Beszel

Beszel is an open-source, MIT-licensed server monitoring platform that delivers Netdata-style dashboards from a single Docker container — no Prometheus, no Grafana, no external database. We rate it 90/100 — for homelabbers, indie sysadmins, and small teams who want a "set and forget" view of their boxes, it is the most polished self-hosted option you can deploy in 2026.

What is Beszel?

Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring stack written in Go and built on top of PocketBase by solo developer Henry G. (henrygd). The first commit landed on July 7, 2024, and as of April 25, 2026 the project sits at 21,298 GitHub stars, 746 forks, and version v0.18.7 (released April 5, 2026). It is officially listed under the GitHub topics homelab, monitoring, and self-hosted.

The architecture is deliberately simple: a hub (the web dashboard, a single Go binary that bundles a SQLite-backed PocketBase) plus a tiny agent binary that runs on every machine you want to monitor. The agent connects outbound to the hub over an SSH-style key-pair channel, so you do not need to expose any of your servers to the public internet. That single design choice is why Beszel is winning hearts that previously belonged to Prometheus + Grafana stacks: you can stand up the entire monitoring system in under five minutes with one docker run command.

Key Features of Beszel

• One-binary hub on PocketBase: The hub is a single static Go binary (also distributed as a 35 MB Docker image) that includes the database, web UI, REST API, and admin panel. There is no Postgres, no Redis, no time-series DB to manage.
• Sub-15 MB agent: The agent binary is tiny and uses an outbound-only SSH-style connection to the hub. It is available for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD and has a one-line install script.
• Docker and Podman container stats: Beszel tracks CPU, memory, and network history per container without you having to touch cAdvisor or scrape the Docker socket manually. Containers appear automatically as soon as the agent sees them.
• Configurable alerts: Per-system thresholds for CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, temperature, load average, and "system down". Notifications go to email, Telegram, Discord, ntfy, Pushover, Gotify, Matrix, Mattermost, Signal, Slack, Teams, Twilio, and ~15 other backends out of the box.
• GPU and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring: Includes Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPU usage and power draw, plus disk health via S.M.A.R.T. data — features that competitors usually lock behind Pro tiers.
• Multi-user with OAuth / OIDC: Supports multiple OAuth2 providers (GitHub, Google, Authentik, Keycloak, etc.) and lets you disable password authentication entirely. Each user manages their own systems; admins can share systems across users.
• Automatic backups to disk or S3: Scheduled backups of the SQLite database to local disk or any S3-compatible object store (Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Backblaze B2). One-click restore.
• REST API: A first-class API (since v0.13) that lets you script integrations, build custom dashboards, or pipe data into Home Assistant, which has a community-maintained Beszel integration.

What Users Say About Beszel

Sentiment in the self-hosting community is unusually warm. The recurring praise on r/selfhosted and r/homelab is variations of "I replaced my entire Prometheus + Grafana + Node Exporter stack with this and it just works." The Hacker News reaction has been overwhelmingly positive — commenters specifically call out the lightweight resource footprint (the agent typically uses under 25 MB of RAM) and the lack of operational overhead.

The most common complaints, repeated across GitHub issues and the Matrix room #beszel:matrix.org, are: (1) the alert thresholds are still per-system rather than templated across groups of systems, so configuring 50 hosts is a slog; (2) there is no native multi-tenant org model, only multi-user; and (3) anyone needing custom Prometheus exporters or PromQL queries should look elsewhere — Beszel intentionally does not speak that protocol. Henry has been responsive on issues but has explicitly said he wants to keep the scope tight.

Beszel Pricing

Beszel is free and open source under the MIT License. There is no paid tier, no hosted SaaS, no per-system fee, and no telemetry phoning home. The only costs are the server you self-host the hub on and the (negligible) resources the agent consumes on each monitored machine.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Self-hosted (only option)	$0	Unlimited systems, users, containers, and history. MIT licensed. No commercial restrictions.

