Most monitoring tools ask you to describe a check in a web form. Checkly asks you to write a Playwright test, commit it, and let it run on a schedule from around the world. If your team already writes end-to-end tests, that is a remarkably short distance to travel — and it means your monitoring is reviewed, versioned and deployed like everything else you own.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is Checkly worth it?
For an engineering team that already lives in Playwright and CI, yes — it is the most natural fit in this category and nothing else makes monitoring feel so much like code. Budget carefully though: browser checks consume a metered allowance, and at roughly $6.50 per thousand runs, frequency is the variable that decides your bill. If what you need is to know a page returns 200, this is an expensive and elaborate way to find out.
Checkly is a synthetic monitoring platform built around monitoring as code. Checks are defined in a project, kept in version control and deployed through a CLI, so a monitor is a reviewable artefact rather than something somebody configured once and forgot.
The centrepiece is browser checks written as Playwright scripts. A real browser logs in, walks through a checkout, and fails loudly when the journey breaks — which is a far more meaningful question than whether the homepage responds.
API checks cover endpoints with assertions on status, body and timing, and uptime monitors handle plain availability. The three types have separate allowances, and browser runs are by a wide margin the expensive one.
Monitoring that belongs in your repository.
Real browser journeys written as Playwright tests. If a login or checkout breaks, you find out from the same script your team already trusts in CI.
Checks defined in a project, version controlled and deployed through a CLI. Code review applies to your monitoring, which is unusual and genuinely valuable.
Assertions on status, response body and timing, rather than a bare HTTP ping with a keyword match.
Four public locations on Starter, all 22 on Team, with private locations for internal systems.
10 uptime monitors, 1,000 browser runs and 10,000 API runs a month — enough to run something real before paying.
SMS on paid tiers, phone alerts on Team, and the integrations an on-call rotation expects.
Plans set the allowance; check runs set the bill. Prices below are annual billing.
| Plan | Price/mo | Included | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $0 | 10 uptime, 1k browser, 10k API runs | — |
| Starter | $24 | 50 monitors, 4 locations, 3k browser, 25k API | $6.50/1k browser, $2.60/10k API |
| Team | $64 | 75 monitors, all 22 locations, 12k browser, 100k API | $6.25/1k browser, $2.50/10k API |
| Enterprise | Custom | Quoted | — |
Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement. Every figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
Checkly does something we do not attempt. We cannot log into your application, walk through a checkout and tell you step four broke — we check that a URL responds, optionally that it contains or omits some text, and that is the limit. If real user journeys are what you need watched, they are the right tool and we are not a substitute.
Where we differ is the shape of the cost. Their bill moves with how often checks run; ours does not meter anything. $19 a month covers 50 monitors at five-minute intervals whatever they are doing, and a monitor can be an uptime check, a certificate, a domain, a page content watch or a cron heartbeat. Certificates and domains in particular are first-class types for us and not for them.
The honest split: a team with Playwright tests and journeys worth protecting — theirs, comfortably. A set of sites, certificates, domains and pages that simply must not break quietly, on a bill that never surprises you — ours.
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.
Hobby is free with 10 uptime monitors, 1,000 browser runs and 10,000 API runs a month. Starter is $24 a month annually and Team $64, with overages charged per thousand browser runs. Verify current pricing on their site.
One execution of one check. Every time a monitor fires it consumes a run from your allowance, so frequency multiplies consumption — a check every minute uses thirty times what the same check every thirty minutes uses.
A browser check launches a real browser and executes a script, which costs far more compute than an HTTP request. That is why the allowances are separate and why browser frequency is the thing to watch in your bill.
For browser checks, effectively yes. Uptime and API checks are configurable without it, but the product's main advantage is lost if nobody writes Playwright.
Not as a first-class monitor type with its own expiry alerting. Certificates are a dedicated concern that dedicated tools handle better.
Four public locations on Starter and all 22 on Team, with private locations available on Team for systems that are not publicly reachable.
Yes, genuinely. 10 uptime monitors plus 1,000 browser runs a month is enough to monitor a real project, provided the browser checks do not run too often.
They run real browser journeys and we do not. We do not meter check runs, and certificates, domains, page content changes and heartbeats are all first-class monitor types on a fixed bill from $5 a month.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Checkly is better at user journeys. We cover uptime, certificates, domains, page changes and heartbeats on a fixed monthly price.