The 10 Best Real Browser Monitoring Tools 2024

Often, people get real browser monitoring confused with real user monitoring. The fact of the matter is that these two monitoring practices couldn’t be any further apart.

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a type of monitoring that records real user interactions with a website or application, providing visibility and insight into end-user issues.

A lot of tools on this list will offer RUM in some capacity, but there are lots of other tools out there that offer some of the key features of RUM, like users by region and latency by region. Some of those tools include Google Analytics, Plausible, and Semrush.

Real browser monitoring, on the other hand, is a type of synthetic monitoring. This means it opens your app in a real browser and tests if everything is working correctly, similarly to how a user would experience it on their browser.

Which browsers, you might ask? Well, according to recent studies, there are a handful of popular browsers that were used across 2023.

As you can see, there are a few different browsers, but Chrome is by far the most popular. Monitoring through a real Chrome browser is essential in ensuring that your users get the best experience.

Today, we’re going to go over the 10 best real browser monitoring tools on the market, give a few pros and cons for each, as well as dive into their pricing. Let’s dive in.

The 10 Best Real Browser Monitoring Tools 2024

1. Better Stack

Better Stack offers real browser monitoring as a part of its expansive Uptime Monitoring and Incident management solution. It tests all vital interactions by running a real Chrome browser instance, with a full-fledged JavaScript runtime.

It provides a much-improved monitoring solution that covers all the essential aspects of synthetic monitoring, like checking for specific keywords in web addresses (HTTPs), making sure things are running smoothly (Heartbeat), ensuring secure connections (SSL), checking if servers are responsive (Ping), monitoring domain names (TLD), real browsers (RBM), and keeping an eye on network connections (TCP/UDP), email servers (POP3/IMAP/SMTP), and DNS servers.

Your website gets checked as frequently as every 30 seconds from different places to make sure you don't get false alarms. You can even set up checks that focus on specific locations if you want to keep an eye on location-related issues.

Better Stack also works well with other popular tools and platforms like CloudWatch, Datadog, PagerDuty, New Relic, Grafana On-Call, Opsgenie, Google Cloud, and Heroku.

Whenever there's an issue, it records what happened with screenshots and error logs, and it creates a timeline that shows every second of what went wrong. It helps you analyze what went down (post-mortem) and sets up rules to ensure the right people get notified quickly in case of a problem. You can plan for these situations in advance and make sure there are people ready to respond right away with on-call scheduling.

And if there's any downtime, you can create your custom status pages with designs that fit your style. This way, your users can stay in the loop and get updates when things go back to normal.

🌟Key features

• Uptime monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• API monitoring
• Log management
• Incident management
• Comprehensive observability dashboards

➕Pros

• On-call scheduling
• Incident Management and Status Pages built-in
• 30-second check frequency
• Dozens of integrations with popular third-party platforms

➖Cons

• Not a full-stack observability solution
• Not as feature-rich as some of the larger tools

💲Pricing

Better Stack Uptime and Logs are both available for free.

Uptime premium packages start at just $25/month and come with 50 monitors, 5 status pages, and built-in incident management.

The Logs premium packages also start at just $25/month and come with a 30GB allowance and 15 days of retention.

Want to see more? You can check out our full range of packages by visiting the pricing page.

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a robust observability solution that covers various aspects like synthetic monitoring, which includes real browser monitoring. It's primarily designed for enterprise-level use and is very well known as one of the best API monitoring tools on the market.

With Dynatrace, users can proactively detect and resolve problems before they affect end-users. By conducting thorough tests to assess application availability and performance through real browsers, users can quickly identify the underlying causes of issues within their applications and make necessary fixes or optimizations.

Another thing Dynatrace is known for is its extensive network of test locations worldwide. It offers a lot more testing locations than the average tools, and this global presence enables continuous performance monitoring of APIs, ensuring their proper functionality and taking proactive measures to address potential problems.

Not a big fan of Dynatrace? Check out some similar tools to Dynatrace.

