Website monitoring is how businesses monitor their webpage performance and take immediate action if there’s an unexpected downtime. These monitors send instant notifications in case of outages and assist businesses in quick recovery.

UptimeRobot is a popular website monitoring tool with more than 2.1 million customers worldwide. Companies like Heineken and WordPress VIP use UptimeRobot to avoid disruptions and ensure reliable operations.

The platform offers 8 different types of checks, 17 integrations, and 4 flexible plans for businesses of all sizes. There’s also a free plan that comes with 50 monitors and port, ping, and keyword monitoring. The paid plans start at just $7/month, meaning it's also ideal for bargain hunters.

Keep reading to find out everything about UptimeRobot, including its cost, features, interface, and support options. We'll also give you a couple of alternatives in case UptimeRobot isn't for you.

UptimeRobot: Plans and pricing

You can get started with UptimeRobot with its free plan that comes with 50 monitors and allows you to run HTTP, port, ping, and keyword checks at an interval of 5 minutes. With basic status pages and 5 integrations, this plan is sufficient for startups and personal use.

UptimeRobot’s first paid plan is priced at $7/month and comes with 10 monitors. The monitoring interval drops to 60 seconds on this plan, and you get additional features like SSL and domain expiry monitoring. This plan also allows you to customize your status pages. There’s another version of this plan, which comes with 50 monitors, costing $15/month.

The platform’s most popular plan is the Team plan, costing $29/month for 100 monitors. As the name suggests, this is ideal for team-oriented organizations, who can invite up to 3 members on this plan and even purchase extra seats for an additional fee ($15/month).

The most noticeable difference with this plan is the status pages. You can create as many as 100 of them along with password-protected status pages and detailed page analytics.

The last plan is the Enterprise plan, starting at $54/month for 200 monitors. You can also opt for 500 monitors at $124/month or 1,000 monitors at $222/month. This plan allows you to run checks every 30 seconds with access to unlimited status pages. You can also invite up to 5 team members on board. All other features are similar to the Team plan.

UptimeRobot also offers a 10-day money-back guarantee on all plans so that you can try it out risk-free before committing.

UptimeRobot: Features

UptimeRobot offers 8 different types of monitoring features, including website monitoring, ping monitoring, cron job monitoring, port monitoring, and ping monitoring to ensure your webpage stays online at all times and you get instant alerts if downtime happens. Checks can be run at an interval of as low as 30 seconds (depending on your plan).

Now there are a lot of ways you can receive these notifications, such as email, SMS, voice calls, and mobile push notifications. You can even integrate with apps like Slack, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat to receive these alerts. Plus, access to Zapier integration allows you to build custom workflows with the apps you use.

We liked UptimeRobot's cron job monitoring – pre-scheduled tasks that you can automate at regular intervals. Cron jobs serve as vital tools for automating tasks, increasing efficiency, and maintaining system health.

Using this, you can run various tasks such as scheduled server reboots, clearing temp files every night, or running a script every 5 minutes.

Port monitoring and ping monitoring are some other key UptimeRobot functions. The former, for example, helps you keep an eye on different ports such as HTTPS, FTP, and SSH. You can set up POP3, IMAP, and SMTP port monitoring to ensure your services running on different ports on your server are always up.

Ping monitoring sends Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echoes to targets and analyzes responses to detect and notify any anomalies. Besides this, you can also set up SSL certificates and domain monitoring to get timely updates before they expire. Expiry notifications are sent 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before, giving you enough time and reminders to renew your SSL and domain address.

Much like other website monitoring tools, UptimeRobot also allows you to design and share status pages with your users. These pages can be fully customized as per your brand voice and keep your visitors updated during unexpected outages.

On higher-tier plans, UptimeRobot allows businesses to set up maintenance windows, which halt checks during website maintenance. This helps you avoid false positives and keeps your website's numbers healthy.

Another handy UptimeRobot feature is keyword monitoring. This lets you keep tabs on any content changes on a given webpage. For example, you might want to keep an eye on your competitor’s website to track any changes made.

