compare · alertping vs checkly
Checkly alternative without per-run billing: Checkly alternatives, pricing and competitors compared
Short answer: Checkly sells check executions, not monitors, and that single billing decision is why people go looking for a Checkly alternative. Its $24 Starter plan includes 25,000 API runs a month, which is 0.57 of one endpoint checked every minute, and one Playwright browser journey at the same frequency costs $175.33 a month in run fees on top of the plan. AlertPing bills flat: 20 monitors for $19 a month, 100 with 30-second checks for $59, 500 for $189, and the bill does not move with how often anything runs. If what you actually need is scripted multi-step Playwright testing in CI, keep Checkly. Nothing here replaces that.
Checkly plan prices and run rates read from checklyhq.com, annual-billed column
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN
▸ waiting…▌
queued probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
Simulation, not a measurement of your site: this preview runs entirely in your browser and the latencies are generated from the domain you typed. Real checks on your monitors run from our Frankfurt, Virginia and Singapore regions.
the honest frame
Two different products that share one job
Checkly is a code-first synthetic monitoring platform. You write Playwright scripts, keep them in a repository, deploy them with a CLI and run them from 22 locations. That is a developer tooling product, and it is a good one. AlertPing is external availability monitoring: is the URL, the API, the port, the certificate and the scheduled job up, and who gets woken when it is not.
Where they genuinely overlap
Uptime monitors and single-request API checks. If your Checkly account is mostly URL monitors plus a handful of endpoint assertions, you are paying a synthetic testing platform to do availability monitoring, and the run meter is charging you for the privilege.
Where they do not overlap at all
Playwright Check Suites, scripted browser journeys, monitoring as code, CI-triggered checks and private locations inside your own network. AlertPing does none of that and is not trying to. If those are load-bearing for you, this page is not your answer.
Why anyone switches
A bill that changes when you change a frequency. Raising one check from five minutes to one minute multiplies its run count by five, and nothing on the plan page warns you before the invoice does.
checkly pricing
Checkly pricing in full, as the pricing page states it
Read from checklyhq.com in September 2026. Every price below is the annual-billed column, which is what the page serves. Checkly does offer monthly billing behind a toggle and advertises a saving of up to 20% for paying yearly, but those monthly figures are rendered by script rather than served in the page, so we do not publish a number we cannot read. Assume monthly is higher and confirm at checkout.
| Line item | Hobby | Starter | Team | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month, annual billed | $0 | $24 | $64 | Quoted |
| Same, per year | $0 | $288 | $768 | Quoted |
| Uptime monitors included | 10 | 50 | 75 | Custom |
| API check runs per month | 10,000 | 25,000 | 100,000 | Custom |
| Browser check runs per month | 1,000 | 3,000 | 12,000 | Custom |
| Users | 1 | 3 | 10 | Custom |
| Public locations | 6 | 6 | 22 | 22 |
| Fastest check frequency | 2 min | 1 min | 30 sec | 1 sec |
| SMS credits per month | 0 | 100 | 200 | Custom |
| Phone credits per month | 0 | 0 | 200 | Custom |
| AI root cause invocations | 10 | 50 | 150 | Custom |
| Raw data retention | 7 days | 7 days | 30 days | 180 days |
| Extra monitors | Not offered | $8 per 25 | $8 per 25 | Custom |
| Prepaid browser runs | Not offered | $4.00 per 1k | $4.00 per 1k | Custom |
| Prepaid API runs | Not offered | $1.80 per 10k | $1.80 per 10k | Custom |
| Automatic overage, browser | Not offered | $6.50 per 1k | $6.25 per 1k | Custom |
| Automatic overage, API | Not offered | $2.60 per 10k | $2.50 per 10k | Custom |
The cheapest line on the card is the monitor
Extra uptime monitors cost $8 for a block of 25, which is $0.32 each, and the price is identical on Starter and Team. At the plan level Checkly Starter works out at $0.48 per included monitor against $0.95 on our own $19 Starter, so on pure monitor count at the entry tier Checkly is cheaper and we will not pretend otherwise. The picture inverts one tier up, where Checkly Team is $0.85 per monitor and AlertPing Team is $0.59.
