# Statuspage vs Checkly: A Complete Comparison for 2026
Checkly's whole idea is that monitoring should live in your Git repository. You write a browser check in TypeScript with Playwright, open a pull request, and it deploys through CI/CD alongside your application, and the status page it publishes is generated from those code-defined checks. Statuspage is the opposite kind of object: a hosted page you configure by clicking, that monitors nothing and waits to be told what to display.
**Checkly is a developer-first synthetic monitoring platform**, founded in Berlin in 2018 and built around monitoring-as-code with Playwright and TypeScript, organized into three separately billed modules, Detect for monitoring, Communicate for alerting and status pages, and Resolve for AI analysis. Its buyer is a developer or platform engineer who wants monitoring to behave like infrastructure. **Statuspage is Atlassian's communication layer**, a polished, deeply branded page built for posting incidents and notifying subscribers, priced by subscriber tier up to $1,499 a month, that monitors nothing on its own.
So they answer to different people entirely. Checkly's status page is a byproduct of code-defined monitoring that developers own, while Statuspage is a communication product that operations and communications teams run by hand. A team choosing between them is really choosing whose job the status page is.
## Quick comparison at a glance
| Category | Statuspage, Atlassian | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| **Built for** | Incident communication | Developer-first synthetic monitoring |
| **Core model** | Hosted, click to configure | Monitoring-as-code, Playwright and TypeScript |
| **Built-in monitoring** | ✘, integration only | ✔, browser, API, uptime |
| **Deployment** | Web UI | CLI, Terraform, Pulumi, CI/CD |
| **Status page** | The whole product | Communicate module, separate billing |
| **Page reflects real checks** | ✘, needs external monitor | ✔, from code-defined checks |
| **Subscriber channels** | Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, webhook | Email |
| **Audience-specific pages** | ✔ | ✘ |
| **On-call and escalation** | ✘, via JSM or Opsgenie | ✘, via PagerDuty or Opsgenie |
| **AI** | ✘ | Rocky AI, root cause on checks |
| **Logs, metrics, RUM** | ✘ | ✘ |
| **Free plan** | 100 subscribers, no monitoring | Hobby, 10 monitors, code checks |
| **Entry paid price** | Hobby $29/mo | Detect Starter $24/mo |
| **Full Team setup** | Up to $1,499/mo | ~$133/mo, three modules |
| **SSO / SAML** | Via Atlassian Guard | Enterprise only |
| **Best fit** | Ops and comms, audience-specific pages | Developers shipping frequently |
## What each one is
The two are built for different people and different workflows, and that difference decides the whole comparison. One is code; the other is a console.
### Checkly: monitoring as code
Checkly closes the gap between how developers write tests and how monitoring usually works. You define API and browser checks as TypeScript constructs, run real Playwright scripts against Chromium from more than 20 locations, version them in Git, and deploy them through the Checkly CLI or official Terraform and Pulumi providers, so a check goes through the same pull request and review process as any other code. The product splits into three modules that bill separately: Detect for the monitoring, Communicate for alerting and status pages, and Resolve for Rocky AI and traces. What Checkly is not is a general observability platform: it has no log management, no infrastructure metrics, no RUM, and no native incident management, so when a check fails it tells you what broke and hands the deeper investigation to other tools.
### Statuspage: a communication layer
Statuspage created the status page category in 2013 and publishes a polished, deeply branded page where you post incident updates and notify subscribers when something breaks. It is configured through a web interface, not code, and it monitors nothing, so the page reflects what a human or a connected tool tells it. Its value is the communication itself: incident posts, subscriber management, audience-specific pages, and native ties to Jira and Jira Service Management. It is built for teams that own the customer-facing message rather than the monitoring behind it.
| What it is | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Configuration | Web UI, click to set up | Code, versioned in Git |
| Monitors your services | ✘ | ✔ |
| Owned by | Ops and comms | Developers and platform teams |
| Status page source | Hand-curated | Generated from code checks |
| Scope | The page only | Synthetic monitoring plus a page |
## Monitoring as code
This is Checkly's whole reason to exist, and Statuspage does not compete on it, because it does not monitor at all. The question is whether you want monitoring your developers write and own, or a page your ops team configures.
