Best Uptime Monitoring Tools in 2026 (Free and Paid)

The best uptime monitoring tools in 2026 are UptimeRobot for a large free plan, HetrixTools for free 1-minute checks, Better Stack for on-call teams, Uptime Kuma for self-hosting and Checkly or Pingdom for synthetic testing. Upmonora, Hyperping and StatusCake fill the budget-to-mid range. The table below compares 12 tools on the same six facts.

One disclosure first. This page is written by Upmonora, which makes one of the tools below. Every ranking page in this search result is written by a vendor, and most of them put themselves first. We list ourselves as one row with our real limits (no SMS or phone alerts, no custom status page domains yet) and judge every tool on the same facts: free tier, fastest check interval, starting paid price, regions, alert channels and status pages.

Prices and limits were checked in October 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page; check the vendor's pricing page before you buy, because most of these changed at least once this year.

12 uptime monitoring tools at a glance

Freshping is not in the table because it no longer exists. Freshworks discontinued it on 6 March 2026 and deleted remaining data about 90 days later, in early June 2026. If you landed here looking for a Freshping replacement, HetrixTools and UptimeRobot are the closest free matches, and the free uptime monitoring tools comparison covers that move in detail.

How we compared these tools (and what we left out)

We opened every vendor's pricing page in October 2026 and recorded six things: what the free plan includes, the fastest check interval and which plan unlocks it, the cheapest paid plan and what it buys, how many regions checks run from, which alert channels exist, and whether status pages are included. Where a vendor does not state a number on its pricing page, the table says so rather than guessing.

We left out full observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud) because their uptime checks are a small feature inside a usage-priced product, and we left out tools whose pricing is quote-only. We also did not rank tools 1 to 10. A fixed ranking hides the fact that the right choice depends on whether you need free, cheap, on-call, self-hosted or synthetic.

Why do interval and alert channels matter more than the monitor count? Oh Dear's 2025 dataset of 1.8 million confirmed outages found that the median outage lasts 1.9 minutes and 98.6% resolve within an hour. A 5-minute check misses most of those outages entirely; a 30-second check catches them. And about 68% of outages start outside 9-to-6 business hours, which is why an alert that only lands in email is often read the next morning. The post on 30-second vs 1-minute vs 5-minute intervals works through the detection-time arithmetic.

Best for simple sites and small teams

UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot remains the default for small sites because its free plan is the largest in the market: 50 monitors at 5-minute checks, one basic status page on an UptimeRobot URL and 3 months of history. Paid plans start at Solo ($13/mo monthly, $12/mo annual) for 60-second checks and 3 status pages on your own domain; Team ($46/mo, $39 annual) brings 30-second checks, 100 white-label pages and webhooks, Zapier and PagerDuty. SMS and voice alerts are credit-based on every plan (10 credits for $3, up to 1,000 for $100). Multi-location checks (North America, Europe, Asia and Australia) start on Solo, not Free. The downside is that the useful alert integrations (webhooks, PagerDuty) sit on Team, which is a jump from $13 to $46. Our Upmonora vs UptimeRobot comparison goes feature by feature.

Upmonora

Upmonora is our own tool, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. The free plan is small (5 monitors, 5-minute checks, 7-day history, 1 status page, one region). Starter at $9/mo gives 25 monitors, 1-minute checks, 90-day history, 3 status pages, 3 regions, signed webhooks and REST API access; Business at $29/mo gives 100 monitors, 30-second checks, 6 regions, 365-day history, 10 status pages, reports and 10 team members. Every check validates up to 5 redirect hops and the expected status code (single codes or ranges), an incident opens only after 2 consecutive failures by default, and a site is marked down only when a majority of regions agree. Alerts go to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and webhooks. There are no SMS or phone alerts, status pages cannot use a custom domain yet, and heartbeat monitoring is still on the roadmap. Full plan details are on the pricing page.

Hyperping

Hyperping's free plan is generous on breadth: 20 monitors, 5-minute checks from 18 regions, one basic status page and email, Slack and Teams alerts. Essentials ($290/yr, shown as $24/mo billed yearly) unlocks 50 monitors at 30-second checks, a custom status page domain, PagerDuty and Opsgenie, phone calls and 20 SMS credits a month. Business ($2,990/yr) reaches 20-second checks. The catch is that the pricing page shows yearly prices by default; the monthly rate for Essentials is not listed.