🌟Key features

• Full-stack monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Log management and analytics

➕Pros

• Very rich feature toolset
• Powerful alerting capabilities
• Utilizes AI for workflow efficiency
• Prices determined by data usage

➖Cons

• User reviews report Dynatrace being extremely costly at scale
• User reviews report occasional difficulties with the debugging tool
• User reviews report occasional difficulties with data collection

💲Pricing

As mentioned above, Dynatrace bases its prices on data usage, but it’s still expensive. In theory, this is a great practice, as you will only be charged for what you use.

However, when you do the math, it gets costly. For example, with synthetics, you pay $0.001 per request. But if you run checks in 2-minute intervals from a single location, that comes out to be 30 requests per hour. With 24 hours in a day, you get 720 requests per day. Then you multiply that by 30, and you’re running 21,600 requests per month.

21,600 * 0.001 = $21.6 per monitor! On top of that, with this math, the shorter the interval, the more expensive it gets.

3. New Relic

New Relic is a behemoth in the wide world of observability. Essentially, there’s not a tool or feature that New Relic doesn’t offer. The same can be said for a few others on this list, but they weren’t recently bought out for $6.5 billion.

New Relic provides a powerful synthetic monitoring solution, which includes real browser monitoring. It’s great for troubleshooting quickly, enhancing build quality, and collaborating effectively.

You can mimic the entire user experience and test how your applications perform from different locations around the world, publicly and privately. In addition to web browsers, you can simulate various devices and operating systems to identify any underperforming elements that might need improvement.

Not a big fan of New Relic? Check out some similar tools to New Relic.

🌟Key features

• Full stack monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Log management
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕Pros

• Feature and solution-rich
• Lightweight and doesn’t consume many resources
• Dynamic reporting
• Massive list of integrations

➖Cons

• Expensive, per-seat pricing
• User reviews complain about the platform being overwhelming
• User reviews report receiving inaccurate data on occasion

💲Pricing

New Relic boasts about having a transparent pricing structure, but it’s quite the opposite. They don’t offer any tangible prices upfront, instead requiring users to calculate their expenses themselves.

With New Relic's free plan, you can have one user and use up to 100GB of data without any extra charges. But if you go over these limits, they switch to a pay-as-you-go system. For every extra gigabyte of data beyond the initial 100GB, you'll be charged 25 cents. And if you exceed 1,000 incident events in a month, each additional event will cost you 50 cents.

Their pricing also depends on the level of access and features each user needs. Basic users are included at no cost in any plan, but they come with some limitations. If you need more features, Core users are priced at $49 per seat per month, while full access to all the platform features starts at $99 per seat per month and can go up to $658 per seat per month.

This tiered pricing gives you flexibility, but it can lead to different costs, which might not suit every organization's budget or requirements. It's not as straightforward as it might seem at first.

4. AppDynamics

AppDynamics takes your web application monitoring to the next level with real browser monitoring. It helps you proactively assess your app's performance and availability from various locations worldwide.

AppDynamics is an all-in-one solution that includes synthetic monitoring, Real User Monitoring (RUM), Infrastructure monitoring, and security monitoring. While you can use it as a single solution, you'll get the most value (though it can be pricey) when you combine multiple solutions to improve data correlation.

Like other synthetic monitoring tools, AppDynamics allows you to identify and address issues before they impact your users. What makes it unique is its ability to retest any failures, which helps reduce the number of false alarms or alerts.

🌟Key features

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕Pros

• Full-stack observability
• Error retesting
• Code-level profiling
• Clean UI
• Actionable dashboards and reports

➖Cons

• Expensive licensing
• User reviews report occasional issues with log parsing
• User reviews indicate the need for some third-party tools

💲Pricing

AppDynamics' pricing may seem simple at first, but it can get a bit tricky if you're not familiar with your system's details. The pricing mainly depends on how many CPU cores you use, except for Real User Monitoring (RUM), which has a different pricing structure.

Here's a breakdown of the pricing:

• Infrastructure Monitoring Edition: $6 per CPU core - This includes infrastructure monitoring only.
• Premium Edition: $33 per CPU core - It covers infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and database monitoring.
• Enterprise Edition: $50 per CPU core - This includes everything in the Premium Edition, plus business performance monitoring.
• Enterprise Edition for SAP: $95 per CPU core - It encompasses infrastructure monitoring, business performance monitoring, and SAP monitoring.