Checkly runs Playwright browser checks for end-to-end flows like logins and checkouts, API checks with response validation, multistep API sequences that pass data between requests, and uptime checks across HTTPS, TCP, DNS, ICMP, and heartbeat, all defined in TypeScript. Visual regression testing compares screenshots against baselines to catch layout breaks on the Team plan, private locations run checks inside your own network, and existing Playwright test suites can be reused as production monitors with little rewriting. The workflow is the differentiator: checks live in the repository, deploy through GitHub Actions, GitLab, or Jenkins, and run against preview environments before production, so monitoring moves with the code instead of drifting from it in a separate dashboard. Statuspage has none of this, so to make its page move on its own you connect a monitoring tool, and Checkly is one of the tools you would connect.
| Monitoring as code | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Playwright browser checks | ✘ | ✔, core product |
| Checks defined in code | ✘ | ✔, TypeScript |
| CLI, Terraform, Pulumi | ✘ | ✔ |
| CI/CD and preview environments | ✘ | ✔, native |
| Visual regression | ✘ | ✔, Team plan |
| Private locations | ✘ | ✔, Team plan |
[summary]
### Monitoring that ties a failed check to the logs and traces behind it
Checkly tells you which check failed and Statuspage sees nothing, but Checkly's view stops at synthetic data. Better Stack runs checks and links a failure straight to the logs and traces from that moment, so you move from the failed flow to the backend cause without leaving the tool.
**Monitoring wired to the logs and traces that explain the failure.** [Start free.](https://betterstack.com/uptime)
[/summary]
## Status pages
Here Statuspage is the stronger product, because the page is its whole job while it is one module of Checkly's. Both publish a page that reflects status, so the split is subscriber reach, page types, and how it is managed.
Checkly's status page lives in its Communicate module, sold separately, and it updates automatically from the code-defined checks, which is its advantage: the page reflects the same monitors your developers already own, with custom domains on paid plans and custom CSS and password protection on Team. The limit is communication reach: subscriber notifications are email only, so a customer who wants an SMS or a partner who wants a webhook is not served, and there are no audience-specific pages. Statuspage is built for exactly that reach, with subscriber notifications across email, SMS, Slack, Teams, and webhooks, audience-specific pages that show different components to different customers, and full customization on its Business plan, though those channels sit behind higher tiers. So Checkly gives you a page that mirrors code-defined monitoring, and Statuspage gives you the deeper communication surface.
| Status pages | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Role | The whole product | Communicate module |
| Updates from own monitoring | ✘, integration | ✔, code checks |
| Subscriber channels | Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, webhook | Email |
| Audience-specific pages | ✔ | ✘ |
| Custom domain and CSS | Higher tiers | Paid, Team for CSS |
| Billing | In the plan | Separate module |
[summary]
### A branded page with multi-channel subscribers, driven by monitoring
Checkly's page is email-only and Statuspage gates SMS subscribers behind its $99 tier. Better Stack publishes a branded page on your custom domain with email, SMS, Slack, and webhook subscribers on paid plans, updated automatically from the monitoring in the same platform.
**A branded page with multi-channel subscribers, driven by real checks.** [See how it works.](https://betterstack.com/status-page)
[/summary]
## Incident management and on-call
Neither product runs a full on-call rotation on its own, so this is a shared gap. The question is what each does with a failure before handing it off.
Checkly detects the incident and alerts through email, Slack, webhooks, SMS, and phone, with escalation policies and integrations into PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Incident.io, Rootly, and Microsoft Teams, and its SMS and phone allowances are capped by plan, 100 SMS on Starter and 200 SMS plus 200 phone alerts on Team, so serious paging routes to a dedicated tool. Statuspage detects nothing and holds only the customer-facing post, so both detection and paging live in the tools you connect. Between the two, Checkly owns the detection and a real alert on the way to PagerDuty, and Statuspage communicates the result, and a full on-call workflow with unlimited paging belongs to a third tool in either case.
| Incident and on-call | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Detects the incident | ✘ | ✔ |
| Escalation policies | ✘, external | ✔ |
| Phone and SMS paging | ✘, external | Capped by plan |
| On-call scheduling | ✘, external | ✘, external |
| Post-mortems | ✘ | ✘ |
[summary]
### On-call scheduling in the same tool that detects the outage
Checkly caps paging by plan and hands real on-call to PagerDuty, and Statuspage neither detects nor pages. Better Stack includes on-call scheduling, unlimited phone and SMS alerts, escalation policies, and automatic post-mortems alongside the monitoring and the status page, at $29/month per responder.
**On-call and escalation in the same tool that catches the outage.** [See incident management.](https://betterstack.com/incident-management)
[/summary]
## AI
Checkly brings AI to its checks and Statuspage brings none, which is the pattern across this comparison. The question is whether AI on synthetic check data is the help you need.
