7 Best Pingdom Alternatives in 2024

Jenda Tovarys
Updated on December 11, 2024

Pingdom homepage

Pingdom has been around since 2005 and is still one of the most used uptime monitoring tools on the market. In many ways, however, Pingdom has failed to deliver to their users the functionality they need. Take, for example, Pingdom's status pages, which still to this day don't have SSL certificates and have a design that was probably not changed since 2010.

Quick tools list:

Tool Best For Pricing Main Difference Key Features
Better Stack All-in-one platform with uptime monitoring, incident management, and status pages Free with Pay-as-you-go Built-in incident management, customizable status pages - HTTP(s), Ping, Port, DNS, SSL checks, Unlimited phone alerts, Over 100 integrations
Updown.io Simple, usage-based uptime monitoring with flexible intervals Pay-as-you-go Cost control with pay-per-request model - 30-second check intervals, Automatic SSL checks, Customizable alerting, Hosted status pages
Dotcom-Monitor Specialized monitoring for websites, servers, and e-commerce apps Paid plans Tiered plans based on specific monitoring types - Page load times, Content validation, DNS checks, 1-minute intervals, Transaction waterfalls
WebGazer Affordable, global uptime monitoring with customizable alerting Free plan with paid tiers Pre-purchased credits for SMS and call alerts - Monitoring servers globally, 5 to 1-minute check intervals, In-depth reporting tools
Upmon Simple, affordable monitoring for smaller setups Free with paid tiers $1 per monitor pricing, unlimited alerts - Cron job monitoring, Unlimited SMS and phone alerts, HTTP, Ping, and DNS monitoring
Uptime.com Comprehensive monitoring with international check locations Paid plans Reliable uptime monitoring with broad geographic coverage - Website, server, API monitoring, Multiple geographic checks, Uptime history, SLA tracking
HetrixTools Basic, cost-effective uptime and server monitoring Free with paid tiers Generous free tier for small teams - Uptime, server, DNS monitoring, 1-minute intervals, Real-time alerts through email, SMS, webhooks

But it's not just the status pages that make many developers angry and hungry for an alternative. It's the expensive pricing as well as the cranky interphase that make many DevOps teams feel like Solarwinds don't really care at all.

Because of that, we have compiled this list of Pingdom (Solarwinds) alternatives to give you the information you need to make an informed switch to a better monitoring tool.

In our selection, we looked to include synthetic monitoring tools that might be a direct alternative as well as tools that might be suitable as an upgrade to a more advanced service.

This list is not exhaustive and if you don't find a suitable alternative for your needs, we recommend checking out the hayden james' 100+ monitoring tools list. Now let's have a look at our community picks:

1. Better Stack

uptime.png

Better Stack combines incident management, uptime monitoring, and status pages into a single beautifully designed product.

On the free plan, they offer 3-minute checks, and on paid plans 30 seconds once, compared to Pingdom's 1-minute checks. Better Uptime offers HTTP(s), ping, port, DNS, SSL, and cronjob (heartbeat) checks. Their Free plan offers 10 monitors, their Freelancer plan 50, and a Team once over 100 monitors. Since Pingdom is priced per monitor, Better Uptime can provide significant savings when monitoring more websites.

When it comes to alerting, Better Stack offers unlimited phone calls, SMS, e-mail, and push notification alerts. Slack and Microsoft Teams can also be very easily integrated, offering great alerting variability.

Status pages from Better Stack are very well designed and also free for all. A useful feature for any business is definitely the subscription option that they offer as well as the ability to protect it by a password.

The main benefit, however, is the built-in incident management and on-call scheduling. This is great news for any DevOps teams that want to simplify their stack and possibly manage everything from one place, without the need for Pagerduty or other on-call platforms.

Explore the full Better Stack demos library

Screenshot 2024-10-31 at 8.47.24.png
Read all reviews on G2

✅ Pros:

  • Unlimited phone call alerts
  • HTTP(s), Ping, Port, DNS, SSL & TLD expiration, Cron jobs checks
  • Easy on-call scheduling & incident management
  • Screenshots & error logs of incidents
  • Slack, Teams, Heroku, AWS, and 100+ other integrations

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Datadog
  • Newrelic
  • Grafana
  • Zabbix
  • Prometheus
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker

Check the list of all Better Stack integrationshere.