Doing it manually can be resource intensive. Simply set up a keyword alert that’ll notify you if those words appear on the website. For instance, alerts can be set for words like ‘sale,’ ‘new launches,’ and so on.

UptimeRobot: Interface and in use

UptimeRobot’s interface is quite simple and easy to use. The main dashboard bears a classy black theme with all the information you need in a single place. You can access features like monitoring, incidents, and status pages from the left panel.

There's a list of all your monitors at the center of the page. Simply click on it to view detailed website metrics, such as total uptime and track incidents.

Setting up a new monitor is also straightforward. Click on the ‘new monitor’ option at the top-right corner, choose the type of monitor, and enter fields like URL, notification methods, and interval. You can also add tags to group certain types of monitors for easy sorting.

Overall, we found UptimeRobot beginner-friendly. You need little to no training thanks to the entire user experience being pretty self-explanatory.

UptimeRobot: Support

UptimeRobot offers decent customer support options. You can either send them an email for any queries you might have or seek support via the live chat option on their website. There’s also an engaging Discord community that’ll help you stay updated with everything UptimeRobot.

The platform also has a help center and knowledge hub where you’ll find articles explaining common queries and setup processes. All in all, we found UptimeRobot’s support options adequate. However, the lack of call support might sting some of you.

UptimeRobot: The competition

Although UptimeRobot is a good website monitoring option, it may not be best for all business use cases. Here are a couple of alternatives you can consider.

Uptime.com is an all-around monitor offering 30 different types of checks. The platform is ideal if you need detailed insights into Real User Monitoring (RUM) data. RUM monitoring gathers data from real users visiting your website to produce data like average load times and bounce rates.

This data-driven approach is very user-centric and ideal for e-commerce businesses. You can also set up no-code transaction checks and design private status pages on Uptime.com. That said, it can be expensive as the paid plans start from $20/month.

UptimeRobot: Final verdict

UptimeRobot is an easy-to-use and straightforward website monitoring tool that helps businesses keep an eye on their website's online status at all times. You can run 8 different types of checks at an interval of as low as 30 seconds.

In addition to basic monitors like ping and port monitoring, you can also set up custom maintenance windows and status pages to keep your visitors informed.

The platform is pretty affordable, too, with plans starting at just $7/month for 10 monitors. You can set up as many as 17 integrations (besides Zapier), meaning you have the full liberty to streamline your workflows with existing third-party apps. There’s also a free plan with 50 monitors and a 10-day money-back guarantee on all paid plans.

That said, UptimeRobot lacks Real User Monitoring, which means you won’t get insights into real users' experiences on your website. This may be an issue, especially for large customer-driven businesses. In that case, you can consider alternatives like Uptime.com.

FAQs

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Website monitoring is essential to ensure your web addresses stay functional at all times. Outages, if any, should be reported swiftly so that they can be tackled before bounce rates increase. Here’s where a robust tool like Uptime comes in handy.

Launched in 2013, Uptime.com caters to some big names, like Apple, Microsoft, and PwC. With 44.7M monitoring checks, 115K alerts, and 2,500+ status pages, Uptime has saved billions of dollars for companies around the world – all the while maintaining a 99.999% uptime.

Uptime offers 30 different check types, from basic HTTPS checks and advanced Real User Monitoring (RUM) to API endpoint and transaction checks. Hang around until the end as we explore one of the best website monitoring software in more detail, discussing its best features, pricing, and interface, and also listing down a couple of alternatives.

Uptime.com: Plans and pricing

Uptime offers four plans, meaning it caters to businesses of all sizes and needs. It all begins with the Starter plan priced at $20/month, which allows you to run 30 basic checks, 1 transaction, API, and page speed check each, along with 10 cloud status checks and 2 group checks.

The check frequency here is 5 minutes, and you get 4 check locations and 3 locations per check. You can also create 1 status page – private or public. This plan allows access to 50K RUM data points per month and data retention for up to 13 months. We found this plan offering good value for the money, making it ideal for startups with one site to manage.