For homelabs, the practical floor is roughly $5/month on a small VPS (Hetzner CX11, DigitalOcean basic droplet) for the hub itself, and zero marginal cost per agent.

Who Should Use Beszel?

Best for: Homelab operators, indie SaaS founders running 1–50 servers, agencies who manage a small fleet of client VPS boxes, and platform teams that want a lightweight "did anything die overnight?" dashboard alongside their bigger observability tools. If you have ever installed Netdata and felt it was too heavy, Beszel is exactly what you want.

Not ideal for: Large enterprises with hundreds of nodes that need PromQL, alert routing trees, or SLO-style burn-rate alerts — keep Prometheus or Grafana Cloud. Also skip Beszel if your monitoring requirements include log aggregation or distributed tracing; Beszel is metrics-only by design.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Genuinely 5-minute setup — one Docker command for the hub, one curl-pipe-bash for the agent.
• No public ingress required for monitored hosts; agents dial out over an SSH-style channel.
• 21k+ GitHub stars and an active maintainer who has shipped releases roughly every 2–3 weeks since launch.
• Includes Docker stats, GPU monitoring, S.M.A.R.T. data, and OAuth/OIDC out of the box — features other tools paywall.
• SQLite + Go = trivially backable up: the entire state is one file you can rsync.

Cons:

• No grouping or templating for alert thresholds — configuring identical alerts across many hosts is repetitive.
• No native log aggregation or tracing; you will still need Loki/Tempo/equivalent if you want a full observability stack.
• SQLite scales fine to dozens of agents but is not built for hundreds-of-thousands-of-events-per-second workloads.
• The web UI is functional but not as visually rich as Grafana — no custom panel layouts.

Alternatives to Beszel

The closest comparison is Netdata — far more granular per-second metrics and a slicker UI, but heavier on resources and more complex to self-host across multiple nodes. Prometheus + Grafana is the enterprise-grade default but takes hours to set up properly and is overkill for a 10-server homelab. Uptime Kuma is a great companion (it does HTTP/TCP/Ping checks and status pages) but it does not collect host metrics, so many users run both. For Chinese-language users, Nezha is the most-cited alternative with a similar agent/hub architecture.

Verdict: Is Beszel Worth It?

For self-hosters and small teams, Beszel is one of the easiest wins of the year. It earns a 90/100 because it does one thing — lightweight, multi-host server and Docker monitoring — almost flawlessly. The 10 points it loses are for the absence of alert templates and the deliberate decision not to support Prometheus exporters, which keeps it out of the running for larger fleets. If you maintain anywhere from 1 to 50 servers, install the hub today; you will likely retire two or three other tools by the end of the week.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Beszel free?

Yes. Beszel is open source under the MIT License with no paid tier. You self-host the hub and unlimited agents at zero licensing cost.

What platforms does Beszel support?

The hub runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows (or as a Docker container on any host). The agent runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. The web UI works in any modern browser.

How does Beszel compare to Netdata?

Beszel is dramatically lighter (sub-15 MB agent vs. Netdata's ~150 MB) and far simpler to deploy across many hosts because of its outbound-only agent connection. Netdata offers more granular per-second metrics, anomaly detection, and a richer UI, but is overkill for most homelabs.

Is Beszel open source?

Yes — fully open source under the MIT License. Source code is on GitHub at henrygd/beszel.

Does Beszel monitor Docker containers?

Yes. Once the agent is installed on a Docker host, it automatically tracks CPU, memory, and network history for every running container without additional configuration. Podman is also supported.

Does Beszel require exposing my servers to the internet?

No. Agents make outbound SSH-style connections to the hub, so monitored servers can sit behind firewalls or NAT with no inbound ports open.

Can I get alerts from Beszel?

Yes. Beszel supports configurable thresholds for CPU, memory, disk, bandwidth, temperature, load, and system status, with notifications via email, Telegram, Discord, ntfy, Pushover, Slack, Teams, and around 15 other channels.