So, while the pricing is based on CPU cores for most parts, keep in mind that Real User Monitoring (RUM) may have its own pricing structure.

5. Splunk

Recently acquired for a whopping $28 billion, Splunk is a strong player in the world of synthetic monitoring. It stands out by providing comprehensive observability across your entire system and even throws in some security features that many other tools lack.

Splunk is an all-in-one solution that promises to protect against threats, minimize downtime, and speed up issue resolution. It's a robust tool that offers a well-rounded set of solutions and features to help your organization perform at its best.

What sets Splunk apart (and possibly contributes to its higher cost) is its extensive network. They have established partnerships with over 2,200 organizations spanning various industries, ensuring that users can leverage the platform to its fullest potential. Additionally, they boast a community of over 18,000 active members and 1,800 Splunk experts who can assist you in troubleshooting, planning deployments, and scaling operations.

Not a big fan of Splunk? Check out some similar tools to Splunk.

🌟Key features

• Full stack monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Security monitoring
• + more

➕Pros

• All-in-one observability that includes many security features
• Massive network of experts ready to help

➖Cons

• Expensive
• Requires users to learn and stay up-to-date with SPL (Splunk processing language)
• User reviews report a huge learning curve and intense resource consumption

💲Pricing

Unfortunately, Splunk isn't very transparent when it comes to its pricing. They only provide prices for a select few of their solutions on their website, and these details can be somewhat hard to find.

The only actual price information we could locate is related to their cloud observability solution, and here are the prices:

• Synthetics: $1 per 10,000 uptime requests
• APM (Application Performance Monitoring): $55 per host per month
• RUM (Real User Monitoring): $14 per 10,000 sessions
• Infrastructure: $15 per host per month
• App & infra: $60 per host per month
• End-to-end: $75 per host per month
• On-call: $5 per user per month

It's worth noting that other pricing details for different solutions may not be readily available, and you may need to contact Splunk directly for a customized quote.

6. Sematext Synthetics

Sematext Synthetics provides a comprehensive solution for synthetic monitoring. Their offering is designed to meet the demands of modern monitoring requirements, whether you're dealing with hybrid environments, cloud-based systems, or on-premise servers. With Synthetics, you gain the ability to monitor a wide range of metrics.

Synthetics offers Uptime and API monitoring capabilities from various locations, including private networks and behind firewalls. It covers all layers of monitoring, including DNS, TCP, SSL, and HTTP, and allows for customizable API monitoring. Additionally, Synthetics keeps a vigilant eye on SSL certificates, website performance, and offers end-to-end visibility.

One of the standout features of Synthetics is its single-pane approach, which allows users to correlate data seamlessly across various sources, such as infrastructure metrics, application logs, events, real-user data, and synthetic performance metrics. This integrated approach helps streamline monitoring and provides a holistic view of your system's health.

🌟Key features

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Log management

➕Pros

• Full-stack monitoring
• Price-per-monitor option with synthetics
• Out-of-the-box dashboards
• Helpful support

➖Cons

• Log monitoring can be expensive
• Only offer real browser monitoring for Chrome
• Dashboard configurations can be a bit overwhelming
• User reviews express some difficulties with user management
• Lacks some helpful integrations with security tools

💲Pricing

Sematext offers flexible pricing options to cater to different customer needs. They have adopted both a pay-as-you-go model, where you can customize your subscription according to your requirements, and standard subscription packages.

For the pay-as-you-go Synthetics option, it’s a flat $2 per HTTP monitor and $7 per browser monitor. Keep in mind, though, that there’s a $5 minimum.

Alternatively, they offer a starter package for Synthetics with a standard subscription starting at $29 per month. This package includes monitoring for up to 40 HTTP endpoints and 5 Browser monitors, with a data retention period of 30 days.

7. Checkly

Checkly is an excellent choice for real browser monitoring, providing comprehensive tools to keep a close watch on the well-being of your web applications.

One standout feature of Checkly is the freedom it gives you to code your monitoring checks personally. You have the option to integrate your monitoring tasks directly into your application's code repository. This means you can create your monitoring resources from scratch rather than just configuring them.

You have the flexibility to test your created resources locally on your own machine and during the deployment process in your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline. This entire monitoring process is powered by Checkly's global infrastructure, which is known for its reliability.

