Most people land here after UptimeRobot's free plan stopped covering what they needed. This is the field as it stands, with the entry price and the free tier of each tool, and the thing each one is bad at. We build Safeship, so read the first row with that in mind: it is in the table on the same terms as the rest, including the column about what it does not do.
The short answer
- Want it free and hosted: Safeship, 5,000 checks a month, or UptimeRobot's free tier if you need to watch many URLs at a 5 minute interval.
- Want it free and self-hosted: Uptime Kuma, accepting that it dies with your server.
- Want logs and on-call in the same tool: Better Stack.
- Want to know your API returns correct data, not just a 200: Safeship or Checkly, depending on whether you would rather write a schema or a Playwright script.
- Want real user monitoring: Pingdom. Nothing else on this list does it.
All ten compared
Prices are the public entry tiers read on 3 August 2026. They change, so check before you commit.
| Tool | Free tier | Entry price | Best for | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Safeship | 5,000 checks / month | EUR 3 / month | Solo developers who want JSON response validation and setup from an AI editor | No log management, no on-call rotation, no real user monitoring |
| UptimeRobot | 50 monitors, 5 minute interval | USD 7 / month | Watching a lot of URLs for free, with the widest name recognition | Per monitor billing, and keyword matching that misses JavaScript rendered content |
| Uptime Kuma | Free, self-hosted | Free, you pay in hosting | Anyone who wants no subscription and full control of the data | You are the single point of failure: your monitoring dies with your server |
| Better Stack | 10 monitors | USD 29 / month | Teams wanting uptime, logs and incident response in one platform | Modular pricing adds up fast once you pass the free tier |
| Pingdom | Trial only | From USD 10 / month | Real user monitoring and multi-step transaction checks | Cost rises sharply past the first ten monitors |
| Cronitor | 5 monitors | From USD 7 / month | Cron jobs and background workers that fail silently | Per monitor pricing, and no voice call alerts |
| Uptime.com | Trial only | From USD 7 / month | SLA reporting and the broadest set of check types | No on-call scheduling or escalation policies |
| StatusCake | Yes, limited intervals | From USD 24 / month | Page speed data alongside uptime | Slower pace of product updates than the rest of this list |
| Checkly | Yes | From USD 24 / month | Playwright based end-to-end checks wired into CI | You write code for every check, which is the point and also the cost |
| Datadog Synthetics | No | Usage based, on top of the platform | Teams already running Datadog for metrics, logs and traces | Unpredictable bills, and far more platform than a side project needs |
Per monitor or per check
This is the line that decides the bill, and it is rarely on the pricing page in those words. Most of this list charges for the number of monitors you keep. That model treats an endpoint polled once an hour the same as one polled every minute, which is 60 times the work for the same price.
The practical effect is that you stop splitting a service into separate checks, because each split costs money, and you end up monitoring one URL that stands in for eight. Safeship bills per check performed for that reason: adding a rarely polled endpoint costs close to nothing.
A 200 is not a success
Every tool here will tell you when your server stops answering. The outage that actually costs you is quieter: the server answers, the status code is green, and the payload is wrong. A migration dropped a column, a third-party API renamed a field, a cache is serving an empty list.
Keyword matching, which is what most of this list offers, catches some of it and misses anything rendered client side. Schema validation catches the shape: you describe a healthy response once, and a 200 that no longer matches raises an alert. Safeship and Checkly are the two here that do this properly, from different ends, a JSON schema against a browser script.
Where Safeship is the wrong choice
If you need centralised logs, an on-call rotation with escalation policies, or real user monitoring from actual visitors, Safeship does none of those and is not planning to. Better Stack covers the first two, Pingdom the third. If you want zero subscription and control of your data more than you want independent monitoring, self-host Uptime Kuma.