compare · alertping vs checkmk
Checkmk alternative for hosted website, API and port checks, with Checkmk alternatives compared
Short answer: Checkmk is built to watch servers, switches and containers from inside your network, and its paid self-hosted editions start at a 3,000-service minimum, which is $3,300 a year for Pro. If most of what you need is outside-in checks of public websites, APIs, ports and certificates, AlertPing Team does that every 30 seconds, confirming failures from a second region, for $348 a year, with no server to run.
Checkmk Pro, smallest tier
$3,300 / yr
AlertPing Team, 100 monitors
$348 / yr
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 2 regions · US East · EU Central
▸ 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 2/2 regions (US East, EU Central). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 2/2 regions . First fail: EU Central.
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 US East and EU Central regions.
3,000
services is the smallest Checkmk Pro or Ultimate purchase, which Checkmk equates to about 100 hosts
1,000
services is the smallest Checkmk Cloud subscription, $2,880 a year or $290 a month in USD
750
services and one site is what a self-hosted trial falls back to when its 30 days run out
2 regions
US East and EU Central check every AlertPing monitor on every plan
what you are licensing
Checkmk sells services, and public endpoints use very few of them
In Checkmk the contract counts services. A service is one monitored aspect of a host, such as CPU load, a disk, a temperature sensor or a network port. Checkmk's own rule of thumb is 30 services per host, which is how 3,000 services becomes "about 100 hosts" on the price page.
That ratio fits a Linux server with an agent. It does not fit a public website, which needs an HTTP check, a certificate check and maybe a port. If 40 public endpoints use about 3 services each, they fill 120 of the 3,000 services you must buy, and the rest of the license sits idle unless you also monitor internal servers with it.
The full tier sheet, Cloud pricing and the Synthetic Monitoring add-on are in our Checkmk pricing breakdown.
3,000-service minimum, filled two ways
The case the tier is designed for. Every service paid for is used.
4% used. The other 2,880 services are paid for and empty.
$348 a year on yearly billing, 30-second checks from 2 regions.
list prices in usd
What Checkmk costs per year and over three years compared with AlertPing
Checkmk publishes prices in euros and dollars. The figures below are its US dollar list prices at the smallest purchase size for each edition. Self-hosted editions are subscriptions billed annually. Cloud can be paid yearly or month to month, and the monthly contract costs about 21% more.
| Option, smallest size | Per month | Per year | 3 years | You run the server |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkmk Community, up to about 100 hosts | $0 | $0 | $0 | Yes |
| Checkmk Pro, 3,000 services | $275 | $3,300 | $9,900 | Yes |
| Checkmk Ultimate, 3,000 services | $400 | $4,800 | $14,400 | Yes |
| Checkmk Ultimate with Multi-tenancy, 3,000 services | $425 | $5,100 | $15,300 | Yes |
| Checkmk Cloud, 1,000 services, yearly | $240 | $2,880 | $8,640 | No |
| Checkmk Cloud, 1,000 services, monthly | $290 | $3,480 | $10,440 | No |
| AlertPing Starter, 20 monitors, 60 s | $24 | $288 | $864 | No |
| AlertPing Team, 100 monitors, 30 s | $29 | $348 | $1,044 | No |
| AlertPing Business, 500 monitors, 30 s | $94 | $1,128 | $3,384 | No |
| AlertPing Enterprise, 1,500 monitors, 15 s | $189 | $2,268 | $6,804 | No |
Checkmk per-month figures for self-hosted editions are the yearly price divided by 12. AlertPing figures are yearly billing; month to month is $49, $59, $189 and $378. Checkmk figures exclude the server, its operating system and the admin time to run it. Source: checkmk.com/pricing, USD view.
Three years at the smallest size each product sells
where the check starts
A Checkmk site sees your network from the inside, customers reach it from outside
A self-hosted Checkmk site runs its active checks, such as the HTTP and certificate checks, from the server it is installed on. That is ideal for hosts behind the firewall. For a public website it means the monitor shares the failure: when the uplink or the cloud region drops, the Checkmk site often drops with it and the alert never leaves.