Next comes the Essential plan at $67/month, where you get 50 basic checks, 5 transaction checks, and 10 API checks. The group check limit also increases to 10, and the check frequency drops to 3 minutes. The best part is that you can run checks for every location around the globe as well as enjoy 5 locations per check. The number of RUM data points also increases to 200K on this plan.

Unlike the Starter plan, you can customize the design of your status page here and also create password-protected status pages. The Essential plan is an extended version of the Starter one, ideal for small businesses.

If you’re a large business, you can switch to the Premium plan at $285/month, which pretty much has everything Uptime has to offer. This includes 200 basic checks, 15 transaction checks, and 20 API checks.

These checks can be run at an interval as low as 1 minute. You get 15 locations per check and the mighty ability to select private locations. More good news: SMS and phone alerts, both of which are capped in the previous two plans.

If even this subscription doesn’t fit your needs, you can build a plan from scratch with customizable configurations and billing.

Another good thing about Uptime is that it offers a 14-day free trial for all its paid plans – no credit card needed. So, you can take the service out for a spin before committing to a plan.

Uptime.com: Features

Uptime offers 3 free tools: domain health check, website page speed test, and global uptime test. The domain health test helps you check parameters like web and DNS performance, functionality, blacklist monitoring, and so on.

Speed tests help you determine loading speeds of your web page from various global locations, while the global uptime test checks a website’s responsiveness and provides insights into performance disparities.

Besides this, Uptime offers more than 30 check types. Basic checks such as HTTPS, Whois/Domain checks, TCP Port checks, and malware checks are available with every plan. Several advanced checks, such as API monitoring, transaction checks, group checks, and cloud checks, are also available.

For instance, the platform allows checking various APIs, such as REST APIs, gRPC APIs, and GraphQL APIs, to ensure they are working fine and alert the concerned team immediately in case there’s an issue.

Needless to say, you can also run Real User Monitoring (RUM), under which data from real users are analyzed to identify issues like 4xx and 5xx HTTP status codes and JavaScript issues, page load times, AJAX load times, and bounce rates.

This data-driven approach helps you fix minor issues before they become major business concerns. You can also access detailed RUM reports to drill down on user data.

Uptime also offers impressive no-code transaction checks that help you check specific website elements such as clicking a button, visiting a website, or entering information in a text field. You can even mimic entire user paths, such as adding items to a shopping cart or contact form submissions.

The platform’s synthetic transaction monitoring also supports advanced web applications such as MFA sites. For example, using Uptime, businesses can check whether 2FA on their site is functioning for all users.

Another feature we loved about Uptime was the Status pages, a powerful reporting and accountability tool that helps communicate outages and manage incidents more efficiently. Uptime offers 3 types of status pages: public, private, and SLA pages, each customizable with HTML and CSS.

Uptime.com: Interface and in use

The Uptime interface is clean and intuitive. You’ll see a panel on the left with all function options. Whenever you’re setting up a new check, you’ll see a window pop up with four options: Basic, Advanced, Escalations, and Maintenance.

For instance, if you want to run a basic HTTPS check, you’ll find it in the Basic tab. Similarly, advanced checks like RUM and transaction checks can be found in the Advanced tab.

Each check can be configured within seconds by simply filling out the required fields such as check type, contacts who’ll receive the notifications, locations to run the check from, and of course, the URL to be checked.

The Escalations tab makes it very easy to manage incidents by sending alerts to concerned team members. You can set up a hierarchy of escalations based on incident sensitivity.

You’ll see all the checks on the Uptime’s main dashboard along with a summary of all your checks. At just a glance, you can check variables like total checks, outages, response times, global uptime, and RUM load time. What we like the most is that the dashboard is fully customizable. So, you can start with a clean slate and only add data you want to see on the dashboard.

