Uptime.com Blog

12 Alternatives to Pingdom for Checking Your Website’s Health

Now that Pingdom has permanently closed its doors to free users, many customers are searching for alternatives to stand in the gap for their website performance monitoring needs.

Web monitoring keeps you from losing potential business because of service or site downtime.

David Sanchez of Mammoth Web Solutions says: “You have to continuously monitor your domain, because every new integration can affect domain performance. We recommend testing site loading speed before and after every update and added integration.”

While there are some basic criteria to consider for your web infrastructure monitoring needs, each company packages them differently. It can be very hard to tell if two software programs do exactly the same thing because features often have different names from platform to platform.

Page load time is one of the most critical aspects of web performance. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, website visitors will go elsewhere and you may be penalized by Google. Another important metric to measure is time to first byte.

Website Monitoring is Critical to Improving Time to First Byte (TTFB)

Internal monitoring checks the availability of your web infrastructure from within your company network. External monitoring is crucial to judging the performance of your website from outside your network, where website visitors and customers access it.

Website visitors may have an entirely different view of your website, and a high TTFB may not be caught by relying solely on your internal network metrics. This is why many companies invest in both internal and external monitoring solutions to ensure network health for both your employees and clients.

According to Taz Lake of Brightmill, there are lots of things that can impact TTFB.

“Bad performance can be caused by many issues including out of date software and hardware, poor DNS services, as well as end-user device capability. Old PHP and out of date WordPress instances are par for the course. Also, complexity really clashes with performance, so removing unused technology components like old plugins can also help.”

Free speed tests are a great starting point, but continual monitoring is the gold standard for organizations that depend on the internet for revenue. Using a Ping/ICMP check like those provided by Uptime.com is a great way to keep an eye on this metric.

Continuously monitor website speed and receive alerts with an Uptime.com free trial, no credit card required.

Domain Health is More Than Just Occasional Testing

If you type “Free Domain Health Check” into Google, there’s about 152 million results (at time of publishing this article).

Yes, there are plenty of free testing tools. But running a random, one-off domain health check isn’t going to ensure the health of your domain on a continual basis, even with regular testing.

Plus, the services these free tools provide are always limited in functionality. (We offer a free domain check as well, and it puts too much load on our servers to offer a fully-featured tool for free to everybody who wants it.)

In order to ensure your domain is healthy in the long-term, monitor one or more aspects of your web infrastructure including:

• DNS records
• Web server availability and other info (HTTP/S, ICMP, SSL Certificate Expiry)
• Mail server responses and status (POP, IMAP, SMTP)

Security is always a concern, but SaaS tools that focus solely on web monitoring often realize that you will have your own staff and software to deal with keeping your domain locked up tight.

12 Pingdom Alternatives That Check HTTP/S Errors and More

In order to help those of you who are trying to find a viable pingdom alternative, here are the tools we’ve found that may be useful for you. Keep in mind there are both free and paid versions of some tools, but the free versions are very limited.

1. Uptime.com

Naturally, we believe Uptime.com is a viable alternative to those searching for a new web monitoring software to check HTTP/S errors and monitor your web infrastructure.

According to Mike Fleisher, Co-Founder of Starboard Suite, “The interface is clean and straightforward, the API makes it easy to add and remove checks programmatically and the pricing is competitive.”

Here’s the nitty gritty:

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Ping (ICMP)
• SSH
• TCP
• UDP
• DNS
• SMTP
• POP
• IMAP
• Domain Blacklist
• Domain WHOIS/Expiry
• Malware/Virus
• API
• SSL Certificate Expiry
• Transaction Check (Synthetic Monitoring)
• NTP

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Special Features: Maintenance Windows, Escalations, SSO, Audit Log, custom branded reports, status pages, unlimited tests on the checks you setup, Voice Call/SMS alerts

Multiple Users: Yes, with SSO configuration as well

Support: Email, chat, phone

Integrations:

• Cachet
• Datadog
• Geckoboard
• Jira Service Desk
• Klipfolio
• Librato
• OpsGenie
• PagerDuty
• Pushbullet
• Pushover
• Signifai
• Slack
• Status.io
• StatusPage
• Twitter
• VictorOps
• Wavefront
• Webhooks

