Every tool on this list will tell you your site is down. What separates them is what else they watch, how much they charge for the frequency you actually want, and whether you still believe the alerts after a month of using them.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
What is the best uptime monitoring tool?
For a personal project, UptimeRobot's free plan with 50 monitors is unbeatable — provided the site is genuinely non-commercial, which its licence now requires. For self-hosting, Uptime Kuma is free and excellent. For the cheapest possible availability checks, updown.io. For a commercial site where certificates, domains and page content also matter, that is where we place ourselves.
Uptime monitoring is the most commoditised thing in this category. Any of these eleven will send you an email when a check fails. The differences that actually matter are commercial: what a free plan is licensed for, whether frequency is metered, and how many separate subscriptions you end up with to cover one website.
This list is published by MonitoringDaddy and we make one of the eleven tools on it. We rank ourselves first on a stated and narrow criterion — commercial sites that need more than availability watched — and every entry says plainly who it is for, including the four tools that beat us on price or on free allowance. You should know who wrote a ranked list before you read it.
All prices were checked against vendor pricing pages in September 2026. Several widely-cited comparison sites are currently wrong about at least two tools on this list, so it is worth verifying before you subscribe to anything.
On what you get for the money, for a commercial site that needs more than a ping.
The ranking criterion is value for a business site where availability is necessary but not sufficient — the certificate, the domain, the pricing page and the nightly job all matter too. That is a specific situation, it is the one we built for, and it is why we rank first here.
Change the situation and the order changes. For a homelab, the free and self-hosted options at positions two and five are better answers than anything paid. For a team that lives in Playwright, the developer tool at position seven is a better fit than a general monitor. For a business with a global audience and an SLA to evidence, the enterprise platforms at the bottom of this list are the correct purchase despite costing many times more.
| If you are… | What matters most | Best on this list |
|---|---|---|
| A personal project | A free plan that is genuinely free | UptimeRobot or Uptime Kuma |
| A commercial site | Breadth per pound, and a licence that fits | Us, or StatusCake |
| An agency | Client separation and reporting | StatusCake or Oh Dear |
| A developer team | Real user journeys, monitoring as code | Checkly |
| A global business with an SLA | Multi-region checks and reporting | Uptime.com or Pingdom |
Ranked for commercial sites that need more than availability. Each entry says who it is really for.
From $5 a month for 25 monitors, $19 for 50 and $34 for 100 at 60-second checks. A monitor can be an uptime check, a certificate, a domain expiry watch, a page content watch or a cron heartbeat, in any mix, with nothing metered. What we do not offer: a free plan, checks from more than one location, real browser journeys, or server agents. Several tools below beat us on each of those. Try MonitoringDaddy — plans from $5 a month.
Fifty monitors free at five-minute intervals, which remains the most generous free offer in monitoring. Since October 2024 that plan is licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. The paid ladder is awkward: Solo is $13 a month for ten monitors — a fifth of what the free plan gives — because you are buying 60-second checks and a commercial licence rather than capacity. Team at $46 for 100 monitors is the realistic commercial entry point.
Genuinely excellent escalation, scheduling and incident handling, with the best-looking status pages in the category. The uptime checks are competent; the reason to buy it is the rota. If nobody is on call, you are paying for the most expensive part and not using it.
A free plan with 10 uptime monitors plus one each of page speed, server, domain and SSL. Superior at $20.41 a month gives 100 monitors at one-minute checks with 50 SSL and 50 domain monitors; Business at $66.66 adds sub-accounts, which is the structural feature agencies need and most competitors omit below enterprise pricing.
MIT licensed, no monitor caps, no paid tier, more than ninety notification integrations and domain expiry monitoring since v2.1. The 2.5 line is current and actively maintained. The catch is architectural rather than commercial: a monitor running on your own infrastructure shares the fate of your own infrastructure, so host it somewhere else or accept a hole exactly where you need one.
Pay-as-you-go with no plans at all: one credit per check, €5 for 200,000 credits, intervals from 15 seconds to an hour. Ten sites checked every two minutes starts around €1.83 a month. Nothing else is close on price for plain availability. There is no certificate expiry alerting, no domain monitoring and no content change detection.
Monitoring as code: checks defined in a project, version controlled, deployed through a CLI, with browser checks written as Playwright tests. Free Hobby tier, then $24 and $64 a month annually. Browser runs are metered at roughly $6.50 per thousand, so frequency rather than monitor count is what drives the bill.
$17 a month for 2 sites through $439 for 200, with every feature on every plan — broken links, mixed content, Lighthouse, sitemap monitoring, DNS records, blocklist checks, cron and certificates. Nothing is gated by tier, which is refreshing. Per-site pricing is expensive across many small sites and excellent across a few important ones.