Rocky AI, in Checkly's Resolve module, automatically analyzes a failing check, breaking the failure from the user's perspective down through the test steps to a probable root cause, examining artifacts like Playwright traces, packet captures, and traceroutes to distinguish an application bug from a DNS, CDN, or third-party problem. It suggests corrected TypeScript for checks it can diagnose, and it supports bringing your own model rather than the default, which matters to teams that cannot send data to a specific provider. Its boundary is scope: Rocky only sees synthetic check data, so it cannot correlate a failure with an infrastructure metric spike, a log line from a dependent service, or a deployment ten minutes earlier. Statuspage ships no AI and no MCP server at all, so on AI, the developer tool is ahead.
| AI | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Root cause on check failures | ✘ | ✔, Rocky AI |
| Code fix suggestions | ✘ | ✔, TypeScript |
| Bring your own model | ✘ | ✔ |
| Correlates beyond synthetic data | ✘ | ✘ |
| MCP or AI in the status page | ✘ | ✘ |
## Pricing
The two prices are structured for two different buyers, and Checkly's modular billing is the thing to model. Statuspage sells one subscription by subscriber tier; Checkly sells three modules you assemble.
Statuspage's public pages run from a free tier at 100 subscribers up through Hobby at $29, Startup at $99, Business at $399, and Enterprise at $1,499 per month, gating SMS at $99 and full customization at $399, with private and audience-specific pages billed separately. Because it monitors nothing, a working setup also includes a monitoring tool. Checkly bills its modules apart: Detect for monitoring at Hobby $0, Starter $24, and Team $64 per month, Communicate for alerting and status pages at $0, $9, and $30, and Resolve for Rocky AI at $0, $12, and $39, so a Team using all three runs about $133 a month before check-run overages, which are metered per thousand browser runs and per ten thousand API runs. Raw data lasts only seven days on the free and Starter plans. For a developer team that wants code-defined monitoring plus a page that reflects it, Checkly is far cheaper than Statuspage plus a separate monitor; for a team that only needs the communication page, Statuspage's own tiers are the direct comparison, and Checkly's monitoring modules are spend you would not need.
| Pricing | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Subscriber tiers | Three separate modules |
| Free plan | 100 subscribers, no monitoring | Hobby, code checks |
| Entry paid | Hobby $29/mo | Detect Starter $24/mo |
| Status page | In the plan | Communicate, $9 to $30/mo |
| AI analysis | ✘ | Resolve, $12 to $39/mo |
| Overages | ✘ | Per check run |
## Enterprise readiness
Both meet enterprise checklists, and each gates key controls differently. What does procurement get from each?
Statuspage inherits Atlassian's compliance posture, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001, with SSO and SCIM through Atlassian Guard available from lower tiers, and native Jira and Jira Service Management integration. Checkly is SOC 2 Type II compliant with a 99.9% uptime SLA, but SAML and SSO are Enterprise-only rather than available on Starter or Team, and reviewers have flagged limited data residency options as a concern for EU teams. So a regulated organization that needs SSO without an Enterprise contract, or HIPAA and ISO coverage, will find Statuspage the easier fit, while a developer team already living in Git and CI/CD will value Checkly's model more than its compliance gating.
| Enterprise | Statuspage | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type II | ✔ | ✔ |
| HIPAA / ISO 27001 | ✔, via Atlassian | Confirm directly |
| SSO / SAML | Via Atlassian Guard | Enterprise only |
| Data residency | EU and US | Limited, EU concerns |
| Ecosystem | Jira, JSM native | Git, CI/CD, Terraform |
## Final thoughts
If you want your monitoring, and the status page that reflects it, to live in your repository as code your developers own, **Checkly is the better fit and nothing here matches its monitoring-as-code workflow**. Playwright checks in TypeScript, versioned in Git, deployed through CI/CD, and reviewed in pull requests make monitoring behave like the rest of your infrastructure, and the status page updates automatically from those checks.
Statuspage wins when the page is a communication product rather than a developer artifact. If you need subscriber notifications across SMS, Slack, and webhooks, audience-specific pages, or Atlassian's compliance and ecosystem, Statuspage's page goes well beyond Checkly's Communicate module, which is a separate purchase with email-only subscribers.
The deciding question is whose job the status page is. Checkly makes it the development team's, generated from code, while Statuspage makes it the job of operations and communications, managed by hand. Neither runs a full on-call rotation on its own, and Checkly's view stops at synthetic check data, so a team that wants the code-defined monitoring, the branded page, the on-call, and the logs and traces to explain a failure in one place is asking for more than either was built to give.
[summary]
### The whole reliability workflow in one platform
Checkly owns code-defined monitoring and Statuspage owns the message, and neither runs full on-call or holds the logs and traces behind a failure. Better Stack brings monitoring, a branded status page with subscribers, on-call scheduling, incident management, and a full observability data layer into one platform, so detection, communication, paging, and root cause live in one workflow.
**Monitoring, status pages, on-call, and observability in one platform. Start free, no credit card required.** [Try Better Stack.](https://betterstack.com/status-page)
[/summary]