Checkly vs openstatus

Checkly is a synthetic monitoring platform from Berlin built on the idea of monitoring as code. Engineering teams write API checks and browser checks in JavaScript or TypeScript, using Playwright for browser flows, keep them in the same repository as the application, and deploy them with the Checkly CLI or Terraform.

The same checks run in CI against preview deployments before a release and then continuously from global locations after it, so a broken login or checkout flow is caught by a test first and by monitoring second. Assertions, retries, alert channels such as Slack, PagerDuty and email, multistep API checks and heartbeat monitors are available, and traces connect a failed check to backend spans through OpenTelemetry. A free Hobby plan includes a monthly quota of API and browser check runs; Starter and Team plans add runs, locations and collaboration, and Enterprise adds SSO and private locations inside your own network.

Checkly fits teams that already write Playwright tests and want one source of truth for end-to-end testing and production monitoring. It requires coding and is not a full observability suite, so it is a poor fit for non-technical teams who only want uptime pings. Better Stack and UptimeRobot are simpler for basic uptime and status pages, Datadog Synthetics suits teams already on Datadog, and Grafana Cloud offers synthetic monitoring inside its own stack.

openstatus is an open-source synthetic monitoring and status page platform aimed at developers. It checks websites, APIs and TCP endpoints from many regions around the world, measures latency per region, and publishes the results on a public status page, so the same tool tells you when something breaks and tells your users what is happening.

Monitors can be created in the dashboard or defined as code through a CLI and configuration files, which fits teams that manage infrastructure in git. Status pages support custom domains, incident updates, maintenance windows and subscriber notifications, and alerts go to email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, Opsgenie and webhooks. Data can be exported with OpenTelemetry, so monitoring results can join an existing observability stack. The cloud version has a free plan with a limited number of monitors and paid plans that add more monitors, regions, check frequency and team members, while the whole stack can also be self-hosted at no license cost.

openstatus suits startups, indie developers and open-source projects that want modern uptime monitoring and a clean status page without an enterprise contract. It is a young project with a smaller community and fewer integrations than established tools, and it does not try to replace full incident management or on-call scheduling. Better Stack combines monitoring, on-call and logs in one product, Atlassian Statuspage is the enterprise status page standard, and Uptime Kuma is a popular self-hosted monitor without a hosted option.