Checkly vs PagerDuty

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.

PagerDuty is an incident management and on-call platform founded in 2009 by Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, headquartered in San Francisco and listed on the NYSE since 2019. Its core job: take alerts from monitoring tools, wake up the right engineer through escalation policies and coordinate the response until the incident is resolved.

The product covers on-call schedules and escalation policies, alert routing and deduplication, push, SMS and phone notifications, Slack and Teams incident channels, status pages, post-incident reviews and analytics, plus 700+ integrations. Add-ons include AIOps for noise reduction, Runbook Automation, Status Pages and PagerDuty Advance generative AI. Pricing has two parts: Incident Management has a Free plan for 5 users and Professional at $25 per user a month, while the PD Reliability Platform is sold as annual platform fees (Starter, Essential, Plus, Ultimate) with bundles of seats, events and AI actions.

PagerDuty fits engineering and IT operations teams that run production systems around the clock and need dependable paging at scale. Add-ons get expensive. Better Stack bundles uptime monitoring, on-call and status pages for less, Datadog On-Call suits Datadog users, and Statuspage only covers public updates.

PagerDuty launched SRE, Scribe, Shift and Insights agents and a remote MCP server in October 2025; since the March 2026 release the SRE Agent can join escalation policies. A 14-day trial needs no credit card; check whether the per-user Professional plan or a platform tier is cheaper for your team size.