Checks from more than 300 locations and uses them to confirm an outage before alerting, which is the most direct defence against alerts nobody believes. Business at $29 a month covers 25 monitors at one-minute checks with transactions and API access. Read the ladder carefully — the $9 tier covers one monitor and the $5 tier covers five.
Real user monitoring from actual visitor sessions is the reason to choose it, and few competitors at any price match it. Synthetic checks are priced on a slider at roughly $1.50 each — $78 a month for 50 checks, $149 for 100 — with no free tier. Expensive for plain availability, worth it if you use the RUM.
More than 100 probe locations with IPv4 and IPv6, transaction and API checks, group checks and 24-month history. Website monitoring from around $9 a month on their calculator, a named Starter plan at $20, and Premium at $285 for 200 basic checks. Status pages and real user monitoring are separate modules.
The five situations that cover most people reading this.
UptimeRobot free, or Uptime Kuma if you enjoy running things. Both are free and both are better value than anything paid at that scale. Do not pay for monitoring a hobby project.
This is where UptimeRobot's licence change bites — the free plan no longer covers you. Compare Team at $46 against StatusCake Superior at $20.41 and our Growth at $19, and check what a monitor means on each.
StatusCake for sub-accounts, or Oh Dear for per-site depth and branded client reports. Both are built around how agency work is actually organised.
Checkly. If you already write Playwright, the distance from test to monitor is very short and nothing else on this list matches that.
Uptime.com or Pingdom. Multi-region checks, transaction monitoring and reporting built for proving uptime to someone else. They cost several times more and that is the correct trade when an SLA is involved.
Not features. These are the reasons monitoring gets abandoned.
UptimeRobot's free tier has been personal-use-only since October 2024. A great many businesses are still on it, technically outside the terms. Read the licence, not just the feature list.
Tools that sell check runs make the interval you actually want the thing that breaks the budget. A plan that sells slots instead lets you set five-minute checks and forget about it.
One probe failing may be the probe, the route or a local network problem rather than your site. Tools that confirm from a second location before alerting are the ones you still trust after a month.
Both end a site as thoroughly as downtime and neither shows up in an uptime check. If your monitoring tool does not watch them, something else has to.
Get alerted when your website stops responding.
Use the address a visitor would use, including https. Monitoring a redirect target rather than the real entry point hides a whole class of failure.
Five minutes suits most sites. One minute is worth it for checkout or login paths where minutes of downtime are expensive.
A keyword condition catches the case where the server responds but the page is an error, which a status code check alone will report as healthy.
Email, webhook, Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram or SMS on suitable plans. More than one destination, so a single missed notification is not a missed outage.
Both are separate monitors, both fail silently, and both take the site down as completely as an outage.
Typically about 2 minutes from start to finish.
Uptime monitors, watched pages and heartbeats each get their own allowance, so adding a page watch never costs you a monitor. SSL and domain checks ride along with the monitor they belong to and use nothing extra.
| Plan | Monitors | Watched pages | Heartbeats | Fastest interval | Alert channels | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | 1 | 1 | Every 30 minutes | 1 email address | $0 |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | 25 | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | 10 | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | 50 | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | 100 | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
UptimeRobot for a hosted free plan — 50 monitors at five-minute checks, licensed for personal, non-commercial use only. Uptime Kuma if you will self-host, where there are no limits at all. StatusCake's free plan is smaller at 10 monitors but includes certificate and domain monitors.
Not within its terms. Since October 2024 the free plan is restricted to personal, non-commercial use. If the site earns money or belongs to a client, the licence expects you on a paid plan — where Solo covers 10 monitors for $13 a month.
Five minutes is right for most sites. One minute is worth paying for on revenue paths like checkout or login. Anything slower than fifteen minutes stops being monitoring and becomes reporting.
updown.io, clearly — around €1.83 a month for ten sites checked every two minutes, on pay-as-you-go credits. It covers availability only, with no certificate, domain or content monitoring.
Only if you already have somewhere safe to run it and count your own time at zero. Uptime Kuma is free, but a separate VPS is $4 to $6 a month, plus setup and ongoing maintenance. The software being free is not the same as the monitoring being free.
Usually because a single monitoring location had a network or routing problem rather than your site being down. Tools that check from several locations and confirm before alerting — Host-Tracker most notably — largely solve this.
If your audience is global and regional availability matters, yes. If you mainly need to know that the site is broken, one location that re-checks before alerting covers the common case at much lower cost.
Uptime monitoring asks whether a URL responds. Synthetic monitoring runs a scripted journey — log in, add to basket, check out — and tells you when a step breaks. A site can be perfectly "up" with a broken checkout.
It is usually simpler and cheaper, because they are the same class of problem — something that stops working without anyone being told. The main reason to separate them is if you need certificate depth, such as chain validation, that general monitors do not provide.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
25 monitors for $5 a month, 50 for $19, nothing metered.