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testcritic

New Relic Synthetic Monitoring vs UptimeRobot

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 tier

From €9 per month (Solo, billed annually; €10 monthly)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

The free tier is genuinely usable. Costs come from full-platform user seats rather than check volume.

One of the best free tiers in infrastructure tooling, and paid plans are still inexpensive: Solo €9, Team €35 and Scale €65 a month on annual billing. Solo buys the 60-second interval.

Free tier

100 GB of data ingest and one full-platform user free every month, permanently.

50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, free forever, with SSL and domain-expiry checks and one status page.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScript
Codeless

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Widely used

New Relic · since 2015

Widely used

UptimeRobot · since 2010

Strengths

  • The most generous permanent free tier of any major observability platform.
  • Synthetics, APM, logs and RUM under one bill and one query language.
  • Scripted browser monitors use standard Selenium-style JavaScript.
  • Free tier covers what most small projects actually need.
  • Five-minute setup with no configuration to learn.
  • Status pages included even on lower tiers.

Limitations

  • Per-user pricing for full-platform access surprises teams that want wide visibility.
  • The interface is dense and takes time to navigate confidently.
  • Synthetics is less differentiated than Datadog's correlation story.
  • No browser-based transaction monitoring — availability only.
  • Basic alerting logic; expect some noise from transient failures.
  • Limited reporting and no observability integration.

Best for

Teams wanting an observability platform with monitoring included and a real free tier.

Side projects, small businesses and anyone who currently has no monitoring at all.

All of these integrate with: PagerDuty, Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.