Checkly vs Pingdom

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.

Pingdom is a website monitoring service founded in Sweden in 2007 and owned by SolarWinds since 2014. It checks whether sites and APIs are up and how fast they load from a network of probe servers around the world, and alerts teams by email, SMS and integrations when something breaks or slows down.

Synthetic monitoring includes uptime checks, transaction checks that script multi-step flows such as login or checkout, and page speed tests that break down load time by resource. Real User Monitoring measures performance from actual visitors by country, browser and device. Alerts route to tools such as Slack, PagerDuty and Opsgenie, and public status pages show uptime to customers. The two products, Synthetic and Real User Monitoring, are priced separately and scale with the number of checks or monitored pageviews.

Pingdom suits businesses and agencies that want a dependable, established monitoring service with simple setup. It looks dated next to newer tools, prices are higher than many modern alternatives, and incident management features are limited. Better Stack bundles uptime, status pages, on-call and logs, UptimeRobot is cheaper with a generous free tier, and Datadog Synthetics fits teams already using Datadog.