StatusCake

StatusCake's free plan bundles 10 uptime monitors at 5 minutes with one SSL monitor, one domain monitor and one page-speed test, which is a useful spread for a single site. Superior (listed at $24.49/mo and $20.41/mo; the page does not label which is annual, so verify before buying) gives 100 monitors at 1 minute and 75 SMS credits a month. Business reaches 30-second checks with 300 monitors. The pricing page does not state status page limits or location counts, so ask before you commit if either matters.

Best free uptime monitoring tools

Two free plans stand out in 2026, and they trade off against each other.

• HetrixTools gives 15 monitors checked every minute from 4 of its 12 locations, with every alert channel (Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks; SMS and phone need credits) available on the free plan. If you need 1-minute checks for free, this is the only hosted option in the table that provides them. Paid plans are modest: Professional $9.95/mo for 30 monitors, Business $19.95/mo for 60, Enterprise $49.95/mo for 200.
• UptimeRobot gives more monitors (50) but slower checks (5 minutes) and limits the free plan to 5 integrations. Its terms of service state that the service is available for any use, including commercial and business use, so the old claim that the free plan is non-commercial is out of date.

Better Stack (10 monitors, 3-minute checks per its docs, 1 status page, email and Slack), Checkly (10 monitors at 2 minutes plus browser check runs), OnlineOrNot (3 monitors at 3 minutes) and Upmonora (5 monitors at 5 minutes) are smaller free tiers that make sense if you expect to upgrade to that vendor. The common catches on free plans are the same everywhere: slower intervals, single-region checks, short history and no webhooks or paging.

Best for on-call and incident management

Better Stack

Better Stack bundles uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling and status pages into one product, priced per responder: $34/mo monthly or $29/mo annual, with unlimited phone and SMS alerts included. The base licence includes 10 heartbeats and 1 status page; 50 extra monitors cost $25/mo ($21 annual), 10 extra heartbeats $20/mo, and each extra status page $15/mo ($12 annual). Checks run at up to 30-second frequency from multiple locations. For a team that wants escalation policies and phone paging without a separate PagerDuty bill, this is the strongest option. For a solo developer who only needs monitoring, per-responder pricing plus monitor packs adds up quickly. See Upmonora vs Better Stack for the detailed comparison.

Uptime.com

Uptime.com sells quantity-based plans starting at $9/mo ($108/yr) with 1-minute checks from 100+ probe servers, email and SMS alerting and 20+ integrations; phone alerts and escalation policies are listed as features but the page does not confirm them at the $9 tier. There is no free plan, only a 30-day money-back guarantee, and status pages are add-ons. It suits teams that already know they need SLA reporting and escalation.

Cronitor

Cronitor is worth a look if cron and heartbeat monitoring matter as much as HTTP checks. The free Hacker plan has 5 monitors at 5 minutes and one status page; Business is $2 per monitor plus $5 per user with no minimum, 30-second checks, and SMS plus PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Datadog On-Call integrations.

Best self-hosted option

Uptime Kuma is the standard self-hosted uptime monitor: MIT licensed, 20-second check intervals, 90+ notification services, multiple status pages that can be mapped to your own domains, and monitor types covering HTTP(S), keyword, JSON query, TCP, ping, DNS, push and Docker containers. Installing it takes one command on any box with Docker:

docker run -d --restart=always -p 3001:3001 \
  -v uptime-kuma:/app/data --name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:2

The trade-offs are structural rather than feature gaps. It checks from one location (wherever you run it) unless you deploy several instances, it cannot alert you if the host it runs on is the thing that went down, and you own the updates, backups and the inbox for its notifications. Many teams pair it with one hosted monitor pointed at the Uptime Kuma instance itself. The Uptime Kuma vs hosted monitoring post covers when each makes sense.