Not prepaying is a 62.5% surcharge
Prepaid browser runs are $4.00 per thousand. Let the plan spill over instead and automatic overage bills $6.50 per thousand on Starter and $6.25 on Team, which is 62.5% and 56.2% more for exactly the same execution. API runs carry the same structure: $1.80 per 10,000 prepaid against $2.60 and $2.50, so 44.4% and 38.9% more. There is no volume discount at either tier. Starter and Team pay the identical prepaid rate.
the run meter
What an included run allowance actually buys you
A run allowance is a number of executions, so its value depends entirely on frequency, and frequency is the one setting nobody thinks of as a pricing decision. The table below converts each allowance into the only unit that matters when you are sizing a plan: how many checks it covers for a full month at a given interval. A month here is 43,833 minutes, the average calendar month, and a figure below 1.00 means the allowance cannot keep a single check running to the end of the month.
| Interval | Runs per check per month | API checks covered, Starter | API checks covered, Team | Browser checks covered, Starter | Browser checks covered, Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every 30 seconds | 87,666 | 0.29 | 1.14 | 0.03 | 0.14 |
| Every minute | 43,833 | 0.57 | 2.28 | 0.07 | 0.27 |
| Every 5 minutes | 8,767 | 2.85 | 11.41 | 0.34 | 1.37 |
| Every 10 minutes | 4,383 | 5.70 | 22.81 | 0.68 | 2.74 |
| Every 15 minutes | 2,922 | 8.56 | 34.22 | 1.03 | 4.11 |
| Every 30 minutes | 1,461 | 17.11 | 68.44 | 2.05 | 8.21 |
| Every hour | 731 | 34.22 | 136.88 | 4.11 | 16.43 |
Starter cannot cover one endpoint checked every minute
This is the number that surprises people, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. One API check at a 1-minute interval executes 43,833 times a month. Starter includes 25,000 runs. That is 57% of one check, so a single minute-by-minute endpoint exhausts the plan allowance around day 17 and meters for the rest of the month. Checkly permits a 1-minute interval on Starter, so nothing stops you configuring it. The plan simply is not sized for it.
One browser journey costs more than the plan it runs on
At $4.00 per thousand prepaid, one Playwright journey at 1-minute frequency is $175.33 a month, which is 7.3 times the entire $24 Starter fee and 2.7 times Team's whole annual cost when you run it for a year at $2,104. Fall through to Starter overage and the same journey is $284.91 a month. Five minutes brings it to $35.07 and an hour to $2.92. The interval, not the plan, is the price.
The detail that quietly doubles a bill: suite duration is billable
Checkly's Playwright Check Suites bill one browser check per 30 seconds of runtime, rounded up. Checkly's own documentation gives the example: a 45-second suite counts as two runs. So a suite that grows from 28 seconds to 32 seconds as you add assertions has just doubled its own cost, with no configuration change and no warning. On a per-monitor product that is not a thing you can do. On a per-execution product, writing a slower test is a purchasing decision.
read the plan table twice
Checkly prices four modules, and the headline covers one
The plan-details table on checklyhq.com is split into four modules, and each one prints its own price rather than a shared plan price. Detect is $0, $24 and $64. Platform shows the same $0, $24 and $64. Communicate, which is status pages and dashboards, shows $0, $9 and $30. Resolve, the AI root cause analysis, shows $0, $12 and $39.
| Module | What it covers | Hobby | Starter | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Detect | Monitors and check runs | $0 | $24 | $64 |
| Platform | Locations, users, retention | $0 | $24 | $64 |
| Communicate | Status pages and dashboards | $0 | $9 | $30 |
| Resolve | AI root cause analysis | $0 | $12 | $39 |
| If Communicate and Resolve are additive | Fully loaded monthly | $0 | $45 | $133 |
| Same, per year | Against a $288 and $768 headline | $0 | $540 | $1,596 |
Checkly does not state on the pricing page whether Communicate and Resolve are included in the plan fee or charged on top of it, and we are not going to guess on your behalf. Both readings are available from the page as published. If they are additive, Starter is really $45 a month and Team is really $133, which is 87.5% and 107.8% above the headline, or $540 and $1,596 a year against $288 and $768. Ask Checkly to confirm before you sign, because a status page is the sort of thing people assume is bundled. On AlertPing, status pages are on every plan and there is no second line to reconcile.
side by side
AlertPing vs Checkly, feature by feature
Scored on availability monitoring only. On Playwright authoring, CI integration and scripted journeys Checkly wins every row, because we do not compete there.