Cons:

  • Not a full observability platform

💰 Pricing:

Free tier with a pay-as-you-go option.

2. Updown.io

Updown.io homepage

Updown.io is a straightforward uptime monitoring tool. It has all the basic functionality you would expect from an uptime monitoring service, including HTTP and SSL checks. Downtime is also confirmed from several locations before triggering an alert.

Compared to other tools on this list, Updown.io doesn't offer a free plan. If you want to monitor only a single website, you will need to sign on to the paid plan.

On the other hand, the benefit of the paid plan is that you only pay for the requests updown.io makes to your websites. This means that you can save money by decreasing the frequency with which they check your website. For example, instead of having 1-minute checks going for 5 minutes once. For a hoppy project, this can be sufficient. However, if you have multiple websites and need more frequent checks, you will find yourself paying much more than you would with other alternatives on this list.

Updown also includes hosted status page, which comes with your plan. It is nicely designed and includes information about the current status, historical uptime, and Apdex.

When it comes to integrations, Updown offers API and webhooks. Their alerting integrations include SMS, Zapier, Statuspage, Telegram, and Slack. Those are fine, but for more demanding customers and larger teams, it is recommended to go with a more premium service.

✅ Pros:

  • Monitoring intervals are available as often as every 30 seconds
  • Uptime checks performed from multiple global locations
  • Simple and user-friendly interface
  • Automatic SSL certificate expiration checks with alert notifications
  • Alerts can be customized and sent via email, SMS, Slack, and other channels for prompt issue detection
  • Public status pages to display real-time service status
  • Comprehensive and well-documented API

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Suretriggers
  • Zapier
  • Statuspage.io

Cons:

  • No synthetic transaction monitoring, detailed server monitoring, and advanced analytics
  • Does not include real browser-based monitoring.
  • Alert rule customization options are relatively simple compared to more feature-rich tools

💰 Pricing:

Updown operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, starting at approximately $1.46 per month for a website check every 15 seconds. This allows you to adjust the check frequency and pay only for the monitoring you require. The flexible pricing structure helps you manage costs based on actual usage, making it a cost-effective solution for small to medium-sized monitoring needs.

3. Dotcom-monitor

Dotcom Monitor homepage

Dotcom-monitor is a monitoring platform that offers to monitor the uptime and performance of web pages, applications, and servers. Dotcom-monitor has four different plans, which are not tiered, but capability/use-case based. Their Web services plan offers a solution for users looking for basic uptime, ping, and SSL monitoring. This plan starts at $20/month and offers 1-minute checks from 30 locations.

Their second plan is called Web pages and focuses on page load times and different clients' performance, be it a browser type or DNS connection. The Web page plan starts at $30/month.

For e-commerce customers, dotcom-monitor offers a Web applications plan, which provides a web-based scripting tool together with content validation, playback video capture, and transaction waterfalls. This plan starts at $39/month.

The 4th plan is focused on servers and protocols and offers DNS, Traceroute, FTP, and other checks. The Internet infrastructure plan starts at $40/month.

As the plan pricing suggests, the dotcom-monitor is suitable for users who have specific features in mind they want to focus on and check. On the other hand, for users looking for a one plan fits all, this is not the best solution as subscribing to multiple plans will become expensive. No free plan is available for dotcom-monitor at the time of writing.

✅ Pros:

  • Monitoring for page load times, content validation, transaction waterfalls, Traceroute, DNS, and various server and protocol performance metrics
  • Four distinct plans tailored to different needs and use cases

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Microsoft Azure
  • Dynatrace
  • PagerDuty
  • Splunk
  • Okta

Cons:

  • Pricing can be on the higher side compared to some competitors
  • Setting up advanced monitoring features may be a bit complex
  • A few users have noted that customer support response times can be slower than expected

💰 Pricing:

The pricing structure is flexible, beginning at $19.99 a month for essential website and server monitoring. More advanced plans, which include features like real browser checks and synthetic transaction monitoring, start at $38.95 per month. Pricing varies depending on the type of monitoring, with the first two types being website and server monitoring, while the other two types include page performance and web applications.

