Comparison

Best uptime monitoring tools in 2026

An honest look at 8 uptime monitoring tools. We built one of them, so we're biased — but we're also the people who spent months researching the alternatives. Every tool here has strengths worth knowing about, including the ones we compete with.

Larm

Teams who want alerts they can trust

Larm checks your services from multiple probe locations across multiple continents and uses multi-probe voting to confirm outages before alerting. A single probe failure in one region doesn't wake your team at 3 AM. Status pages are bundled and update automatically. EU-owned infrastructure, flat pricing, generous free tier with commercial use allowed.

Free (15 monitors, 3-min intervals), Pro $19/mo (100 monitors, 1-min), Business $49/mo (500 monitors, 30-sec)

Strengths

Multi-probe voting eliminates false positives — only alerts when a majority of probes confirm the problem

Status pages included on every plan, pre-rendered to static HTML on CDN

Flat pricing with no per-seat or per-responder fees

EU-owned infrastructure (Hetzner), not US cloud with an EU label

14 alert integrations on every plan including free

Limitations

New product — less track record than established tools

Smaller probe network than Pingdom or Datadog

No synthetic browser monitoring yet (coming soon)

UptimeRobot

Budget monitoring with high monitor counts

Detailed comparison →

The most popular uptime monitoring tool with over 2.7 million users. Simple, affordable, and battle-tested. The free tier offers 50 monitors (personal use only since November 2024). Paid plans start at $7/mo. Checks from multiple servers in the same region and retries from other nodes before alerting.

Free (50 monitors, 5-min, personal use only), Solo $7/mo (10 monitors, 1-min), Team $29/mo (100 monitors)

Strengths

Massive user base and decade-plus track record

50 free monitors (highest free count in the market)

Native mobile app with push notifications

Simple to set up — works in 30 seconds

Limitations

Free tier restricted to non-commercial use since November 2024

Single-region verification leads to false positives — the #1 user complaint

Dated interface that hasn't evolved significantly

No request waterfall or detailed performance data

Better Stack

Teams wanting an all-in-one observability platform

Detailed comparison →

A modern, well-designed monitoring platform from a Czech company. Combines uptime monitoring, incident management, status pages, logging, and tracing in one product. Beautiful UI, broad integrations. The catch is per-responder pricing — every team member who needs on-call access is $29/mo on top of the base cost.

Free (10 monitors, 3-min), per-responder $29/mo, monitors $21/mo per 50-pack

Strengths

Beautiful, modern interface with strong design

All-in-one: monitoring + logs + traces + incidents + status pages

Custom domains on free status pages

30-second check intervals on paid plans

Limitations

Per-responder pricing punishes team growth — a 3-person team costs ~$129/mo

Runs on AWS (US-owned) despite being a European company — CLOUD Act applies

Complexity creep as they add more products

Uptime Kuma

Self-hosters who want full control

Detailed comparison →

An open-source, self-hosted monitoring tool with 57,000+ GitHub stars. Beautiful UI, easy to set up with Docker, and completely free. Supports HTTP, TCP, DNS, and 90+ notification integrations. The trade-off is that you host it yourself — if the server running Kuma goes down, your monitoring goes down with it.

Free and open source (self-hosted)

Strengths

Completely free at any scale — unlimited monitors

Full data control, runs on your infrastructure

90+ notification integrations

Beautiful UI, active community, frequent updates

Limitations

Single point of failure — your monitoring goes down when your server does

No multi-location checks (most requested feature since 2021, still unimplemented)

No multi-user support or RBAC

No API for config-as-code workflows

Checkly

Developer teams doing monitoring-as-code

Detailed comparison →

A developer-first monitoring platform built around Playwright browser checks and monitoring-as-code. Define your checks in JavaScript/TypeScript, store them in version control, deploy through CI/CD. Strong synthetic monitoring capabilities with full browser script execution. Usage-based pricing.

Hobby free (10K API runs, 1.5K browser runs), Team $40/mo (50K API, 6K browser)

Strengths

Monitoring-as-code with Playwright — checks live in your repo

Full browser synthetic monitoring for user flows

CI/CD integration — run checks as part of your deploy pipeline

Strong developer community and tooling

Limitations

Usage-based pricing can be unpredictable

Developer-first means less accessible for ops teams

No bundled status pages

Runs on AWS (US infrastructure)

Pingdom

Enterprises already in the SolarWinds ecosystem

Detailed comparison →

One of the oldest monitoring tools, now owned by SolarWinds. Pioneered the "second opinion" confirmation model — when one probe fails, a geographically distant probe re-checks. Over 100 probe locations worldwide. The product hasn't evolved much in recent years and the UI feels dated.

Starts at $10/mo (10 monitors), no free tier (14-day trial)

Strengths

100+ probe locations — the largest network in the market

Decades of operational track record

Real User Monitoring (RUM) capability

SolarWinds enterprise ecosystem integration

Limitations

No free tier

Dated 2010s-era interface

Only 2-probe confirmation (re-check, not majority voting)

Pricing scales by monitor count and features

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Enterprise teams already using Datadog for observability

Part of the Datadog observability platform. Powerful API test and browser test capabilities with configurable alerting conditions: minimum failure duration, minimum locations failed, and fast retries. Best when you're already paying for Datadog's metrics, logs, and APM — adding synthetics is incremental. Expensive as a standalone monitoring tool.

API tests from $5/1K runs/mo, browser tests from $12/1K runs/mo. Platform fees separate.

Strengths

Deep integration with Datadog's metrics, logs, and APM

Highly configurable alerting conditions

Managed locations worldwide

Powerful API and browser test scripting

Limitations

Expensive as a standalone tool — pricing makes sense only with the full Datadog stack

Complex pricing model with multiple dimensions

Defaults are noisy — requires deliberate configuration to prevent false alerts

Overkill for teams that just need uptime monitoring

Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

Teams already running Grafana Cloud

Built into Grafana Cloud. Checks run from 20+ managed probe locations and results are stored as Prometheus metrics. Alerting is done through Grafana Alerting rules with percentage-based thresholds — fire if 5%, 10%, or 25% of probes fail for 5 minutes. Unique approach but requires Grafana expertise.

Included with Grafana Cloud (free tier available with limits)

Strengths

Percentage-based probe thresholds — scales naturally with probe count

Full Grafana Alerting flexibility with PromQL

Included with Grafana Cloud if you're already using it

Private probes for internal network monitoring

Limitations

Requires Grafana expertise — not a standalone monitoring tool

No built-in status pages

Configuration happens through Grafana's alerting system, not a dedicated monitoring UI

Less intuitive for non-Grafana users

How we evaluated these tools

We're the team behind Larm, so take our perspective with that in mind. We built Larm because we weren't happy with the existing options — but that doesn't mean the existing options are bad. Every tool on this list solves real problems for real teams.

We evaluated based on: false positive prevention (how well does it avoid waking you up for nothing?), pricing transparency (can you predict your bill?), status page quality (does it include one, and does it actually stay up?), and infrastructure sovereignty (where does your data live?).

If you're self-hosting and want full control, Uptime Kuma is genuinely great. If you're already deep in the Datadog ecosystem, adding their synthetics makes more sense than a separate tool. If you need monitoring-as-code with Playwright, Checkly is purpose-built for that. We don't think Larm is the right choice for everyone — but for teams who want monitoring they can trust without a complex bill, it's what we built.

Try Larm free.

15 monitors. Multi-probe voting. Status pages. 14 alert integrations. No credit card.