Checkly vs StatusCake
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $24 per month (Starter; Team is $64)
Free tierFrom €16.66 per month (Superior, billed annually; €19.99 monthly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Priced by check runs; browser checks cost more than API checks, and frequency multiplies the bill. Team at $64 adds 75 monitors, 30-second frequency, all 22 locations and private locations.
SSL and domain expiry monitoring included on paid plans, which prevents a genuinely common outage cause.
Free tier
Hobby: 10 uptime monitors, 10k API and 1k browser check runs a month across 6 locations.
Free plan with unlimited uptime tests at 5-minute intervals.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Checkly · since 2018
Established
StatusCake · since 2012
Strengths
- One Playwright script serves as both an E2E test and a production monitor.
- Monitoring-as-code fits GitOps workflows and code review.
- Excellent developer experience and clear, published pricing.
- SSL and domain expiry alerts prevent an entire class of self-inflicted outage.
- Many test locations even on cheaper plans.
- Simple and reliable.
Limitations
- Playwright-centric; teams on other frameworks get less benefit.
- Browser checks at high frequency across many locations get expensive.
- Not a full observability platform — no APM or log management.
- No scripted browser journeys.
- Interface is functional rather than pleasant.
- Limited integration with observability platforms.
Best for
Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.
Small teams wanting broad availability coverage cheaply.
All of these integrate with: PagerDuty, Slack, Opsgenie.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.