| Capability | AlertPing | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Billing model | Flat per plan, monitor count only | Plan fee plus metered check runs |
| Entry price | $19 a month, $180 a year | $24 a month annual billed, $288 a year |
| Monitors at entry | 20 | 50 |
| Monitors at the middle tier | 100 for $59 | 75 for $64 |
| Cost per monitor, middle tier | $0.59 | $0.85 |
| Does frequency change the bill | No | Yes, linearly |
| Fastest interval | 30 seconds on Team, 15 on Enterprise | 1 minute on Starter, 30 seconds on Team |
| Free plan | None | Hobby, 10 monitors |
| Scripted browser journeys | Not offered | Playwright, first class |
| Monitoring as code and CLI | Not offered | Yes |
| Private locations | Not offered | Team and above |
| Public check locations | 3 confirming regions | 6 on Starter, 22 on Team |
| TCP and UDP port checks | Every plan | Limited |
| SSL certificate expiry | Every plan | Yes |
| Cron and heartbeat checks | Every plan | Yes |
| SMS alerts | Unlimited on every plan | 100 on Starter, 200 on Team, then credits |
| Phone call alerts | Enterprise | 200 credits on Team |
| Status pages | 1 on Starter, 5 on Team, 20 on Business | Priced under a separate module |
| Status page custom domain | Business, $189 | Yes |
| Raw retention | Full history on plan | 7 days, 30 on Team |
where they win
Six things Checkly does that we do not
If any two of these matter to you, stop reading and stay on Checkly. A comparison page that cannot name what the other product is better at is a brochure.
Real Playwright journeys
Log in, add to cart, check out, assert on the confirmation. Checkly runs genuine Playwright against a real browser. AlertPing checks single requests and asserts on the response. It cannot tell you a checkout flow broke at step four.
Monitoring as code
Checks live in your repository, get reviewed in pull requests and deploy with the CLI. For a team that treats monitoring config as software, that is worth real money and we offer no equivalent.
A free tier that is usable
Hobby gives 10 monitors, 10,000 API runs and 1,000 browser runs for nothing. We have no free plan at all. If free is the requirement, we are not the answer and Checkly is a better one than most.
22 locations and private probes
Team unlocks all 22 public locations plus private locations that reach inside your own network. We check from three regions and only from the public internet.
CI-triggered checks
Run the same suite as a deployment gate and as a production monitor. That single artifact serving two jobs is the strongest argument for Checkly and it has nothing to do with uptime.
A one-second interval, if you buy it
Enterprise goes to one second. Our floor is 15 seconds on Enterprise and 30 on Team. Be aware what a one-second interval does to a per-execution meter before you ask for it.
who buys which
Six situations and the honest recommendation for each
You have 40 URLs and no scripts
Take AlertPing. Forty endpoints checked every minute is 1.75 million runs a month on Checkly's meter and $297.60 a month in prepaid API runs on top of the Team plan. Here it is $59 a month with 30-second checks and the frequency is free.
Your checkout is the thing that breaks
Stay on Checkly. A multi-step purchase flow needs a real browser driving real steps, and a status-code check on the cart page will pass happily while payment is broken. Run the journey every 15 minutes rather than every minute and the meter stays sane.
You want both, cheaply
Run both, and split by job. Keep three or four Playwright journeys on Checkly Hobby or Starter at a slow interval, and move the fifty plain availability checks onto a flat plan. The metered product then only meters the thing that genuinely needs a browser.
Your Checkly bill jumped and nobody changed a plan
Look at frequencies and at suite runtime before you look at anything else. A check moved from 10 minutes to 1 minute is a tenfold increase in that line, and a Playwright suite that crossed 30 seconds of runtime doubled. Neither shows up as a plan change.
You are an agency watching client sites
Take AlertPing Business. Five hundred monitors for $189 a month is $0.38 each with SLA reports, 20 status pages and a custom domain. On Checkly the equivalent monitor count is an Enterprise conversation, and the run meter scales with every client you add.
You are one developer with a side project
Take Checkly Hobby. It is free, it gives you 10 monitors and it lets you write real Playwright. We have no free plan and would be the wrong recommendation. Come back when the project has customers who notice downtime.
moving the flat part
How to move the availability half off a run meter in an afternoon
You are not migrating Checkly. You are separating the checks that need a browser from the checks that do not, and putting the second group somewhere the frequency is free.
Step one
Sort by what the check asserts
Anything whose whole assertion is a status code, a keyword, a JSON field or a response time budget does not need a browser. In most accounts that is the large majority of the checks and nearly all of the run volume.