Not a big fan of Checkly? Check out some similar tools to Checkly.

🌟Key features

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• API monitoring
• Heartbeat monitoring

➕Pros

• User-friendly interface
• Easy to create simple checks

➖Cons

• Expensive pricing based on the number of checks rather than monitors
• User reviews indicate a lack of documentation

💲Pricing

Checkly provides a free plan, but it comes with limitations. It allows for only 10,000 API checks and supports just one user.

If you’re looking for a little more, they offer the Team plan starting at $40 per month. With this plan, you get 50,000 API checks and can have up to 20 users.

For those with specific or larger requirements, Checkly also offers a custom plan that can be tailored to your needs. To learn more about this option, you'll need to get in touch with their sales team.

8. Datadog

Datadog is a powerful observability tool with an extensive range of features. It's known for its comprehensive synthetic monitoring capabilities, but it does come at a high cost, making it more suitable for larger businesses.

One of Datadog's standout features in regards to real browser monitoring is that it will run tests in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Most others on this list will only use Chrome.

What's particularly nice about Datadog is that it allows you to create tests without writing code. They offer a web recorder that lets you interact with your website as a regular user would, providing real-time results. When issues arise, Datadog offers detailed information, including screenshots, performance data, server traces, error logs, and more, to help you pinpoint and address problems effectively.

Datadog also enables you to compare your website's performance inside and outside your network firewall and provides automation tools to save time. With these monitoring options, you can efficiently manage issues and gain a comprehensive view of your website and systems.

Not a big fan of Datadog? Check out some similar tools to Datadog.

🌟Key features

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Log management
• + more

➕Pros

• Full-stack observability
• Tests in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
• 20+ individual solutions
• Hundreds of integrations

➖Cons

• Datadog is very costly and not meant for small-to-medium-sized businesses

💲Pricing

With all their solutions, it would be a lot to list all of the details here. Instead, we’ll list a few of the notable solutions, including synthetics, which includes real browser monitoring.

• Synthetic monitoring: $5 per 10,000 API runs and $12 per 1,000 browser runs
• Infrastructure monitoring: $15 per host per month
• Real user monitoring (RUM): $1.50 per 1,000 sessions per month
• Log management: $0.10 per ingested GB and $1.70 per million log events per month

9. ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine Applications Manager (MAM) is known for simplifying synthetic monitoring, in particular, real browser monitoring. It offers in-depth insights into the user experience and the performance of your critical applications and infrastructure components through Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

MAM allows you to quickly identify and resolve performance-related issues across your entire stack, from the URL to the actual lines of code. With its robust APM capabilities, you can monitor database operations, identify slow SQL statements, and take advantage of distributed tracing features to streamline debugging, especially in microservices environments.

Additionally, MAM assists in pinpointing bottlenecks within your code stack through code profiling. It goes further by providing automated service maps, helping you visualize dependencies within your application architecture. Essentially, ManageEngine Applications Manager is a dedicated tool specifically designed for transaction monitoring.

🌟Key features

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real browser monitoring
• APM
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕Pros

• Tests in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
• Powerful APM capabilities
• Intuitive UI
• Real-time issue diagnostics

➖Cons

• No prices listed online
• User reviews report issues with creating dashboards and maps
• User reviews indicate issues with the responsiveness of the UI

💲Pricing

Unfortunately, ManageEngine doesn’t list any prices online. If you want details on their product pricing in any capacity, you’ll have to reach out to them.

10. SolarWinds Pingdom

SolarWinds' Pingdom offers a streamlined synthetic monitoring tool. Unlike some other tools, Pingdom focuses on providing two solutions: Synthetics and RUM (Real User Monitoring).

Pingdom promises to deliver a seamless digital experience by monitoring your web application. It proactively monitors the end-user experience with real browser testing and simulates key site transactions via browser tests in Chrome.

However, it's essential to consider the downsides. While Pingdom is straightforward, it's not known for being budget-friendly. Additionally, due to its limited feature set, it doesn't offer support for Playwright scripts for front-end testing, which Checkly and Better Stack provide.

Not a big fan of Pingdom? Check out some similar tools to Pingdom.

