Checkmk Pro costs $3,300 a year in US dollars for 3,000 services, which Checkmk equates to about 100 hosts, and Checkmk Ultimate costs $4,800 for the same size. Both are yearly subscriptions sold in steps up to 30,000 services, where Pro reaches $16,500 and Ultimate $24,000. Checkmk Cloud, the hosted version, starts at $2,880 a year or $290 a month for 1,000 services. Checkmk Community is free.
Most price summaries for Checkmk still quote one "starting at" figure per edition, and several use edition names Checkmk retired with version 2.5. Below is the full US dollar sheet from Checkmk's own price calculator, every tier for every edition, the Cloud yearly and monthly rates, the Synthetic Monitoring add-on, and three bills worked out.
Paying Checkmk services for public websites?
HTTP, certificate and port checks on public endpoints count against your Checkmk service total. AlertPing Team checks 100 websites, APIs, ports and certificates every 30 seconds from 2 regions for $348 a year. See the plans and limits.
How much does Checkmk cost?
Self-hosted Checkmk Pro costs $3,300 to $16,500 a year and Ultimate costs $4,800 to $24,000, across five tiers from 3,000 to 30,000 services. Above 30,000 services you ask sales for a quote. Prices are billed annually, and professional support is included in every paid edition.
| Services (about hosts) | Pro per year | Ultimate per year | Ultimate with Multi-tenancy | Ultimate with 24x5 support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3,000 (100) | $3,300 | $4,800 | $5,100 | $19,800 |
| 6,000 (200) | $4,800 | $6,600 | $7,500 | $21,600 |
| 12,000 (400) | $7,800 | $11,100 | $12,600 | $26,100 |
| 18,000 (600) | $10,500 | $15,300 | $16,800 | $30,300 |
| 30,000 (1,000) | $16,500 | $24,000 | $26,400 | $39,000 |
| Above 30,000 | Quote | Quote | Quote | Quote |
Checkmk also lists the same tiers in euros, where Pro starts at €2,280 a year (€190 a month). The dollar prices are not a straight currency conversion, so US buyers should quote the dollar column. Pro includes 8x5 professional support and Ultimate 10x5. Upgrading Ultimate to 24x5 Premium support adds $15,000 a year at the smallest tier, which is the single biggest jump on the sheet.
Pro and Ultimate per year, by service tier
How much does Checkmk cost per host?
At 30 services per host, Checkmk Pro works out to $2.75 per host per month at the 100-host tier and $1.38 at the 1,000-host tier. Ultimate runs from $4.00 down to $2.00. Volume halves the unit price, but only if your hosts really carry 30 services each.
| About hosts | Pro per host per month | Ultimate per host per month |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | $2.75 | $4.00 |
| 200 | $2.00 | $2.75 |
| 400 | $1.63 | $2.31 |
| 600 | $1.46 | $2.13 |
| 1,000 | $1.38 | $2.00 |
How does Checkmk licensing count services?
Services are the contractual billing unit. A service is one monitored aspect of a host, such as CPU usage, a disk, a temperature sensor or a network port. A host is anything monitored as its own object, including servers, switches, SNMP devices, virtual machines and Docker containers.
The "hosts" on the price page are an estimate based on 30 services per host. A Linux server with the agent can exceed that easily once file systems, interfaces and processes are discovered. A public website watched only for HTTP status and certificate expiry might use 2 or 3. So count services in your own site before you pick a tier, not hosts.
What happened to Checkmk Enterprise pricing?
Checkmk renamed its editions. Raw became Community, Enterprise became Pro, the self-hosted Cloud edition became Ultimate, and MSP became Ultimate with Multi-tenancy. Versions 2.3 and 2.4 changed only the product titles, and 2.5 changed the package names as well. If an old quote says Checkmk Enterprise, today's equivalent is Pro at $3,300 a year for 3,000 services.
Checkmk Cloud pricing, yearly and monthly
Checkmk Cloud is the hosted SaaS edition. It is sold by services from a 1,000-service minimum to a 50,000-service cap, at $2,880 a year or $290 a month for the smallest size. A yearly contract saves 17% at the bottom and more than half at the top.
| Services (about hosts) | Yearly contract | Monthly contract | Monthly x 12 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 (33) | $2,880 | $290 | $3,480 |
| 2,000 (67) | $5,760 | $580 | $6,960 |
| 3,000 (100) | $8,526 | $870 | $10,440 |
| 5,000 (167) | $13,442 | $1,450 | $17,400 |
| 10,000 (333) | $23,043 | $2,900 | $34,800 |
| 30,000 (1,000) | $51,845 | $8,700 | $104,400 |
| 50,000 (1,667) | $72,008 | $14,500 | $174,000 |
Compare the 3,000-service line with the self-hosted sheet. Cloud costs $8,526 a year where Pro costs $3,300 and Ultimate $4,800. That gap, $3,726 a year against Ultimate, is the price of not running the Checkmk server yourself. Cloud includes 10x5 support and a 99.5% availability commitment.
