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 $10 per month (indicative, Synthetic starter)
PaidFrom $24 per month (indicative, Superior)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Transaction checks and RUM are priced separately from basic uptime checks and add up.
SSL and domain expiry monitoring included on paid plans, which prevents a genuinely common outage cause.
Free tier
30-day trial.
Free plan with unlimited uptime tests at 5-minute intervals.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
SolarWinds · since 2007
Established
StatusCake · since 2012
Strengths
Limitations
Best for
Organisations wanting an established name for straightforward uptime monitoring.
Small teams wanting broad availability coverage cheaply.
All of these integrate with: Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Webhooks.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.