Checkmk can place distributed sites in other locations, but each one is another server you install and patch. AlertPing re-runs a failed check from the second region before anyone is paged, so a bad route in one place does not wake the on-call engineer.
side by side
AlertPing vs Checkmk vs the usual Checkmk alternatives
Roundups of Checkmk alternatives list Zabbix, Nagios, PRTG, OpManager and Datadog. Most of them solve the same inside-the-network problem Checkmk does. The table shows where a hosted uptime monitor fits and where it does not.
| Capability | AlertPing | Checkmk Community | Checkmk Pro and Ultimate | Checkmk Cloud | Zabbix, Nagios, PRTG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Hosted, nothing to install | Your Linux server or Docker | Your server, appliance or AWS and Azure marketplace | Hosted by Checkmk | Your servers; PRTG also hosted |
| Where public checks start | US East, EU Central | Your Checkmk server | Your Checkmk sites | Checkmk's platform plus your agents | Your servers or probes |
| Billing unit | Flat per plan, by monitor count | Free | Services, 3,000 minimum | Services, 1,000 minimum | Free core; PRTG by sensor |
| Smallest paid price | $288 a year | None | $3,300 a year | $2,880 a year | PRTG $2,400 a year |
| HTTP, ping, TCP port, SSL expiry | Yes | Yes, as active checks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fastest check interval | 60 s Starter, 30 s Team and Business, 15 s Enterprise | You configure it | You configure it, under 1 minute | Under 1 minute | You configure it |
| CPU, disk, SNMP, containers | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Browser journeys | No | No | Synthetic Monitoring add-on | No | Varies |
| Public status pages | Yes, on every plan | Not a listed feature | Not a listed feature | Not a listed feature | Varies, often a separate product |
| Who patches it | We do | You do | You do | Checkmk does | You do, except hosted PRTG |
PRTG figure from our PRTG pricing breakdown. Zabbix Cloud and support costs are in our Zabbix pricing breakdown. Checkmk capability rows from the feature list on checkmk.com/pricing.
checkmk vs nagios
Checkmk vs Nagios when you only need the outside view
Checkmk began life as an add-on for Nagios, and the two still look alike from a distance: a Linux server, agents or SNMP on the hosts, and active checks for anything with a URL. The commercial pricing differs. Nagios XI sells a perpetual license per node with a yearly renewal, and Checkmk sells a yearly subscription per service.
For the public half of the job, the answer is the same for both. A hosted monitor checks from several regions and needs no server. Our Nagios alternative comparison works through the node math for Nagios XI, and the server monitoring page shows which server checks an outside monitor can and cannot do.
about 100 hosts, year one and after
- Nagios XI Standard, 100 nodes
- $2,595, then $2,104 / yr
- Checkmk Pro, 3,000 services
- $3,300 / yr
- Checkmk Ultimate, 3,000 services
- $4,800 / yr
- AlertPing Team, 100 monitors
- $348 / yr
Not a like-for-like trade: Nagios and Checkmk cover internal metrics we do not. The point is what you pay for the public checks if they sit inside one of those licenses.
read this before you switch
What AlertPing does not replace in Checkmk
- No agent, so no CPU, memory, disk, process or log checks on your hosts.
- No SNMP polling of switches, firewalls, storage or UPS units, and no auto-discovery of services.
- No Kubernetes, Docker or VMware monitoring, and no hardware or software inventory.
- No checks of hosts that are only reachable behind your firewall, and no scripted browser journeys.
If you need those, Checkmk Community covers small estates at no license cost, and the paid editions earn their price on large internal ones. Use AlertPing for the public side, the status page and the phone alert when the site is down for real.
migration
How to move public checks out of Checkmk before your renewal
Checkmk tiers step from 3,000 to 6,000 to 12,000 services. Moving public endpoints out only lowers the bill if it drops you below a step, so count services first. At 6,000 services Pro costs $4,800 a year and at 3,000 it costs $3,300, a $1,500 difference that covers AlertPing Business with $372 left.
If you are on Checkmk Community, the reason to move is not the license. It is the server that has to stay up for the alert to go out, and the public status page that is not part of Checkmk's feature list. Our best uptime monitoring tools comparison prices the hosted field if you want a second opinion.
-
1
List services on public hosts
Filter Checkmk for HTTP, certificate, ping and TCP services on hosts with a public IP or FQDN, and note the service count.