4. Webgazer

Webgazer homepage
Webgazer offers reasonably good functionality with a higher price tag. Uptime monitoring and SSL monitoring are included in all paid plans. Their intervals for checks are 5 minutes for the free plan and 1 minute for all paid plans.

Webgazer provides SMS, phone calls, e-mail, and Slack alerting. Sadly those alerts are not unlimited, even for the paid plans. The SMS and phone call alerts are based on pre-purchased credits, ranging from 16 on the hobby plan up to 150 on the business plan. This significantly limits usability, especially for users looking to monitor more than a few sites.

Although their status pages are very nicely designed and provide plenty of information, they are only available from the Pro plan, which is $69/month. Because of this, Webgazer can be only recommended for users looking to go with the business plan as the other plans are severely limited by functionality.

✅ Pros:

  • Monitoring servers positioned around the globe
  • User-friendly dashboards
  • Users can customize alert settings to suit their preferences
  • Comprehensive reporting tools
  • Supports multiple monitoring types, including HTTP, ping, and DNS checks

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Pagerduty
  • Slack

Cons:

  • Reported slower support response
  • A bit of a learning curve

💰 Pricing:

Starting with a free plan Hobbyist and 50 monitors with 5-minute intervals Webgazer offers a few more tiers to look at. Its basic plan starts at $19/month with 200 monitors and advanced features such as SSL monitoring and 1-minute checks. While the Pro and Business tiers start at $69 and $179 a month for 300 and 500 monitors with the Business having 30-second checks instead of 1-minute.

5. Upmon

Upmon homepage

Upmon is a simple and easy-to-use tool for uptime monitoring. Upmon has a pricing of 1 monitor for $1/month, with a minimum spend of $5. For this, you get 5 monitors. A 30-day free trial is also available.

When it comes to features, Upmon offers unlimited SMS and phone call alerts as well as unlimited status pages. Those are available for all users whether they have 5 or 50 active monitors.

Apart from the uptime checks, Upmon also includes a cron job (heartbeat) monitoring, which comes really handy when checking if scheduled tasks run as they should. Be aware that the cron job monitors have separate pricing. A free plan with 5 cron job checks a month is available.

Overall Upmon is a great simplistic solution for a very specific use case. It can be recommended as an easy way to start monitoring a smaller number of websites when Pingdom is too advanced. On the other hand, when having multiple websites the price is quite high compared to other uptime monitoring alternatives.

✅ Pros:

  • Intuitive dashboards
  • Personalized alerts
  • Email and SMS notifications
  • Historical data and performance trends
  • HTTP, ping, and DNS checks
  • Monitors from various geographic locations
  • Simple status pages
  • Well-documented API

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Pagerduty
  • Slack
  • Splunk on-call
  • Opsgenie
  • Pagertree

Cons:

  • Limited monitoring features

💰 Pricing:

Upmon offers four straightforward plans, starting with a free tier and 5 checks, a Personal tier for $5/momth with 20 checks, a Team tier starting at $20/month and 100 checks, and lastly a Business tier for $100 and 1000 checks.

6. Uptime.com

Uptime.com homepage

Uptime.com is quite an expensive but reliable Pingdom alternative. Uptime.com doesn't offer a free plan, and their cheapest plan starts at $19/month. This The basic plan includes 10 checks, which are performed only in the US. This plan also includes a single status page and 6 phone calls a month.

For any international companies looking for worldwide monitoring locations, the Business plan is the only possibility. This plan starts at $110/month and includes 40 phone call alerts a month and 2 status pages.

Looking at this, it is pretty obvious uptime.com is quite an expensive alternative to Pingdom, especially for people outside of the US or people with an international user base. On the other hand, uptime.com is an established company, and the pricing might reflect the reliability of their systems.

Lastly, it must be highlighted that uptime.com only offers 2 status pages and therefore is not suitable for agencies or freelancers looking to manage multiple websites and larger web companies with multiple products.

