Kitaso vs Netdata: a resident agent, or SSH polling
Netdata runs an always-on agent collecting hundreds of metrics per second on every box. Kitaso polls over SSH from a Mac. The difference is what runs on the server being watched.
Netdata puts a resident agent on every server and serves a real-time dashboard from the box itself. Kitaso puts a Mac app in front of the SSH access you already have. The difference that matters is what runs on the machine being watched.
Everything below about Netdata comes from its documentation and pricing page, checked on 4 September 2026.
Two shapes
Netdata's agent runs continuously on each host. It collects at one-second granularity by default, ships over 800 collectors that auto-discover things like Postgres, NGINX and Redis, serves a web dashboard from the box on port 19999, and runs machine-learning anomaly detection locally. The agent is GPLv3 and much of it works fully offline. Netdata Cloud adds a single view across machines.
Kitaso runs on the Mac. It opens an SSH connection per server, runs one batched command, parses the output and charts it. The optional collector on each server is a scheduled job that runs and exits — no resident process, no open port.
| Kitaso | Netdata | |
|---|---|---|
| On each server | A scheduled job that runs and exits | A resident agent, always running |
| Open ports | None | A local dashboard on port 19999 |
| Granularity | Per server, down to every second | Every second, everywhere, by default |
| Metrics | CPU, RAM, disk, load, Docker | 800+ collectors, app dashboards, ML anomaly detection |
| Dashboard | Native Mac app | Web UI per node, or their Cloud for a fleet view |
| Price | $39 once (1 year of updates included), 2 servers free forever | Agent free; Cloud free to 5 nodes, then Homelab $90/yr or $4.50/node/month, from netdata.cloud/pricing on 4 September 2026 |
Two rows in that table are easy to misread.
Granularity. Kitaso's polling interval is set per server and goes down to one second, so a short spike does not slip past a box you are actively watching. But a local agent samples every metric every second continuously and cheaply, while SSH polling at one second costs far more per sample. Netdata holds that resolution everywhere, all the time. Kitaso reaches it where you ask for it.
Price. Netdata's agent is genuinely free and unlimited. The five-node limit applies to Netdata Cloud, the layer that gives one view across machines. Past five nodes you pay for Cloud or self-host a parent node to aggregate. The per-node dashboards stay free either way.
What the agent costs on the box
An agent collecting hundreds of metrics every second, keeping its own retention and training anomaly models locally, uses real CPU, memory and disk on the machine it is watching. That is not a flaw; it is what the capability costs. On a large application server it disappears into the noise. On a 2 GB VPS running one Rails app it is a visible share of the box.
Kitaso's footprint on the server is one SSH command per poll — or, with the collector installed, a scheduled shell script writing to a local SQLite file. Nothing runs between polls and nothing listens on a port.
Which one
For deep, always-on, per-application visibility with per-second history and anomaly detection on every box, Netdata does considerably more than Kitaso and the agent costs nothing. For real-time troubleshooting it is hard to beat.
For a handful of servers seen at a glance from a Mac, with almost nothing running on the servers themselves and the history on your own machine, that is what Kitaso is for. Two servers free at kitaso.app.
Builds Kitaso — a native Mac app for monitoring Linux servers over SSH. More posts →