A website can stop working in at least five ways, and most monitoring tools watch one of them. The server stops responding. The certificate expires. The domain lapses. A page changes without anyone meaning it to. A scheduled job silently stops running. Only the first is what most people mean by "monitoring".
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What is the best website monitoring tool?
There is no single answer, because the tools are built around different failure modes. If you want the widest coverage for the least money, that is the case we make for ourselves. If you want the best free option, it is UptimeRobot for hosted or Uptime Kuma for self-hosted. If you want the deepest examination of a small number of sites, it is Oh Dear. Pick the one whose failure mode matches your actual risk.
Most "best website monitoring" lists are uptime lists with a few extras bolted on. This one is organised around the five distinct ways a website stops working, because choosing a tool that covers four of them and being caught by the fifth is the most common failure in this category.
This list is published by MonitoringDaddy and we make one of the eleven tools on it. We rank ourselves first on a narrow criterion — covering the most failure modes per pound — and where a tool is better than us at a specific job, its entry says so. Four of the ten below beat us outright on at least one dimension, and we have named which.
All prices were verified against vendor pricing pages in September 2026.
Only one of these is downtime, and it is the one everybody monitors.
Downtime is the visible failure and every tool on this list handles it. The other four are quieter, and they are quieter in a way that specifically defeats uptime monitoring: an expired certificate, a lapsed domain, a changed page and a stopped cron job can all coexist with a perfectly healthy HTTP 200.
That is the argument for coverage over depth for most small and mid-sized sites. A tool that watches all five adequately will usually save you more downtime than a tool that watches one of them brilliantly — unless you already know which one is your real risk, in which case buy the specialist.
| Failure | What an uptime check sees | What catches it |
|---|---|---|
| Server stops responding | A failed check — caught | Any tool on this list |
| Certificate expires | Nothing, until the day it breaks | A certificate monitor with a warning window |
| Domain lapses | Nothing, until DNS stops resolving | A domain expiry monitor |
| A page changes | HTTP 200 — nothing wrong | Content change detection |
| A cron job stops running | Nothing at all — there is no request to fail | A heartbeat monitor |
Ranked by how many of the five failure modes each covers, for the money.
All five failure modes from one allowance: uptime, certificates with 1 to 60 day warning windows, domain expiry with 1 to 180, page content change detection with region selection and noise filtering, and cron heartbeats. $5 a month for 25 monitors, $19 for 50, $34 for 100. We check from a single location, have no free plan and do not run browser journeys — three things several tools below do better. Try MonitoringDaddy — plans from $5 a month.
Every check type on every plan, from $17 a month for 2 sites. Uptime, certificates, domain expiry, cron, broken links, mixed content, Lighthouse, sitemap monitoring, DNS records and blocklist checks — per site, with nothing gated by tier. It goes further than we do on any single site; it costs more when you have many.
Ten uptime monitors plus one each of page speed, server, domain and SSL, free. That is the only genuinely free plan here that covers more than one failure mode. Superior at $20.41 gives 100 monitors with 50 SSL and 50 domain; Business at $66.66 adds agency sub-accounts.
Fifty monitors free, personal and non-commercial use only since October 2024, with SSL and domain monitor types included. Commercially the ladder gets awkward — Solo is $13 for ten monitors and Team is $46 for a hundred.
MIT licensed with no limits, ninety-plus notification integrations, certificate information and domain expiry since v2.1. Excellent software. Host it somewhere other than the server you are monitoring, or the monitor dies with the thing it watches.
Uptime, certificates and status pages wrapped around genuinely strong incident management and escalation. Worth the money when there is a rota; an expensive way to buy checks when there is not.
Uptime, ports, DNS, SSL, ping, cookies, source code, sitemaps, text, subdomains, heartbeats, technology detection, blacklists and screenshots, with a free plan. Its change detection reaches source code and cookies, which we do not watch. Pricing is not published readably; third parties suggest $12 to $15 a month.
Fifteen free uptime monitors, fifteen free server monitors and blacklist monitoring on a lifetime-free tier, with paid plans from about $5.95. Blacklist monitoring catches your mail quietly failing to deliver, which nothing else here watches.
More than 300 locations used to confirm an outage before alerting. Business at $29 a month for 25 monitors at one-minute checks, with SNMP, database and blacklist checks alongside. Certificate and domain checks start at the $14 tier.
Monitoring as code with Playwright browser checks, version controlled and deployed through a CLI. Free Hobby tier, $24 and $64 paid tiers, with browser runs metered at around $6.50 per thousand. The right tool if user journeys are what you need protected.
Real user monitoring from actual visitor sessions, alongside synthetic checks priced at roughly $1.50 each and no free tier. Chosen for the RUM rather than the uptime checks, and expensive if you only want the latter.
Start from what would hurt most, not from a feature list.
Make certificates a first-class monitor type with a warning window you choose, and check whether the tool alerts on an already-expired certificate — many only alert inside a window before expiry, then go silent at exactly the wrong moment.
You need real change detection, not a keyword check. Look for region selection, ignore rules for the parts that always move, and before-and-after images. We and MonSpark both do this; most of the list does not.
A job that stops running produces no request, no error and no failed check. Only a heartbeat monitor catches it. We include them; so do Oh Dear and Cronitor.
Multi-location confirmation is what stops alerts becoming noise. Host-Tracker does this best on this list, with 300+ locations verifying before anyone is woken.
StatusCake free if you want several failure modes covered, UptimeRobot free if you want many uptime monitors and the site is personal, Uptime Kuma if you will host it yourself.
Cover the five ways a website stops working, not just the one.
Start with the URL a visitor would use, at a five-minute interval.
A separate monitor with a warning window matched to how long your renewal actually takes.
Registration expiry is a different date from the certificate and ends the site just as completely.
Pricing, terms, key landing pages. Select the region that matters so the rest of the page cannot create noise.
Backups, imports, billing runs. A job that stops running is invisible to every other kind of check.
Typically about 5 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.
Five things: whether the server responds, whether the certificate is valid, whether the domain is still registered, whether important pages have changed, and whether scheduled jobs are still running. Most tools cover the first and treat the rest as extras.
StatusCake if you want several failure modes covered free — ten uptime monitors plus one each of SSL, domain, server and page speed. UptimeRobot if you want the most uptime monitors and the site is personal. Uptime Kuma if you are willing to self-host.
No, and the gaps are specific. An expired certificate, a lapsed domain, an edited page and a stopped cron job can all happen while every uptime check passes. Each needs its own kind of monitor.
For a small commercial site, $5 to $20 a month covers it comfortably across several tools including ours. Above that you are usually buying multi-region checks, browser journeys, real user data or incident management — all worth money if you need them and waste if you do not.
Fetching a page, comparing it to the last version and reporting what changed. Done properly it includes choosing the region to watch and ignoring the parts that always move, which is what separates a useful alert from noise you learn to ignore.
A URL your scheduled job calls when it finishes. You declare how often to expect the call and are alerted when it does not arrive. It catches the failure where a job stops being run at all and therefore produces no error to detect.
Only if you will put it somewhere other than the infrastructure being monitored, and only if maintaining it is genuinely free to you. A monitor on the same server as the site goes down with the site and tells nobody.
Ideally one. In practice people end up with two or three because their uptime tool does not watch certificates, their certificate tool does not watch content, and nothing watches the cron jobs. Checking coverage against the five failure modes before subscribing usually avoids that.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Uptime, certificates, domains, page changes and cron heartbeats from $5 a month.