Pricing

• 14-day full featured free trial (no credit card required)
• Essential: from $67 per month (includes 30 basic monitors)
• Premium: from $379 per month (includes 200 basic monitors + everything in Essential)
• Custom: from $699 per month (includes everything in Premium + customized for your needs)

2. Uptime Robot

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• Ping
• Port
• Keywords
• SSL monitoring (Pro version)

Check Intervals: 5 minutes (free version), 1 minute (Pro version) for most

Advanced features: ignore minor downtime with alerting every x minutes (Pro version), Maintenance windows (pro), status pages, SMS OR Voice calls (Pro version), 12 months of logs (Pro, 2 months of logs for Free)

Multiple Users: No

Support: Email, chat, phone

Integrations:

• Slack
• Webhooks
• Telegram
• MS Teams
• Push Notifications
• PagerDuty
• OpsGenie
• Victorops

Pricing

• Free plan available
• Solo: $8 per month (includes 10 basic checks)
• Team: $34 per month (includes 100 basic checks)
• Enterprise: from $64 per month (includes 200 basic checks)

Notes: Unclear the amount of locations. Main page says 50, but IP list only includes about 25. It does state that remote nodes/servers have dynamic IP addresses which is why they are not listed on the locations page. The main servers that check for outages are all located in Dallas, TX USA; so downtime in other locations may go undetected since their locations page states they check for downtime at their main servers first (all located in Dallas, TX).

3. Uptrends

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• API
• RUM (available for an additional fee based on pageviews per month)
• Web App (transaction checks for Advanced plans only)
• Web Performance
• Web server
• DNS
• Mail Server

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Advanced features: Maintenance windows, on-call/off-duty schedules for contacts, status pages, SMS and/or Voice call alerts, Advanced plans let you select locations to monitor from

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: Email, phone and “Premium Support”

Other: Logs only saved for 90 days, some plans are as low as 14 days

Integrations:

• Slack
• Pagerduty
• Statushub
• Victorops
• ServiceNow
• Webhooks

Pricing

• Starter: $19.45 per month (includes 10 basic monitors)
• Premium: $55.86 per month (includes 50 basic monitors)
• Professional: $272.32 per month (includes 250 basic monitors)
• Business and Enterprise: base price + pay per check

4. Site24x7

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• API
• RUM (available for an additional fee based on pageviews per month)
• Web App (transaction checks)
• Web Performance
• Web server
• DNS
• Mail Server

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Advanced features: Maintenance windows, on-call/off-duty schedules for contacts, status pages, SMS and/or voice call alerts

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: Email, Forum, Chat & Phone

Notes: Logs based on file size (500MB) instead of number of days in history. Only monitors from 8 locations (from 90+ probe servers). Generous allowances for Real User Monitoring (from 100K/mo pageviews to 1M/month). Also does server, network, and application performance monitoring

Integrations:

• Slack
• Pagerduty
• MS Teams
• ServiceNow
• OpsGenie
• ManageEngine Service Desk PLUS
• ManageEngine SDP On-Demand
• AlarmsOne
• Zapier
• Webhooks

Pricing

• Starter: $19.45 per month (includes 10 basic monitors)
• Premium: $55.86 per month (includes 50 basic monitors)
• Professional: $272.32 per month (includes 250 basic monitors)
• Business and Enterprise: base price + pay per check

5. Freshping

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• Web Performance
• Web server
• DNS

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Advanced features: status pages, SMS alerts

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: Support page doesn’t list Freshping, no information available on support options on website

Other: Only checks from 10 locations, free plan doesn’t let you buy additional checks, cannot remove Freshping logo from Status pages, have to submit a support ticket in order to purchase a plan

Integrations:

• Slack
• Freshdesk
• Freshservice
• Twilio
• Zapier
• Webhooks

Pricing

• Free tier available
• Starts at $11 per month

6. AlertBot

Checks Available:

• APIs
• Transaction checks (synthetic monitoring)
• HTTP
• SSL
• SMTP
• POP3 / IMAP
• DNS
• FTP
• Telnet
• Ping
• Custom Ports

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Advanced features: status pages, SMS/voice call/email alerts, maintenance windows, escalations, on-call setup for contacts

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: Email, live chat and phone

Other: Very expensive compared to other plans, no integrations listed on their website
Integrations: None mentioned, but does integrate with PagerDuty

