UptimeWarden vs Checkly (2026)

Checkly and UptimeWarden overlap on uptime checks and part ways almost everywhere else. Checkly is a synthetic-monitoring tool for developers who want their checks in a repository and their browser flows tested with Playwright. UptimeWarden is uptime monitoring with the incident, on-call and status-page layer built in. This is written by the UptimeWarden team; Checkly's numbers are from its pricing page on 5 September 2026.

What Checkly charges

Checkly meters check runs, not just monitors.

Plan	Price	Uptime monitors	API check runs / month	Browser check runs / month	Fastest frequency
Hobby	$0	10	10,000	1,000	2 minutes
Starter	$24/mo ($288/yr)	50	25,000	3,000	1 minute
Team	$64/mo ($768/yr)	75	100,000	12,000	30 seconds
Enterprise	custom	custom	custom	custom	1 second on request

Hobby is hard-capped. On Starter and Team you can prepay for more runs, or pay overage at $6.50 per 1,000 browser runs and $2.60 per 10,000 API runs on Starter ($6.25 and $2.50 on Team).

The arithmetic to do before choosing: one API check every minute is 43,200 runs a month, so Starter's 25,000 API runs cover a single 1-minute check with room for nothing else. Checkly is priced for checks that run every few minutes or on deploy, not for a wall of 1-minute pings.

What UptimeWarden charges

Per plan, with unlimited check runs inside the plan's interval:

Plan	Price	Monitors	Fastest check
Free	$0	20	3 minutes
Hobby	₺150/mo	35	2 minutes
Starter	$7/mo	50	2 minutes
Professional	$29/mo	100	1 minute
Enterprise	custom	unlimited	30 seconds

Fifty monitors checked every 1 minute is Professional at $29 a month; on Checkly the same fifty monitors at 1 minute need Starter plus about 2.1 million API runs of overage, which is not a configuration anyone would buy. The two products are not priced for the same job.

Where Checkly is the right tool

Browser checks. Checkly runs Playwright scripts against your real UI on a schedule, so it can tell you that login works, not just that the page returned 200. UptimeWarden does not run browser tests and is not going to pretend an HTTP check is one.

Monitoring as code is Checkly's whole design: checks are TypeScript constructs, deployed from CI, reviewed in pull requests. UptimeWarden has a CLI and a Terraform provider that cover monitors, escalation policies, status pages, API tokens and notification channels as HCL or JSON, which is the same idea with less ceremony and no browser scripts.

Where UptimeWarden is the right tool

Everything after the check fails. Checkly sends the alert to whatever you connect (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack); it has no on-call rota, no escalation ladder and no status page of its own. UptimeWarden has a status page on every plan and on-call rotas with escalation from Hobby up, so the same tool that saw the failure decides who is paged, in what order, and what customers see.

Check types. Checkly covers HTTP, API and browser, plus TCP. UptimeWarden also runs UDP, ping, WebSocket, gRPC, MCP and heartbeat checks. Heartbeats are the one to notice: a cron job that stops running never fails an HTTP check, and both tools have this, but on UptimeWarden it is on the free plan.

Confirmation. When a check fails, other regions repeat it before UptimeWarden alerts you. Most alerts are confirmed from at least two regions, and an alert we cannot confirm is still sent, labelled unverified. Free and Hobby use a fixed threshold; Starter and above can tune it. Checkly runs checks from multiple locations too; whether one bad location can alert you is a setting on each check.

Forecasting, on Professional and above: it looks for problems that build up gradually, such as a response time that keeps creeping up or a certificate close to expiry. It is shown on the dashboard and does not page anyone, and sudden outages are not predicted. Checkly does not forecast.

Side by side

	UptimeWarden	Checkly
Free tier	20 monitors, 3 min, 1 status page	10 monitors, 2 min, 10k API + 1k browser runs
Pricing unit	plan	plan plus check runs
Browser (Playwright) checks	no	yes
Checks as code	CLI, Terraform	TypeScript constructs, CLI
On-call and escalation	included from Hobby	via integrations
Status page	1 on Free, up to 10 on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise	via integrations
Heartbeat / cron	all plans	yes
gRPC, WebSocket, UDP, MCP	yes	no
Multi-region consensus	all plans	per-check location setting
Forecasting	Professional and above	no

Who should pick which

Checkly, if you need to test user flows in a real browser, if checks-as-code in TypeScript is how your team already thinks, and if you have an on-call tool.

UptimeWarden, if you want monitoring and incident response in one plan, if you need gRPC, WebSocket or heartbeat checks, or if 1-minute checks on dozens of endpoints would blow through a per-run budget.

Plenty of teams run both: Checkly for the three browser journeys that matter, UptimeWarden for the hundred endpoints behind them. The Free plan covers the second half of that split without a card.