Recommended reading: 10 Best Uptime.com Alternatives

✅ Pros:

  • An established company made mainly for the US market
  • Website, server, API, and application monitoring
  • Multiple geographic location checks
  • Alerts via email, SMS, Slack, and Microsoft Teams
  • Dashboards with monitoring status, performance metrics, and historical data
  • Uptime history, performance trends, and SLA compliance
  • HTTP(S), ping, and DNS checks for comprehensive monitoring coverage

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Jira
  • Datadog
  • Pagerduty
  • Dynatrace

Cons:

  • Configuration learning curve
  • Limited advanced application performance monitoring (APM) features

💰 Pricing:

Uptime offers a generous 2-month free trial for all three of its annual billing plans, except for the custom option. The Starter plan is available for $20 per month, which includes 30 checks at a frequency of 5 minutes. The Essential plan starts at $67 per month and provides 50 checks with a 3-minute frequency. Meanwhile, the Premium plan, priced at $285 per month, features checks every minute. For teams with specific requirements, the custom plan allows you to tailor features according to your needs, ensuring you only pay for what you require.

7. HetrixTools

HetrixTools homepage
HetrixTools offers uptime monitoring and status pages as well as server monitoring. The server monitoring is available for their free plan making it the main benefit compared to Pingdom.

Overall, HetrixTools offers a very generous free plan. It includes 15 uptime and server monitors with a 1-minute check frequency, several alerting integrations, and elementary status pages.

The downside of HetrixTools is that the premium plans don't add much value. The check frequency is 1 minute for all plans, and even the enterprise plan doesn't offer faster checks. The paid plans don't offer phone calls, and the SMS alerts are not unlimited.

HetrixTools offers very basic status pages which are of great value to anyone on the free plan. When it comes to professionals and businesses, the status page you will get is not very good. It lacks some important features, such as email subscriptions. Their design is also not very modern or representative of a professional business website.

✅ Pros:

  • Uptime, server, and DNS monitoring
  • Global monitoring location checks
  • Real-time alerts through email, SMS, and webhooks
  • Intuitive monitoring dashboard
  • Reports and historical data on uptime and performance
  • HTTP, ping, and DNS checks

⚙️ Supported Integrations:

  • Spike
  • Zenduty
  • Pagertree
  • ilert
  • Instatus

Cons:

  • Additional features and checks can increase overall expenses
  • Basic interface
  • There is a learning curve for advanced features

💰 Pricing:

Hetrixtools offers free, professional starting at $9.95/month, business starting at $19.95/month, and enterprise starting at $49.95/month tiers.

Tools summary:

Tool Best For Pricing
Better Stack Real-time monitoring with rich incident management and alerting. Free, PAYG
Updown.io Usage-based monitoring, ideal for small to medium-sized projects with budget constraints. PAYG
Dotcom-Monitor Enterprises requiring a range of monitoring options (websites, apps, servers). Paid tiers
WebGazer Small to medium-sized businesses looking for affordable, global uptime monitoring. Free with paid tiers
Upmon Individuals and small teams looking for simple, affordable uptime monitoring. Paid plans
Uptime.com Comprehensive monitoring for medium to large teams with advanced needs. Paid plans
HetrixTools Affordable monitoring with a balance of features, suited for small businesses. Paid tiers

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:

Author's avatar
Article by
Jenda Tovarys
Jenda leads Growth at Better Stack. For the past 5 years, Jenda has been writing about exciting learnings from working with hundreds of developers across the world. When he's not spreading the word about the amazing software built at Better Stack, he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing tennis.
Got an article suggestion? Let us know
Explore more
Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Make your mark

Join the writer's program

Are you a developer and love writing and sharing your knowledge with the world? Join our guest writing program and get paid for writing amazing technical guides. We'll get them to the right readers that will appreciate them.

Write for us
Writer of the month
Marin Bezhanov
Marin is a software engineer and architect with a broad range of experience working...
Build on top of Better Stack

Write a script, app or project on top of Better Stack and share it with the world. Make a public repository and share it with us at our email.

community@betterstack.com

or submit a pull request and help us build better products for everyone.

See the full list of amazing projects on github