Pingdom Alternatives: Comparison of Popular Free Website Monitoring Services

This is a guest post by Praveen Kumar (@bihari_brat).

Since Pingdom recently announced that it's scrapping its free plan and forcing its free users to pay $11.95/month, people looking for a free website monitoring service will need to consider other options. Luckily, there are a handful of free tools that can serve as valid replacements for those who don't want to pay Pingdom's $11.95/month price tag. To help readers looking for the best free Pingdom alternatives, I did a detailed comparison of some of its popular competitors. Specifically, I compared Pingdom against StatusCake, Uptime Robot, and Freshping.

There are a few important features that I think are important for any website monitoring service.

1. Number of monitored URLs

Typically, website monitoring services that offer free tiers will cap the number of URLs that they allow you to monitor (and allow you to monitor more URLs on their paid tiers). For a price of $ 11.95/month, Pingdom allows users to monitor just 10 URLs.

2. Frequency of checks

When it comes to monitoring, the frequency of checks is an important factor. The more frequently you check a URL, the faster you will come to know about issues related to it and sooner you can take actions to resolve those issues. This is measured in time intervals. The most common frequency that services offer for free is once every 5 minutes—some services offer more frequent checks, but will then require you to pay for them.

3. Geographic locations of checks

The locations from where these checks are made are important. It could be the case that your website is experiencing issues for one geographic location, but not necessarily others. In order to determine the true cause of downtime, it's important to perform multiple checks. Generally, the more locations the better.

4. Status Pages and Notifications

Status pages and notifications are also two important components of website monitoring services. Status pages communicate the status of your site to your users, and can also provide data about your uptime. These pages are helpful in communicating to your usersany issues that may be impacting your website.

Notifications are important because they determine how you are notified when you have any issues with your website. All free website monitoring services will email you whenever you are having issues. However, some services will also send you SMS messages, or alerts through Slack for free, whereas other products may charge for these features.

Comparison of Pingdom Alternatives

Based on these features, I compiled a table of some popular Pingdom alternatives, and how they stack up against each other.