Overall, Uptime is easy to use and get the hang of. There are a lot of tutorials on the website with detailed step-by-step guides that help you set up and use the account. Sure, Uptime, like most website monitoring tools, does require a bit of getting used to. However, the learning curve isn’t steep, thanks to its huge knowledge base.

Uptime.com: Support

Uptime offers comprehensive support for both existing and potential customers. You can either fill out a contact form on the website, call them directly, or send them an email.

While direct contact with a support agent might be your only and last port of call, you can also check out the extensive library of free resources that’s more than capable of answering any questions you might have. There are detailed blogs, release notes, and API documentations, as well as a quick start guide – a lot of material to help you get the hang of the platform.

Last but not least, you’ll also get premium and priority support if you’re on the Premium plan.

Uptime.com: The competition

Uptime is undoubtedly a great website monitoring option for businesses. However, if for some reason it doesn’t suit your needs, you can consider UptimeRobot.

For starters, UptimeRobot offers a completely free plan with 50 monitors and 5 minutes of monitoring interval. You can run various checks such as HTTP, port & ping monitor, as well as benefit from a handy keyword monitor. UptimeRobot is also much cheaper than Uptime.com.

Even its most expensive plan costs just $54/month (for 200 monitors and 30-second intervals). However, UptimeRobot lacks Real User Monitoring, which is where Uptime.com really shines through.

Uptime.com: Final verdict

Uptime is a comprehensive website monitoring tool that lets you run more than 30 types of checks – both basic and advanced checks. You can evaluate the API status on your pages, micro and extended transaction checks, page speed tests, and real user monitoring statuses.

We liked the immediate response and alert mechanisms as well as the detailed escalation hierarchy that helps resolve issues at the earliest. You can get started with 3 free tools for domain health and speed checks and then upgrade to paid plans starting at $20/month.

The interface is pretty clean, and there’s a lot of knowledge material on the website to help you scale the slight learning curve. Plus, the support is robust with call, email, and contact form support.

Overall, Uptime delivers excellent value for money and is a good option for both small and large businesses.

FAQs

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Businesses today need to have a constant online presence, which is why website monitoring has become indispensable. As the name suggests, a website monitor keeps an eye on your web addresses and immediately notifies you if there’s any downtime.

Businesses may lose an average of $137-$437 for every minute their website is down. This is where website monitoring tools like Pingdom come in handy. Pingdom runs various uptime and speed checks for your websites and produces data-driven reports so that you can know which parts of your website need attention. You also get stats from real user experience, which helps you identify visitor attributes and overall trends.

Stick around until the end as we’ll explore Pingdom in more detail. We’ll discuss its best features, pricing plans, and in-use experience, besides suggesting a couple of alternatives.

Pingdom: Plans and pricing

Pingdom has kept its pricing pretty simple. There are just two feature-wise plans – Synthetic Monitoring and Real User monitoring. The Synthetic Monitoring plan starts at just $10/month for 10 uptime monitors, 1 advanced monitor (page speed or transaction checks), and 50 SMS alerts.

However, there are as many as 22 options to choose from within this plan with various numbers of monitors, going all the way up to 30,000 uptime monitors. This makes it ideal for businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to multinational mega businesses.

Besides uptime monitoring, this plan offers page speed monitoring, public status pages, alerts, and transaction monitoring. Regardless of the threshold limit you choose, you can add unlimited users, making it good for small teams.

Next is the Real User Monitoring plan starting at $10/month for 100,000 page views. Here too, you have 22 threshold limits to choose from, all the way up to 1 billion pageviews. We love that there’s no limit on the number of sites you can run RUM on and users you can add.

Now, you can choose both these plans simultaneously in any permutation and combination as per your needs, giving you a lot of flexibility. Pingdom also offers a 30-day free trial to test out the platform before committing to a plan.

Pingdom: Features

Uptime monitoring is one of Pingdom’s core features. It keeps an eye on your websites and sends you instant notifications in case of outages. You can choose the mode as well as the frequency of the alerts. For example, critical alerts might require instant notifications, whereas minor issues may be notified an hour later.

