The original uptime monitor. The enterprise price tag.

Pingdom doesn't have a free plan. Their cheapest option is $10/mo for 10 monitors. Want 100 monitors? You're looking at roughly $90/mo, and that's before per-user fees for your team. SolarWinds enterprise pricing is designed for companies with procurement departments, not for a team that just wants to know if their API is up.

Larm's free tier gives you 15 monitors, a team seat, and a status page. No credit card, no trial countdown. Pro is $19/mo for 100 monitors and 10 seats. The pricing page is one screen, not a conversation with sales.

Pingdom doesn't include status pages. If you want one, you're buying a separate product. Atlassian StatusPage at $29/mo, or something else entirely. That's an extra vendor, an extra bill, and an extra integration to maintain for something that should really just be part of your monitoring setup.

Larm includes a status page on every plan, including free. It's tied directly to your monitors. Components update automatically when something goes down. The page itself is static HTML on a CDN, so it stays up when your infrastructure doesn't. Pro adds custom domains and removable branding.

Pingdom's dashboard looks like it was designed in 2010. That's not an exaggeration. The interface has barely changed since the SolarWinds acquisition in 2014. Users describe it as "cranky," dated, and slow to navigate. When you look at your monitoring dashboard every day, this matters more than you think.

Larm is built with the same design sensibility you'd expect from tools like Linear or Notion. Real-time dashboards, response time charts, request waterfalls. Monitoring is a daily tool. It should feel like one.

When Pingdom detects a failure, it re-checks from a second location before alerting. That sounds reasonable, but two locations isn't enough. A regional network issue can easily affect two nearby probes. Pingdom users regularly report false positives, and this is a big part of why.

Larm checks from six probe locations across three continents and only alerts when a majority confirm the problem. A network hiccup in one region doesn't wake anyone up. When you get an alert from Larm, multiple independent locations agree that something is actually wrong.

Pingdom tells you your response time and whether your site is up or down. That's useful for knowing there's a problem, but not for understanding it. Their "Root Cause Analysis" feature offers some breakdown, but it's basic compared to what's possible.

Larm captures the full request waterfall for every check: DNS resolution, TCP connect, TLS handshake, time to first byte, content transfer. You see exactly which phase is slow, from which location, and how it's trending over time. When your API slows down, you don't just see a number going up. You see that it's the TLS handshake from Frankfurt that's degrading.

Pingdom has an API, but no MCP server and no free tier to try it on. Larm has a full REST API and a built-in MCP server — manage monitors, create incidents, and set up alerts from Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI tool. Available on every plan, including free.

Pingdom was founded in Sweden, but SolarWinds acquired it in 2014. SolarWinds is a US company. Your monitoring data lives on US-owned infrastructure, subject to US jurisdiction and the CLOUD Act. The Swedish origin story doesn't change where your data actually ends up.

Larm runs on EU-owned infrastructure under EU jurisdiction. Your check results and uptime data stay in Europe, governed by European data protection law. If you're dealing with GDPR, DORA, or NIS2, this is the difference between a compliance talking point and actual data sovereignty.