Pricing

• Starter: $40 per month (includes 10 basic monitors)
• Essentials: $122 per month (includes 100 basic monitors)
• Professional: $342 per month (mid volume)
• Enterprise: $1167 per month (includes 2,000+ basic monitors)

7. Nagios

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Ping (ICMP)
• SSH
• TCP
• UDP
• DNS
• SMTP
• POP
• IMAP
• API
• SSL Certificate Expiry
• Transaction

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Advanced features: SMS/email alerts, maintenance windows, escalations, on-call setup for contacts, custom notifications

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: Forums

Other: Open source software, will probably need to hire staff to build a solution, support not readily available, have to rely on IT team knowledge and forums for implementation.

Integrations: Custom

Pricing

• Free

8. Status Cake

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Ping (ICMP)
• SSL Certificate Expiry
• Domain Blacklist
• WHOIS
• DNS
• Virus Scanning

Check Intervals: 30 seconds to 5 minutes for most

Advanced features: SMS (paid plans only)/email alerts

Multiple Users: Yes
Support: email and chat (no other support options listed on website but may have phone support)

Other: virus scanning only supports a max of 10 URLs and 1000 files, no RUM or transaction checks

Integrations:

• Slack
• Discord
• Pushover
• PushBullet
• PagerDuty
• VictorOps
• OpsGenie
• Twitter

Pricing

• Free plan available
• Superior: $24.49 per month (includes 100 basic checks)
• Business: $79.99 per month (includes 300 basic checks)

9. HTTPCS

Checks Available:

• Website availability (Site doesn’t list protocols used)
• DNS

Check Intervals: 1 – 10 minutes for most

Advanced features: SMS/email alerts, maintenance windows, escalations, on-call setup for contacts, custom notifications

Multiple Users: Yes for additional fee

Support: Yes, but how is not listed

Other: Monitor from 50 probe servers but doesn’t state their location, basic plan only allows alerts to one person, basic plan only retains history for one month, provides data on load times and latency

Integrations: API (additional fee)

Price: $10-20/mo, free 14-day trial

10. Cula.io

Checks Available:

• HTTP/S
• ICMP
• FTP
• Servers

Check Intervals: 30 seconds – 2 minutes for most

Advanced features: SMS/email alerts

Multiple Users: No

Support: Chat, email

Other: Monitoring is only from two locations (one in Ireland and one in Northern VA USA.) High probability of false positives

Integrations:

• Slack
• Pushover

Price: Free to $20/mo

11. RapidSpike

Checks Available:

• Ping
• TCP
• HTTP (Web Page) monitors
• WHOIS Domain
• SSL Certificate
• HTTPS Redirects
• API
• Transaction

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most

Advanced features: SMS/email/voice call/Slack alerts, public status pages, maintenance windows, select locations

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: chat, email, phone, dedicated account manager

Other: It’s unclear how many locations RapidSpike monitors from. Software also does SEO monitoring for Alexa ranking, Google Analytics, and SEO stats (Domain Authority, Page Authority, Backlink profiles)

Integrations: Google Authentication, Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft teams/Office 365,
Webhooks, Pushover

Price: $8.25-325/mo, free 14-day trial

12. NodePing

Checks Available:

• WHOIS – domain expiration and response match
• DNS
• MYSQL
• RDP
• TCP Port Connect
• Audio Streams with volume detection (SIP only)
• RBL
• SIP
• WebSocket – including Socket.io
• HTTP/S
• SSL Certificates
• SSH with with response checking
• FTP with file availability
• ICMP
• SMTP
• POP3
• IMAP4
• NTP

Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: SMS/email/voice call, public status pages, maintenance windows, select locations, on-call/contact scheduling

Multiple Users: Yes

Support: chat, email, phone, dedicated account manager

Other: It’s unclear how many locations they monitor from, which can create false positives.

Integrations:

• Slack
• PagerDuty
• Webhooks
• Pushover

Pricing

• 15-day free trial available
• Personal: $10 per month (includes 5 basic monitors)
• Professional: $25 per month (includes 200 basic monitors)
• Premiere: $80 per month (includes 200 basic monitors)

Wrapping It Up

If you’re still searching for a Pingdom alternative to their free plan, maybe it’s time to give a paid plan a try. We truly believe that accurate website monitoring is the most important business objective when it comes to web infrastructure.

Admin