Tenium vs UptimeRobot

Who UptimeRobot is still the right answer for

UptimeRobot earned its reputation honestly. Its free plan has 50 monitors on a five-minute interval, with the API and the mobile app included, and it has a long history of being the tool people reach for first. If you run a personal site, a hobby project or a small business where a five-minute detection delay is acceptable, that plan covers it and nothing here should talk you out of that.

The comparison changes when the work becomes professional: several clients, a team that needs logins, a promise of fast detection, and a status page that carries your brand instead of someone else's. That is the territory this page covers. Tenium is not trying to beat UptimeRobot at being free: our free plan now gives the same 30 monitors at 5 min and the same four monitor types: HTTP(S), keyword, ping and port. On Free neither product includes DNS, UDP, JSON/API, heartbeat or SSL and domain checks, multi-location checks or login seats, and each gives one basic status page. Where UptimeRobot Free is ahead: 5 integrations against our 3, a mobile app, and the API included. UptimeRobot also stops the monthly email reports after the first three months; Tenium Free has no monthly report. The real differences start on the paid plans.

The monthly bill at three team sizes

We price each size with the cheapest UptimeRobot plan whose published limits cover it (Solo from €10, Team from €41, Scale from €77, the euro prices it serves for EUR countries) and the cheapest Tenium plan that covers the same monitors and seats at one-minute or faster checks. UptimeRobot publishes these as euro prices for EUR countries and Tenium prices are in US dollars. We show their price as published and compute every percentage on it converted at about EUR 1 = USD 1.08; their dollar list price may differ.

• 20 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Pro at $29. For UptimeRobot: Team, from €41. Tenium comes out about 35% cheaper.
• 100 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Pro at $29. For UptimeRobot: Team, from €41. Tenium comes out about 35% cheaper.
• 400 monitors, 3 people: Tenium Agency at $59. For UptimeRobot: no public price we can verify for this size, so ask UptimeRobot for a quote.

What the 400-monitor line really means

Above the monitor count of their largest published plan we do not invent a number; the honest statement is that you would need to ask UptimeRobot for a quote or check their pricing page for extras. Tenium's Agency plan stops at 1000 monitors too, so beyond that point we would also talk to you directly.

The two smaller lines are the useful ones for most studios. A team of three needs UptimeRobot Team, because Solo has a single seat. On our side, Starter includes 2 seats and Pro includes 5, so a team of three lands on Pro. If your team is two people and up to 100 monitors are enough, Starter at $7 is the comparison against Solo, which stops at 50 monitors and has no login seats. Tenium Starter at $7 per month is about 71% cheaper than UptimeRobot Solo (50 monitors) at €22 (about $24) per month.

Feature gaps, in both directions

Where UptimeRobot is ahead of us today:

• A native mobile app with push notifications. Tenium is a responsive web app, and alerts reach you through Telegram, email or chat instead.
• Faster checks: Scale runs every 15 seconds, while our fastest interval is 30 seconds.
• SMS and voice-call alerts. Tenium sends Telegram and email only.
• Compliance paperwork. If you need a SOC 2 report or similar for a procurement form, ask UptimeRobot for theirs; Tenium holds no such report today.
• More integrations on the paid plans (12 on Team against the channels we list on the integrations page).
• A very long record of being run at scale and a large community, which matters when you search for a forum answer at midnight.
• More status pages on Team (100) and Scale (unlimited) than Pro includes.

Where Tenium is ahead

Every alert is confirmed before it fires: a failure in one region triggers re-checks from the others, and an incident opens only when 2 of 2 regions agree (all two regions). UptimeRobot describes a re-check from a second location, which is a lighter guarantee.

On Pro you get one branded monthly PDF report, white-label status pages and custom request headers, which is how you let monitoring through a Cloudflare rule that expects a secret header. White-label status pages start at $29 on Pro, where UptimeRobot needs its Team plan.

The difference that matters to an agency is the client workspace. On Agency ($59) you get client workspaces where the client logs in and sees only their own monitors, plus automatic monthly reports under the agency's brand, sent on the 1st. UptimeRobot offers 3-5 login seats on Team and Scale, but not per-client workspaces: those seats are for your own team, not for a client who should see only their own sites.

Migrating in practice

Allow an evening for twenty or thirty monitors. The order below keeps your old account alive until the new one has proven itself.

• In UptimeRobot, create a read-only API key under My Settings, then API Settings. A read-only key cannot change anything, which is the point.
• In Tenium open Import in the sidebar, choose the UptimeRobot tab and paste the key. Alternatively upload the CSV export. You get a preview of the monitors and intervals before anything is created, and your alert contacts are listed so you can add them again. Maintenance windows, monitor types other than HTTP, keyword, ping, port and heartbeat, and HTTP authentication are not imported. On the Free plan, imported types that start on Starter (heartbeat, for example) are skipped and marked in the preview.
• Check the intervals. Anything you ran at 60 seconds will run at 60 seconds; if you want 30-second checks, that needs Pro.
• Recreate your status pages. These are not imported, so the public URL changes. If a status page lives on your own domain, change the CNAME to the target Tenium shows for that page, and expect the certificate to appear within about a minute of DNS propagating.
• Run both tools for a week. Compare incidents; if Tenium caught the same outages with fewer false alarms, cancel the old plan.

What does not carry across

Historic uptime percentages and response-time graphs stay in UptimeRobot, so export or screenshot anything a client contract refers to before you cancel. Email subscribers on a status page are not moved either, because subscribers should opt in again to a new page.

When you should not switch

Stay if your monitors fit comfortably in the free plan, if the mobile app is how you receive alerts, or if you depend on one of their account-level features that we have not mentioned here. Also stay if you are about to renegotiate or close a client and the monitoring history is part of that conversation. The move is cheap but it is not free of effort, and a tool that works is worth more than a tool that is slightly cheaper.