Is Checkmk free?
Yes, in one edition. Checkmk Community is free and open source, and Checkmk positions it for up to about 100 hosts with community support only. The paid editions offer a 30-day trial. When a self-hosted trial expires, the installation keeps running in a free mode limited to 750 services and one site until you buy.
Checkmk Synthetic Monitoring pricing
Synthetic Monitoring, Checkmk's browser test option, is an add-on to Pro and Ultimate only. Three tests are free. Paid packs start at 15 tests for $1,980 a year, which is $11 per test per month, and fall to $2.80 per test per month at 1,000 tests.
| Tests | Per year | Per test per month |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | $0 | $0 |
| 15 | $1,980 | $11.00 |
| 50 | $6,599 | $11.00 |
| 100 | $11,880 | $9.90 |
| 200 | $18,479 | $7.70 |
| 500 | $27,399 | $4.57 |
| 1,000 | $33,600 | $2.80 |
Three Checkmk bills worked out
80 Linux servers on Pro
At about 30 services each, 80 servers use around 2,400 services and fit the 3,000 tier. That is $3,300 a year and $9,900 over three years, or $3.44 per server per month because 20 hosts' worth of headroom is paid for and unused.
250 hosts on Ultimate
250 hosts at 30 services is 7,500 services, which is past the 6,000 step. The bill is the 12,000 tier at $11,100 a year instead of $6,600 for 6,000. Trimming 1,500 services, through discovery rules or by moving some checks elsewhere, saves $4,500 a year.
190 internal servers plus 120 public endpoints on Pro
190 servers at 30 services use 5,700. Add 120 public websites and APIs at 3 services each and the total is 6,060, so the bill is the 12,000 tier at $7,800 a year. Move those endpoints to a hosted uptime monitor and 5,700 services fit the 6,000 tier at $4,800, a saving of $3,000 a year. AlertPing Business covers them with room to spare at $1,128 a year, so the net saving is $1,872 a year. If you are mid-contract, confirm with Checkmk sales that the renewal can drop a tier.
Costs the Checkmk price sheet does not include
The server. Self-hosted editions run on your own Linux server, Docker, an appliance or a marketplace instance in AWS or Azure. Hardware or cloud spend, backups and patching are yours. Appliances are a separate add-on.
Admin time. Somebody tunes discovery rules, upgrades versions and keeps notification rules current. On a busy site that is part of a job, not an afternoon.
Tier steps. 3,001 services means the 6,000 tier. A wave of new containers or interfaces can push the bill up by $1,500 a year on Pro's first step and by $8,700 on Ultimate's last one.
Custom metrics. Ultimate and Cloud include a custom metrics allotment. Extra metrics are priced by sales, and on Cloud, incoming data is blocked once you exceed the allotment by more than 100,000 metrics.
When Checkmk is worth the price
Checkmk earns its subscription on a dense internal estate: servers with agents, network gear over SNMP, Kubernetes and VMware, where each host really does carry dozens of services. It is a weak deal for public URLs, because a website that needs one HTTP check and one certificate check either wastes service headroom or pushes you over a tier step. For how other self-hosted tools price the same estate, see our Nagios XI pricing breakdown and PRTG pricing per sensor.
Cut the Checkmk bill by moving public endpoint checks out
Public websites, APIs, SSL certificates and open ports are better watched from outside your network anyway, because a Checkmk site in the same building or cloud account shares the outage. AlertPing checks them from US East and EU Central. Starter covers 20 monitors at 60-second checks for $288 a year, Team 100 monitors at 30 seconds for $348, and Business 500 monitors with SLA reports and an API for $1,128.
Be precise about the trade. AlertPing has no agent and does no SNMP, container or inventory monitoring, so it replaces the outside-in part of Checkmk and nothing else. The full side-by-side, including where Checkmk wins, is in our Checkmk alternative for public uptime checks.
If your estate is past 30,000 services, the price comes from a sales quote, so treat it like any other large purchase. Put the service counts, the tier you need and the renewal date into a procurement request before the call, so the quote is compared on the same numbers as the alternatives.
Checkmk pricing questions
Is Checkmk billed monthly or annually?
Self-hosted Pro and Ultimate are billed annually. Checkmk Cloud can be bought on a yearly contract or month to month; the monthly contract costs $290 a month at 1,000 services against $2,880 a year on the yearly one, so monthly billing costs about 21% more at the smallest size.
Can I upgrade from Checkmk Pro to Ultimate mid-contract?
Yes. Checkmk says you can move from Pro to Ultimate at any time without waiting for the contract to expire, and an upgrade from Community happens in place with hosts and configuration carried over. Both go through the sales team.
Does a Checkmk license cover AWS and Azure installs?
Yes. Checkmk Ultimate is listed on the AWS and Azure marketplaces with a bring-your-own-license model, so the same subscription covers sites you launch from either marketplace.