UptimeRobot alternatives (2026): 6 tools compared

We make Lampwick. Here's where each tool is the better pick.

UptimeRobot is still hard to beat on price for plain uptime checks. Its free plan has 50 monitors every 5 minutes and says "Good for personal and commercial projects."¹ Look elsewhere if you need checks from several locations with confirmation, on-call, cron monitoring, a tool you run yourself, or your app's errors next to its uptime.

Last reviewed 10 Nov 2026. Every competitor fact links to the vendor's own page in the footnotes, verified on 2026-11-10. Prices exclude VAT; we don't convert currencies.

What UptimeRobot costs today

The free plan includes HTTP, port, ping, keyword and DNS monitors, but only 5 integrations, and keeps 3 months of data. Webhooks, Zapier and PagerDuty come with Team.¹ The page lists "SSL & Domain exp. monitor" on the free card, but its comparison table says SSL monitoring is in paid plans only. The page showed prices in euros when we checked.¹

The short list

Oh Dear

From Belgium. Every plan includes uptime, broken links and mixed content, performance and Lighthouse, ping and TCP, scheduled tasks, SSL, DNS and domain expiry; plans are priced by sites, from Solo ($17, 2 sites) to Scale ($439, 200 sites).² It checks every minute and confirms a failure from a second location out of 16.⁹

Verdict: the pick for agencies and anyone who wants every check type, from several locations. More in Lampwick vs Oh Dear.

Better Stack

Uptime checks up to every 30 seconds, heartbeats, status pages, on-call and incident management, plus logs and error tracking. Free (for personal projects) has 10 monitors and heartbeats and 1 status page. Paid use is $34 per responder seat a month ($29 billed yearly), with 10 monitors included and $25 a month per 50 more.³

Verdict: the pick when on-call schedules and incidents matter as much as the checks.

Healthchecks.io

Not an uptime monitor: it alerts when a cron job or background task stops pinging it.⁵ Hobbyist is free for 20 checks; Business is $20 a month for 100 checks with SMS and phone calls.⁴ It's open source under the BSD 3-clause license, so you can run it yourself.⁶

Verdict: the pick to add cron monitoring next to UptimeRobot, for any language or server.

Uptime Kuma

A self-hosted monitor you run with Docker: HTTP, keyword, JSON query, TCP, ping, DNS, push and Docker container checks, 20-second intervals, more than 90 notification services and status pages on your own domain. MIT-licensed.⁷

Verdict: the pick if you're happy to run and watch a server yourself. Remember that it can't tell you its own server is down.

Pingdom

SolarWinds Pingdom offers synthetic uptime checks, advanced transaction checks, SMS credits and real-user monitoring, in tiers from 10 to 30,000 uptime checks, with a trial.⁸

Verdict: the pick for larger companies that want real-user monitoring from the same vendor.

Lampwick

Uptime monitors every 30 seconds to 1 hour, each with SSL, domain and DNS checks, and, from Pro, status pages and a daily crawl for broken links and mixed content. What UptimeRobot doesn't do: connect your app and Lampwick also shows the exception, slow request, failed job and log lines behind an outage (Laravel or HTTP ingest). Free is 3 monitors every 5 minutes; Pro is €29 a month for 20 monitors every minute; Team is €79 for 100 every 30 seconds.

Where it falls short: the free plan is far smaller than UptimeRobot's, checks run from one location, URLs only (no ping, port or keyword checks), and there are no SMS or PagerDuty alerts. Cron monitoring covers Laravel scheduled tasks reported by your app, not ping URLs for any job.

Verdict: the pick when you want uptime and your app's errors in one place. See uptime monitoring and how to know when your app is down.

How to choose

• The most free monitors, commercial use allowed: stay on UptimeRobot.
• Every check type, from several locations: Oh Dear.
• On-call and incidents: Better Stack.
• Cron jobs on any server: Healthchecks.io.
• Free and on your own server: Uptime Kuma.
• Uptime plus your app's errors, jobs and logs: Lampwick.

Start free: open Uptime, paste your URL and click Add monitor.

Try it with your agent

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, in your app's repository:

Set up Lampwick monitoring for this app. Read https://lampwick.dev/docs/agents.md and follow it. Keep the tokens out of the chat, use a dev or staging environment, and give me the claim link when the first event has arrived.

The agent creates a trial workspace without an account and connects your app. You claim it from the link it gives you and choose what the agent may keep: how it works.