Kitaso vs Beszel: a self-hosted hub, or an app on your Mac
Beszel is a self-hosted web hub with an agent on each server. Kitaso is a Mac app that polls over SSH with no hub at all. Same job, opposite architecture.
Beszel and Kitaso answer the same question — how do you watch a handful of Linux servers without standing up an observability platform — and they put the dashboard in opposite places. Beszel puts it on a server you host. Kitaso puts it in an app on your Mac.
Everything below about Beszel comes from its documentation and GitHub repository, checked on 4 September 2026. It is free, MIT licensed, and had over 25,000 stars at that point.
Two shapes
Beszel is a hub and agents. The hub is a single Go binary with an embedded SQLite database; you run it somewhere central and it serves a web dashboard with user accounts. On each monitored machine runs a small agent. Hub and agent authenticate with an SSH key, and depending on the setup the hub connects to the agent or the agent opens a WebSocket to the hub. Both parts are light.
Kitaso has no hub. The Mac app opens an SSH connection to each server, runs one batched command, parses the output and draws it. History goes into SQLite on the Mac. A scheduled collector on each server is optional; installed, it writes metrics to a SQLite file on that box, and Kitaso pulls the rows when it next connects, so history keeps accumulating while the Mac is closed.
| Kitaso | Beszel | |
|---|---|---|
| Front end | Native Mac app | Self-hosted web hub |
| On each server | Optional scheduled collector (shell + SQLite) | A small agent binary |
| Also required | Nothing else | The hub: a server, TLS, an admin account |
| Where history lives | SQLite on your Mac | SQLite in the hub you host |
| Access | Your Mac | Any browser, multiple user accounts |
| Alerting | From the Mac, while it is awake | From the hub, around the clock |
| Platforms watched | Linux | Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Windows |
| Price | $39 once (1 year of updates included), 2 servers free forever | Free, MIT |
What Beszel does that Kitaso does not
The dashboard exists without your laptop. It runs on an always-on box, reachable from any browser and any phone, with real user accounts. A colleague can open it; an on-call rotation can share it. Kitaso is single-operator — there is no URL to send anyone.
Because the hub is always on, its alerts are too. Kitaso's alerts fire from the Mac and only while the Mac is awake. The collector keeps filling the history overnight, but it does not page you.
Beszel is also free and open source, and it watches more than Linux: FreeBSD, macOS and Windows, plus GPUs and disk health. Kitaso reads Linux boxes over SSH and nothing else, and costs $39.
If more than one person looks at the dashboard, or the fleet is a mix of machines rather than a row of Linux VPSes, Beszel covers ground Kitaso does not.
What running no hub buys
The hub is a server. In practice it lives on a small VPS, in Docker, behind a reverse proxy with TLS if it is reachable from the internet, with an admin login. It has a disk that can fill, updates to apply, and a failure mode of its own: while the hub is down, nothing is being recorded.
Kitaso has no equivalent piece. The servers report to nothing except the Mac that connects to them, over SSH access that already exists. No account, no open port, no certificate to renew.
Which one
One question decides it: does the dashboard need to exist without your laptop?
If yes — a team, a rotation, a phone, or alerts that must fire at 3am — run Beszel. It is free and built for exactly that.
If one person with a Mac watches a handful of Linux boxes, and another server to host, secure and patch is the thing being avoided, that is the gap Kitaso fills. The first two servers are free at kitaso.app.
Builds Kitaso — a native Mac app for monitoring Linux servers over SSH. More posts →