Best for enterprises and synthetic testing

Checkly

Checkly is built around Playwright browser checks and API checks written as code, with plain uptime monitors as a cheaper layer alongside them. Hobby is free with 10 uptime monitors at 2-minute intervals, 6 public locations (3 per check), 1,000 browser runs and 10,000 API runs a month. Starter ($24/mo billed annually) gives 50 uptime monitors at 1 minute; Team ($64/mo) gives 75 monitors, 30-second checks, 22 locations and private locations. Status pages are a separate product with a free tier and a $9/mo Starter. If you need to prove that checkout works, not just that the homepage returns 200, this is the tool.

Pingdom (SolarWinds)

Pingdom offers synthetic monitoring (uptime, transaction and page speed checks) and real user monitoring as separate products. The vendor pricing page renders its prices through a calculator that returned blank values when we fetched it in October 2026; third-party price trackers list Synthetic from $10/mo annual ($15 monthly) for 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check and 50 SMS, and RUM from $10/mo per 100,000 pageviews. Checks run from over 100 locations and the trial is 30 days. There is no free plan. Confirm the current figures on the vendor page before buying. The Upmonora vs Pingdom page covers the price gap in detail.

Site24x7

Site24x7 (ManageEngine) is the all-in-one option: website, server, application, network and cloud monitoring in one account. The Web Uptime plan is $10/mo ($9 annual) for 25 websites at 1-minute polling with 3 status pages. Its free plan covers uptime for 50 resources with email alerts, but the pricing page does not state the free interval, and it lists 32 locations on the Web Uptime plan card while the feature table says a primary location is polled. Clarify both with sales if you are evaluating it seriously.

How to choose an uptime monitoring tool in 2026

The full 12-point checklist is in how to choose an uptime monitoring tool. The short version:

1. Decide the interval first. 30 seconds for anything that takes money or has an SLA, 1 minute for a business site, 5 minutes for a blog. Then look only at tools that offer that interval at a price you accept.
2. Check how a tool confirms an outage. Consecutive-failure thresholds and multi-region agreement are what separate a quiet monitor from one that pages you at 3 am for a routing blip. Our post on false-positive alerts explains the thresholds.
3. List the alert channels you will read. If nobody on your team reads email at night, you need Slack, Teams, a webhook into your paging tool, or native SMS and phone. Only some tools in the table have native paging.
4. Price the plan you will actually need, not the entry plan. Count monitors, add status pages, add seats, add SMS credits. Per-responder and per-page add-ons change the total quickly.
5. Check what a check validates. Status codes, redirect chains, SSL expiry and response content catch different failures. A monitor that only tests "did I get a response" will report a 500 error page as up if it is configured loosely. The how uptime is calculated post shows why check-based and duration-based uptime differ.

Whatever you pick, run a free test first. Upmonora's website checker runs an instant AI check on any public URL, and the uptime monitoring plan pages list exactly what each tier includes. Start free with 5 monitors, no card needed, and move up only if the 5-minute interval is not enough.

For a deeper walkthrough of intervals, alert design and status pages, read the website uptime monitoring guide.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best uptime monitoring tool?

There is no single best uptime monitoring tool. UptimeRobot has the largest free plan (50 monitors at 5-minute checks), HetrixTools has the fastest free checks (1 minute), Better Stack is strongest for on-call teams, Uptime Kuma is the standard self-hosted choice, and Upmonora, Hyperping and Checkly sit in between. Pick on check interval, alert channels and price per monitor.

Are free uptime monitoring tools good enough?

Free uptime monitoring tools are good enough for a personal site or a small business that can tolerate a 5-minute detection delay and email or Slack alerts. They are not enough when you need SMS or phone paging, checks every 30-60 seconds, multi-region confirmation or more than a few months of history.

How often should I check my website uptime?

Check every 1 minute for a business site and every 30 seconds for anything that takes payments or has an SLA. A 5-minute interval is fine for a blog or a staging site. Oh Dear's 2025 dataset found the median outage lasts 1.9 minutes, so a 5-minute check misses most short outages entirely.

Is UptimeRobot still free in 2026?

Yes. In October 2026 UptimeRobot's free plan still includes 50 monitors with 5-minute checks, one basic status page on an UptimeRobot URL and 3 months of history. Its terms of service state the service is available for any use, including commercial and business use, so the old non-commercial restriction no longer applies.

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