacy, and developer experience. Check the review's evidence status and test metadata for its verification level.