-
2
Recreate them as monitors
One monitor per URL or host and check type, with the same expected status code, keyword and certificate warning days.
-
3
Copy notification rules
Checkmk contact groups and notification rules become escalation chains with delays and on-call hours.
-
4
Run both for two weeks
Compare alerts. A second-region confirm should cut the single-site false alarms Checkmk raises when its own link blips.
-
5
Remove the services, then size the renewal
Delete the moved services and check whether your count now fits a smaller tier before the contract renews.
who should switch
The right Checkmk alternative depends on what your services watch
move to alertping
Mostly public endpoints
Your Checkmk site mainly runs HTTP, certificate and port checks against websites and APIs, and nobody wants to own the server. Team covers 100 monitors for $348 a year.
split the job
Servers inside, customers outside
Keep Checkmk for agents, SNMP and containers. Move public checks and the status page to AlertPing so the alert still fires when your own network is the outage.
stay where you are
Almost everything is internal
A hosted uptime monitor saves you little. Compare self-hosted suites instead, as in our SolarWinds alternatives guide.
questions buyers ask
Checkmk alternative questions
What is the best alternative to Checkmk?
It depends on what Checkmk watches for you. For internal servers, SNMP devices and containers, Zabbix, Nagios, PRTG and OpManager are the usual alternatives. For public websites, APIs, ports and certificates, a hosted monitor such as AlertPing replaces the job without a server, checking every 30 seconds and confirming failures from a second region for $348 a year on the Team plan.
Is Checkmk free?
Checkmk Community is free and open source, and Checkmk positions it for up to about 100 hosts. Pro, Ultimate and Cloud are paid subscriptions. A self-hosted trial runs for 30 days, then falls back to a free mode limited to 750 services and one site until you buy a subscription.
How much does Checkmk cost?
In US dollars, Checkmk Pro costs $3,300 a year for 3,000 services, about 100 hosts, and Ultimate costs $4,800. The largest listed tier is 30,000 services at $16,500 for Pro and $24,000 for Ultimate. Checkmk Cloud starts at $2,880 a year or $290 a month for 1,000 services.
What happened to Checkmk Raw and Enterprise?
Checkmk renamed its editions. Raw became Community, Enterprise became Pro, the self-hosted Cloud edition became Ultimate, and MSP became Ultimate with Multi-tenancy. The 2.5 release changed the package names too. So a search for Checkmk Enterprise pricing today means the Pro price, $3,300 a year at the smallest tier.
Is Checkmk better than Zabbix?
Both are mature self-hosted tools for internal infrastructure, and the choice usually comes down to how much tuning you want to do. Zabbix is open source without a paid license tier and sells support separately. Checkmk has a free Community edition and paid editions billed per service. Neither checks your public site from outside your own network unless you deploy probes elsewhere.
Does Checkmk monitor websites?
Yes. Checkmk runs HTTP and certificate checks as active checks from the Checkmk server, and Pro and Ultimate add a Synthetic Monitoring option for browser tests with 3 tests free. The limit is location: the checks start where your Checkmk site runs, so they do not show how a customer elsewhere reaches you.
Can AlertPing monitor servers behind a firewall?
No. AlertPing checks from US East and EU Central, so it only sees what is reachable from the internet. It has no agent and does no SNMP polling. Keep Checkmk for internal hosts and use AlertPing for public websites, APIs, ports, certificates and cron heartbeats.
How do I switch from Checkmk to a hosted monitor?
Filter Checkmk for HTTP, certificate, ping and TCP services on public hosts, recreate each as a monitor and copy notification rules into escalation chains. Run both for two weeks, then delete the moved services and check whether your service count fits a smaller Checkmk tier before renewal.
how we page you
Two regions have to agree
A single failed probe never wakes anybody. A second region, US East or EU Central, re-checks 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
Email, Slack and webhook alerts are unlimited on every plan, SMS comes with a monthly allowance, 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 both regions. No agent, no config file, nothing to deploy on your side.
Public uptime checks without a Checkmk site to keep alive
Websites, APIs, ping hosts, ports, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats, confirmed from a second region. Team watches 100 monitors every 30 seconds for $59 a month.