6 Best Open-Source Website Monitoring Tools in 2024
Website monitoring can give you a serious advantage against competition. By spotting performance-related issues, dysfunctional aspects of your website, location-based errors, or simply getting notified in case of any downtime, you minimize the risk of losing clients, the trust of your stakeholders, and, therefore, revenue.
Website monitoring is still quite a broad term and covers multiple approaches and practices to monitoring. You can collect data by simulating your users’ behavior or trace the steps of real human interaction with your website and evaluate it.
The Benefits of using an Open-Source Solution
- A lot of tools have a broad community of developers, meaning that it is quite possible that you will be able to find additional features in various repos.
- It’s free, at least most of the time. Sometimes you need to pay for infrastructure or some sort of an onboarding course.
- They can serve as an addition to your existing monitoring solution.
Getting a good and reliable monitoring solution requires you to really think about what you actually expect from the tool, do some research, and finally test them on your infrastructure. Some tools might miss essential features, and others might have an unfriendly learning curve. In this article, we will bring an overview of the best Open-Source Website Monitoring solutions and add a few Freemium solutions.
The Best Open-Source Website Monitoring Tools in 2023
Let’s take a look at the best open-source solutions in 2023. If you want to learn more about open-source, take a look at the various licenses available.
1. Upptime
2. Uptime Kuma
3. Cabot
4. Zabbix
5. Sensu
6. Nagios Core
The Best Freemium Website Monitoring Solutions in 2023
Many solutions offer either free tools or completely free-forever subscription plans. Free solutions could offer better security since the code is not available on the internet. Also, you can count on onboarding aid and well-written documentation, what allows you to save time and focus on what's important for you.
1. Better Stack
Better Stack offers a radically better monitoring platform, thanks to a combination of best practices in Uptime monitoring, Incident management, and downtime communication with Status pages.
Better Stack offers HTTP(s) keyword checks, multi-step verification, heartbeat, SSL, Ping, and Port monitoring, and many more features. It supports plenty of integrations, including Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk On-Call, Zabbix, AWS CloudWatch, GCP, and Azure. Better Stack checks on your website every 30 seconds and from multiple locations, so no more false alarms or location-related issues going unnoticed.
In case of an incident, each error is documented with a screenshot and a second-by-second timeline. You can use its reporting and analytics capabilities to overview historical uptime, verify SLA, and better understand incidents in context using incident cause synthesis. In case of any accidents, your system will not be overwhelmed thanks to smart incident merging, and on-call calendar & scheduling will ensure an immediate response. Alerts are handled by Slack, MS Teams, Phone calls, SMS, Push notifications, Zapier, and Webhooks.
Better Stack offers a free solution with e-mail, Slack, and MS Teams alerts, second by second incident timeline, 3-minute checking interval, and a basic Status Page manager. You can also benefit from its historical uptime and SLA analysis.
Main Benefits of Better Stack:
- 30 second monitoring frequency available
- Incident management built-in
- Status pages management
- Possible to integrate with Logtail, a log management solution from Better Stack
2. UptimeRobot
Advanced features include Incident Updates sent by email to Status page subscribers, Semi-Customizable Status Pages, Response times monitor, Maintenance Windows, and Custom HTTP requests.
UptimeRobot allows you to monitor your endpoints from multiple locations as often as every 60 seconds in premium plans and 5 minutes in the free subscription.
UptimeRobot is available for free. However, without SMS or Voice call alerts and only 1 status page, and 3 months log retention.
Main Benefits of UptimeRobot:
- Keyword monitoring
- Maintenance windows
- Advanced notification settings
3. StatusCake
StatusCake offers historical uptime monitoring reports up to a month old, allowing you to compare your website’s uptime results and performance. In case of any issue, you can use one of their 14 integrations, including Datadog, Discord, OpsGenie, Pushover, Slack, and more, to get notified immediately.
StatusCake offers a free subscription package, with 10 monitors and 5 minutes monitoring frequency. Page speed is measured once in 24 hours and your domain once a week. You can always upgrade to higher tiers that offer 1 minute or 30 seconds monitoring frequency from custom locations. Statuscake offers three subscription models - Free, Superior, and Business.,
Main Benefits of StatusCake
- 30 seconds monitoring frequency in the most expensive package
- Page speed monitoring
- Historical Uptime Data
4. Freshping
You can get Freshping for free in their SPROUT plan with 50 checks 5 public status pages, 10 users, and 5 integrations. Their premium plans start at $11/month and offer advanced features such as advanced alerting.
5. Checkly
All of their checks run in real Chrome browsers, within a sealed-off sandbox, which ensures extra security. You can run custom Javascript before and after each API check. Using Checkly’s cUrl and Swagger API importers you can create API checks with just a couple of clicks. Your web is monitored every 60 seconds, and with CI/CD integration and optional coding, you can tailor your Checkly Browser monitoring to your needs.
In case of any error, checkly alerts you via multiple platforms, including e-mail, SMS, Webhooks, Slack, MS Teams, Discord, Pagerduty, and more.
You can get Checkly for free, with 50k API check runs per month, 5k browser check runs, and basic features. Paid subscription operates in the Pay as you go mode, with $1.20 per 10K API check runs and $3.60 for 1k browser check runs.
Main benefits of Checkly:
- Pricing
- Open Source tools such as Headless Recorder
6. New Relic
The free plan also offers Custom Charts and Dashboards, Unlimited Queries, Data integrations, APIs and agents, and alerting capabilities.
Conclusion
In this article, we went over the fundamentals of open-source website monitoring and tools. Then we took a look at freemium alternatives for website monitoring. Website monitoring is always worth the money, but if you encounter certain budget limitations, or like to DIY your solutions, open-source are the ones for you. If you are just dipping your feet in the monitoring waters, you might wanna try the freemium solutions. While they are a bit more limited, they offer a lot of features and can be upgraded to premium solutions.
Want to explore more tools?
Looking for a tool to cater to a very specific use-case? Here are a few lists with monitoring tools to check out:
- 28 Best Website Monitoring Tools (Tried & Tested)
- 22 Tools for Synthetic Monitoring (Tried & Tested)
- 10 Best Ping Monitoring Solutions in 2023
- 10 Best SSL Certificate Monitoring Tools in 2023
- 10 Best Cron Job Monitoring Tools in 2023
-
What Is Synthetic Monitoring? Beginner’s Guide
Learn what is synthetic monitoring, how does it work, what are the benefits and drawbacks and how to set it up.
Guides -
22 Tools for Synthetic Monitoring (Tried & Tested)
We know that synthetic monitoring gives you the upper hand, now let's take a look at the best services in 2024.
Comparisons -
What is Uptime Monitoring?
Learn what is uptime monitoring, how does it work, what are the benefits and drawbacks and how to set it up.
Guides -
28 Best Website Monitoring Tools (Tried & Tested)
This is a list of the 28 best website monitoring tools. How do we know? Because we tried and tested them.
Comparisons
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