Grafana Synthetic Monitoring 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
Free tier available
Free tierFrom €16.66 per month (Superior, billed annually; €19.99 monthly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.
SSL and domain expiry monitoring included on paid plans, which prevents a genuinely common outage cause.
Free tier
Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.
Free plan with unlimited uptime tests at 5-minute intervals.
Open source
Apache-2.0 (agent)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Grafana Labs · since 2021
Established
StatusCake · since 2012
Strengths
- Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
- Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
- Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.
- SSL and domain expiry alerts prevent an entire class of self-inflicted outage.
- Many test locations even on cheaper plans.
- Simple and reliable.
Limitations
- Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
- Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
- Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.
- No scripted browser journeys.
- Interface is functional rather than pleasant.
- Limited integration with observability platforms.
Best for
Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.
Small teams wanting broad availability coverage cheaply.
All of these integrate with: PagerDuty, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.