Uptime Monitoring Tools Compared on Price and Limits (2026)

"Best" depends on what you are monitoring, how many of them there are, how fast you need to know, and whether you want the tool to also run the incident. So instead of ranking, this page puts eight tools next to each other on the numbers that decide the choice, all read from each vendor's pricing page on 5 September 2026.

We make UptimeWarden, one of the eight. We have tried to make the table useful even if you never pick us; if a number below has drifted, tell us and we will fix it.

The table

Tool	Free tier	Cheapest paid	Fastest interval	Bundled incident/on-call	Status page
UptimeWarden	20 monitors, 3 min, 30-day history	₺150/mo (Hobby: 35 monitors, 2 min, SMS)	30 s (Enterprise); 1 min on Professional	Incidents on all plans; on-call from Hobby	1 free, 10 on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise
UptimeRobot	50 monitors, 5 min, 1 status page, 5 integrations	$9/mo annual, $10 monthly (Solo: 60 s)	15 s (Scale)	Notifications; SMS/voice as credits	1 free, 3 on Solo
Better Stack	10 monitors + heartbeats, 1 status page	$25/mo per 50 monitors ($21 annual) + $34/responder seat	30 s	Yes, per-seat	1 free, $15 each after
Checkly	10 monitors, 10k API + 1k browser runs, 2 min	$24/mo ($288/yr) Starter: 50 monitors, 1 min	30 s (Team); 1 s on Enterprise	No, via integrations	No, via integrations
StatusCake	10 tests, 5 min	$24.49/mo ($20.41 annual): 100 tests, 1 min	30 s (Business)	Notifications	Yes
Cronitor	5 monitors, 5 min, 1 status page	$2/monitor + $5/user per month	30 s	Notifications	Yes
Pingdom	None; trial only	Configurator, price not published as a table	Not published	Alerting; no on-call	Yes
Uptime Kuma	Everything, self-hosted (MIT)	$0 + your server	Whatever you set	No	Yes, multiple

"Fastest interval" is the fastest the vendor offers on any plan; the plan it needs is in parentheses where it is not the cheapest one.

Reading the table

If you only need "is it up" on a handful of sites, UptimeRobot's free tier still has the most monitors, and StatusCake's Superior plan is the cheapest published route to 1-minute checks. UptimeWarden's Hobby plan at ₺150 a month gets you to 2 minutes with SMS.

If somebody has to be paged at night, the tools split. UptimeRobot, StatusCake and Cronitor send notifications; you build the rota elsewhere. Better Stack and UptimeWarden include rotations and escalation. Better Stack charges per person who can be paged, which is the right model for a large team and an expensive one for a small team; UptimeWarden includes it in every plan from Hobby up.

If your problem is cron jobs, look for heartbeats: Cronitor, Better Stack, UptimeWarden and Uptime Kuma have them. UptimeRobot's are on paid plans only.

If you want checks in version control, Checkly is built around it and also runs Playwright browser tests, which none of the pure uptime tools do. UptimeWarden has a CLI and a Terraform provider for the same workflow, without browser tests.

If you will not pay, Uptime Kuma is the honest answer, with one caveat: the machine running it has to be more reliable than the things it watches, and that is now your job.

If procurement matters more than price, Pingdom is a SolarWinds product, and its pricing page is a configurator rather than a table. Budget for the trial and a sales call.

What we would say about ourselves

UptimeWarden's argument is the bundle: monitoring, incidents, on-call, status pages and forecasting in one plan at a price that starts at ₺150 a month. A failed check is repeated from other regions before we alert you, and an alert we cannot confirm is still sent, labelled unverified; that recheck is the feature we would least want to give up. We are the newest name on the list and the one with the least history, and the pricing page has every number on it.