🌟Key features

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring

➕Pros

• Straightforward tool
• Powerful alerting via email and SMS
• Shareable reports

➖Cons

• Expensive when you consider the price per monitor
• User reviews report some issues regarding false positives, latency, and health checks

💲Pricing

Pingdom's pricing structure is straightforward, It’s all based on the number of monitors for synthetic monitoring and the volume of pageviews for RUM.

For Synthetics, the starting price is just $10 per month, but it includes only 10 uptime monitors and 1 advanced monitor. You are also limited to 50 SMS alerts. However, the plans can scale up significantly, reaching 30,000 uptime monitors and 2,500 advanced monitors with 1,500 SMS alerts. At this level, you're looking at a substantial monthly cost of $18,300, assuming you choose annual payments.

If you’re interested in RUM, the pricing starts at $15 per month, covering 100,000 pageviews. The cost increases as your pageview volume grows, with the highest tier reaching $19,500 per month for 1 billion pageviews. Again, these prices are based on annual payment options.

The 10 Best Real Browser Monitoring Tools Comparison

The Best Open-source Real Browser Monitoring Tools

If you’re really feeling adventurous, there are some really powerful open-source options for synthetic monitoring, which include real browsers. Of course, these options require a lot more effort on your part, as they will need to be 100% managed by you.

Here are the top 3 open-source tools for real browser monitoring.

1. Zabbix

Zabbix is a widely used open-source monitoring tool that offers a bunch of handy features. It allows you to keep an eye on various aspects of your system, including transactions, application performance, and even real browser monitoring. Zabbix even comes with ready-made templates for keeping tabs on different servers and operating systems.

With Zabbix, you can collect data from different sources like network devices, cloud services, containers, databases, applications, and real browser monitoring. And when something goes awry, Zabbix can ping you through various communication channels like On-Call, Opsgenie, Pagerduty, Slack, and more.

What's neat is that Zabbix also provides learning materials and certifications to help you become a pro at using it. Despite being lightweight, Zabbix can monitor pretty much every part of your system.

🌟Key features

• Open-source monitoring

➕Pros

• Lightweight
• Educational courses

➖Cons

• The cost of hosting Zabbix yourself can be expensive
• User reviews indicate a steep learning curve

2. Prometheus

Prometheus is a metric-driven monitoring tool tailored to keep tabs on your organization's performance, health, and even user behavior, including web transactions and real browser monitoring. What sets it apart is its ability to send alerts based on the real-time data it collects and stores.

Prometheus boasts a handy query language known as PromQL. This language empowers users to swiftly aggregate selected time series data in real time and present the results in user-friendly graphs or tabular format.

One of Prometheus' standout features is its compatibility with external systems through the HTTP API. This means Prometheus seamlessly integrates with tools like Better Stack, offering support right out of the box. Furthermore, it plays nicely with Grafana, allowing you to craft informative dashboards displaying metrics gathered by Prometheus, including real browser monitoring data.

🌟Key features

• Open-source monitoring

➕Pros

• Large number of visualization tools
• Single web portal
• Easy integration with 3rd party tools

➖Cons

• The cost of hosting Prometheus yourself can be expensive
• PromSQP boasts a bit of a learning curve
• User reviews report occasional complications with query

3. Cacti

Cacti is a free and open-source monitoring tool based on RRDTool. It’s fairly user-friendly, offering features like a fast data collector, advanced graph templates, and various data-gathering methods. It displays comprehensive graphs that can be easily customized according to your needs.

Additionally, Cacti employs network polling and data collection features to gather insights from various devices. Its intuitive interface makes it a great fit for LAN-sized installations in complex networks with multiple devices.

🌟Key features

• Open-source monitoring

➕Pros

• Straightforward to set up
• Offers traffic plotting

➖Cons

• Not a lot of recent reviews online

Conclusion

Real browser monitoring is a valuable tool for important insight into how your applications will perform in a real scenario. If you’re not currently utilizing something like this, then my advice would be to do your research, find the best tool for your needs, and start!

Keep in mind that to reap the benefits of such a tool, you will have to subscribe to a synthetic monitoring solution, which is not necessarily exclusive to real browser monitoring. Take your time and test as many solutions as you can until you find the one that has all the right pieces to your puzzle.