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