Pingdom goes a step ahead and runs a detailed root cause analysis to find out what exactly went wrong. For every incident, administrators can run a traceroute, identify the output from a web server, and analyze response codes from servers. This helps in quick incident resolution.

Pingdom’s page speed checks are also different from other monitoring solutions. In addition to checking the page load times, Pingdom also examines how various elements like HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images are performing in relation to each other.

It also lets you zero in on the exact element that is slowing down your website. Pingdom’s comprehensive visualizations let you see how changes made on a page affect its speed. The platform assigns performance grades to each test so that you can know at just a glance how your pages have been performing.

Pingdom also comes with a simple transaction web recorder that lets you record a transaction for a check instead of having to code it manually. This makes it easy for non-IT teams to quickly monitor various parts of the customer journey on the website. For instance, you can run tests for simple actions like clicking a button, filling out a form, new user registrations, user login, or even completing payment on the website.

Besides all these synthetic monitoring features, Pingdom also offers a pretty comprehensive Real User Monitoring (RUM) function. RUM monitoring offers detailed insights into how real users access and interact with your website.

This helps you find out where customers spend most of their time on your website with the help of metrics like bounce rates, top browsers, active sessions, and top-visited pages.

Pingdom: Interface and in use

Pingdom’s interface is pretty data-driven, laced with various charts and graphs that help you understand your website performance metrics better. For instance, the top-level dashboards give you a quick summary of how different websites are performing.

To dig deeper, you can switch to the page-level metrics that focus on specific pages like checkout pages, signup pages, or your blog. Plus, every test and report on Pingdom is color-coded so that you can quickly identify any problems.

For instance, if you’re using RUM, you’ll see a live global map with areas marked in different colors, indicating load times in those regions. What's more, there are detailed timelines with vertical bar graphs for each check you run.

Getting started with the platform isn’t complex at all. You can add a new check in a matter of minutes, for instance. Moreover, there are a lot of help videos on the platform that guide you through the entire setup process.

Pingdom: Support

Pingdom has a dedicated customer portal for technical support, customer service, or product assistance. Here, you can raise a support ticket for any queries you might have. You can even set a priority for the issue you’re facing to get a quicker response.

Plus, you can even reach out to them on call between 8 am and 5 pm Central Time. They have dedicated phone numbers for the US, the UK, and SE regions.

Besides this, there are a lot of resource videos and help articles on the website that solve almost all beginner-level queries you might have.

Pingdom: The competition

HostTracker is a more affordable solution, allowing you to run 25+ URL uptime checks at just $18/month. Plus, you can add additional website checks for just $0.50/month. HostTracker also checks the IP DNS blacklist checker and Google's unsafe websites list to check if any of your websites have been blacklisted for any reason.

Plus, you can run comprehensive database checks along with transaction and speed checks. However, it lacks Real User Monitoring and status pages.

Uptime.com is another website monitoring tool very similar to Pingdom with features like cloud status checks and group checks. It also offers more than 20 types of basic checks, such as SMTP, NTP, UDP, and POP – something you don’t get with most other platforms.

You can run checks from unlimited global locations with as many as 15 locations per check and private location checks. However, Uptime.com is more expensive than Pingdom.

Pingdom: Final verdict

Pingdom is one of the most complete website monitoring tools you’ll ever come across, offering everything you need. It checks for website uptime with detailed root cause analysis and also has a robust speed check feature. Its Real User Monitoring capabilities help you drill down on real-user metrics with parameters like Apdex score, time to first byte, load time, and bounce rates.

The best thing about Pingdom is its visually graphic dashboards. You’ll find a lot of color-coded charts, maps, and graphs, which makes it easy to identify any bottlenecks. Regardless of the plan you choose, you can invite unlimited users to share these detailed and customizable reports with.

Pingdom also gives you a lot of plan options to choose from – 22 tiers each for synthetic and RUM monitoring. This makes it ideal for both small and large businesses. Last but not least, you get a 30-day free trial to try out before committing.

FAQs