Checkly vs PagerDuty
Checkly and PagerDuty are both uptime & monitoring tools. Checkly is aimed at developers, while PagerDuty is aimed at developers and enterprise. Checkly costs less, from $24/mo versus $25/mo for PagerDuty. Both have a free plan.
Synthetic monitoring as code with Playwright
On-call scheduling, alerting and incident response for ops teams
| Pricing | Freemium · $24 | Freemium · $25 |
| Starting price | $24/mo | $25/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | 14 days |
| Built for | Developers | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses |
| Platforms | web | web, ios, android |
| Country | DE · 2018 | US · 2009 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Checkly if
Engineering teams using Playwright.
- Tests and monitoring unified
- Developer-first workflow
- Playwright native
Look elsewhere if: Non-technical uptime monitoring (Better Stack).
Choose PagerDuty if
Engineering and IT operations teams that run critical production services and need proven on-call paging and incident coordination.
- Highly reliable paging, the industry reference for on-call
- Largest integration catalogue among incident tools
- Free plan is enough for very small teams
Look elsewhere if: Small teams wanting cheap, bundled uptime monitoring and paging (Better Stack, Grafana Cloud IRM).
Checkly vs PagerDuty pricing
Checkly
- Hobby$010 uptime monitors; 10k API, 1k browser runs/mo
- Starter$24/moBilled annually; 50 monitors; 25k API, 3k browser runs
- Team$64/moBilled annually; 75 monitors; 100k API, 12k browser runs
- EnterpriseCustomCustom monitors, 1-sec frequency
PagerDuty
- Free$0Up to 5 users, 1 schedule, 100 SMS/phone alerts a month
- Professional$25/user/mo$21/user/mo billed annually; post-incident reviews
- Starter (Platform)$2,800/yr10 seats, 5,000 events, 1,000 AI actions; billed upfront
- Essential (Platform)$12,000/yr20 seats, 40,000 events, 4,000 AI actions
- Plus (Platform)$48,000/yr50 seats, 150,000 events, 16,000 AI actions
Checkly · Key features
- Playwright browser checks
- API checks with assertions
- Monitoring as code via CLI
- CI/CD integration
- Global and private locations
- OpenTelemetry traces
Cons
- Requires coding
- Run-based pricing
- Not a full observability suite
PagerDuty · Key features
- On-call schedules, overrides and multi-level escalation policies
- Alert routing, grouping and deduplication from 700+ integrations
- Push, SMS, phone and email notifications with mobile acknowledgement
- Incident channels and actions inside Slack and Microsoft Teams
- Post-incident reviews and operational analytics
- AIOps add-on for event correlation and noise reduction
Cons
- Costs rise fast with AIOps, status pages and automation add-ons
- Packaging and plan names change often, making comparisons hard
- Platform tiers require annual upfront payment
Checkly vs PagerDuty: FAQ
Which is cheaper, Checkly or PagerDuty?
Checkly starts at $24/mo and PagerDuty at $25/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.
Do Checkly and PagerDuty have a free plan?
Yes, both Checkly and PagerDuty have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.
Which is better for small businesses, Checkly or PagerDuty?
PagerDuty lists small businesses as a core audience, while Checkly is aimed more at developers.