UptimeRobot is where most freelancers start. Fifty monitors for free at five-minute intervals is a genuinely good deal, and the product does what it says. The trouble starts when a client asks for a status page on their own domain, when you want a second person to receive alerts, or when five minutes is too slow and you need the paid plan.
At that point you are looking at Solo from €10, Team from €41 or Scale from €77 a month (UptimeRobot serves these euro prices in EUR countries), and it is a reasonable moment to see what else exists. This is our honest list. We make Tenium, so read our own entry with that in mind.
What agencies actually need
Before the list, the checklist we hear from agencies and freelancers who manage client sites:
- Fast checks (30 or 60 seconds) so you know before the client does.
- Confirmation from more than one location, so one bad route does not page you at 3 a.m.
- Status pages per client on the client’s domain, ideally without the vendor’s logo.
- Something to show the client monthly: a report that proves the care plan is worth paying for.
- Alerts where you already are: Telegram, Slack, email, and a second contact if the first one does not answer.
- SSL and domain expiry, because a lapsed domain is the most embarrassing outage there is.
- Predictable pricing that does not grow with every seat or every client.
Now the tools.
1. Tenium
Price: Free (50 monitors), Starter $7, Pro $29, Agency $59 a month.
Tenium is built for the checklist above. Pro gives you 300 monitors at 30-second intervals, five seats, ten white-label status pages, escalation to a second contact and a branded monthly PDF report for $29. Agency, at $59, adds client workspaces: each client gets their own room with scoped viewer access, their own status pages and their own report, sent automatically on the 1st.
On price, Tenium Starter and Pro list below the matching UptimeRobot plans, though StatusCake Superior is cheaper than Pro (Starter covers the same 100 monitors for less, for up to two people), and each comparison page shows the arithmetic. Few tools sell the agency features. Starter at $7 (100 monitors) sits against UptimeRobot Solo at €22 (50 monitors), and Pro at $29 against Team from €41, both in euro, so check current prices on both sites. Checks run from 2 regions, and an incident opens only when 2 of them agree. Read how confirmation works and the full price table on the pricing page.
Where it falls short: there is no mobile app yet, no browser-transaction checks, and the integrations list is shorter than Better Stack’s. Compare Tenium and UptimeRobot.
2. Better Stack
Price: Free (10 monitors), then from $25 per 50 monitors plus $34 per responder; white-label status pages $250 per page.
Better Stack is the best-engineered product on this list. Incident management with on-call rotations, phone escalation, Playwright browser checks, and logs and tracing in the same tool. It is designed for engineering teams running their own product.
For an agency it is expensive in exactly the wrong places: every team member who needs alerts is a $34 responder, and taking the Better Stack logo off a client status page is $250 a month per page. Compare.
3. Hyperping
Price: Essentials $24, Pro $74, Business $249.
Hyperping has the prettiest status pages in the category and a clean, fast dashboard. Essentials gets you 50 monitors at 30-second intervals with one status page; Pro gets you 200 monitors and ten pages. White-label is Business only at $249. If status page design is your top priority and you have a handful of clients, it is a strong choice. Compare.
4. StatusCake
Price: Free (10 tests), Superior $24.49, Business $79.99.
StatusCake has been around a long time and does more than uptime: page-speed tests, a server agent for CPU and RAM, domain and SSL checks. Thirty-second intervals need the Business plan. The UI shows its age, but the free tier is useful and the feature list is broad. Compare.
5. Pingdom
Price: from around $18 a month for 10 checks, quote-based above that.
Pingdom, owned by SolarWinds, is the enterprise veteran. Real user monitoring and scripted transaction checks are its differentiators. For a freelancer with 40 client sites the price climbs quickly and there is only one status page per account. Compare.
6. Oh Dear
Price: $17 a month for 2 sites, up to $165 for 50.
Oh Dear is loved by Laravel developers and does things none of the others do: broken-link crawling, mixed-content detection, Lighthouse performance checks. Pricing is per site with every check included, which is wonderful for two sites and painful for forty. Unlimited seats and status pages. Compare.
7. Cronitor
Price: Free (5 monitors), then $2 per monitor and $5 per user.
If your main worry is cron jobs, queues and background workers, Cronitor is the deepest tool here, with SDKs for every language and automatic job discovery. It also does uptime and status pages. Per-monitor pricing means 100 monitors is around $200 before volume discounts, which is a different league from the flat-rate tools. Compare.
8. Uptime Kuma
Price: Free, self-hosted. Budget €5 a month for a VPS and a few hours a year of your time.
Uptime Kuma is excellent open-source software with a gorgeous UI and 90-plus notification providers. It is also a single server in a single location that you have to keep patched, backed up and monitored. There is no multi-user, no per-client separation and no reports. For your own projects, hard to beat. For paying clients, you become the monitoring provider, with all that implies. Compare.
Which one?
- You run your own product with an on-call team: Better Stack.
- You want beautiful status pages and have a few clients: Hyperping.
- You crawl sites for broken links and are a Laravel shop: Oh Dear.
- Cron jobs are the main concern: Cronitor.
- You like owning everything and it is only your own sites: Uptime Kuma.
- You look after client sites and want reports, white-label status pages and a flat price: Tenium.
Whatever you pick, export your UptimeRobot monitors first. Every tool here imports a CSV, and Tenium reads UptimeRobot’s CSV export through its importer.
Related
The per-tool pages go further than this round-up: Tenium vs UptimeRobot, Tenium vs Hyperping, Tenium vs Better Stack and the whole comparison hub. If you are weighing check types rather than vendors, start with website monitoring and SSL monitoring, and test a site for free with the is-it-down tool. Agencies should read what the agency plan includes.
Related
Related Tenium pages
Monitor your first site free
30 monitors free, checks from 2 regions, no card. SSL and domain expiry from $7 a month.