Step two
Price the two halves separately
Multiply each remaining browser check by 43,833 divided by its interval in minutes, times $4.00 per thousand. That number is what the browser half genuinely costs, and it is usually the whole bill.
Step three
Rebuild the simple checks flat
Recreate the URL, API, port, certificate and heartbeat checks on a flat plan and set the interval you actually wanted rather than the one the meter allowed. Point alerts at the same Slack channel and on-call rota first.
Step four
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the Checkly checks live and muted for a month, compare what each side caught, then downgrade the Checkly plan to whatever the surviving browser journeys need. Never delete monitoring you have not yet replaced.
questions people ask
Checkly alternatives, answered
What is the best Checkly alternative?
It depends which half of Checkly you are replacing. For Playwright journeys and monitoring as code the closest substitutes are Datadog Synthetics, New Relic scripted browsers and Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring, all of which also meter per execution. For plain availability of URLs, APIs, ports and certificates, a flat-rate checker like AlertPing at $19 to $189 a month removes the meter entirely. No single product is a clean swap for both halves.
How much does Checkly cost?
Hobby is $0, Starter is $24 a month and Team is $64 a month on annual billing, so $288 and $768 a year, with Enterprise quoted. On top of that sit metered check runs at $4.00 per thousand browser and $1.80 per 10,000 API when prepaid, rising to $6.50 and $2.60 on Starter if you do not prepay. Extra uptime monitors are $8 per block of 25. The full Checkly rate card is broken down here.
Is Checkly expensive?
The plan fee is not, the executions are. Starter at $24 is competitive on monitor count, working out at $0.48 per included uptime monitor. What makes bills large is frequency: one Playwright journey at a 1-minute interval is $175.33 a month in run fees, which is 7.3 times the plan it sits on. Teams that keep browser checks at 15 minutes or slower rarely find Checkly expensive.
Is there a free alternative to Checkly?
Checkly is itself the free option for many people, since Hobby permanently includes 10 monitors, 10,000 API runs and 1,000 browser runs. Beyond that the open source route is Uptime Kuma or Grafana k6 self-hosted, at the cost of running and patching them. AlertPing has no free plan, so it is not the answer when free is the requirement.
Does Checkly charge per check or per monitor?
Both, on separate lines. Uptime monitors are counted against a plan limit of 10, 50 or 75 and top up at $8 per 25. API and browser checks are billed per execution against a monthly run allowance. That split is the single most important thing to understand before sizing a plan, because the monitor count is the cheap number and the run count is the one that moves.
Why did my Checkly bill go up without changing plan?
Almost always frequency or suite runtime. Moving a check from 10 minutes to 1 minute multiplies its executions by ten. A Playwright Check Suite bills one browser check per 30 seconds of runtime rounded up, so a suite that grew past 30 seconds now costs double. Spilling past the allowance without prepaying adds a further 62.5% on browser runs at the Starter tier.
Can I use Checkly just for uptime monitoring?
You can, and at 50 monitors for $24 it prices well for that on paper. The mismatch is that you are buying a synthetic testing platform, paying for Playwright infrastructure you never use, and accepting a 7-day raw retention window below the Team tier. Confirm with Checkly whether your uptime monitors also draw from the API run allowance, because the pricing page does not say.
Checkly vs AlertPing, which is cheaper?
For monitor count alone at the entry tier, Checkly, at $0.48 per monitor against our $0.95. For anything checked frequently, AlertPing, because our price does not move with interval. The crossover is fast: at 40 endpoints checked every minute Checkly adds $297.60 a month in prepaid run fees on top of Team, while our figure stays $59. See how uptime monitoring pricing models compare.
keep reading
Related comparisons and pricing breakdowns
how we page you
Three regions have to agree
A single failed probe never wakes anybody. Frankfurt, Virginia and Singapore all re-check first, so a hiccup on one route is not a 3am phone call.
what a plan covers
SMS is in the price, not in credits
SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts are unlimited on every plan, and each plan hosts status pages. No credit packs, no per-message fee, no per-monitor math.
how setup works
One URL, no agent to install
Paste the address, choose where alerts go, and the first check runs from all three regions. No agent, no config file, nothing to deploy on your side.
Availability monitoring with no execution meter to model
Websites, APIs, ICMP hosts, TCP and UDP ports, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats, confirmed from three regions before anyone is paged. Flat from $19 a month, with 30-second checks from $59.