compare · alertping vs hetrixtools

HetrixTools alternative with 30-second checks: HetrixTools pricing, plans and free tier limits compared

Short answer: HetrixTools is cheaper than AlertPing at every tier and has a free plan we do not match, so if budget is the deciding factor, stay where you are. There is one hard limit worth knowing before you commit: HetrixTools checks no faster than once a minute on any plan, and its SMS alerts run on purchased credits at $0.10 each. AlertPing runs 30-second checks from the $59 Team plan, confirms every failure from three named regions before paging anyone, and never meters SMS. HetrixTools also does three things we do not do at all: blacklist monitoring, server resource monitoring through an agent, and domain expiry tracking.

Run a check first ▸

Last updated August 2026 · HetrixTools pricing verified in USD against US listings and vendor documentation

alertping ▸ run check

live

▸ type a domain and run a real-feel check

▸ probes from 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN

▸ waiting…▌

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.

the honest frame

HetrixTools is cheaper and broader. Here is the one thing it cannot do.

Most pages like this one open by explaining why the competitor is bad. HetrixTools is not bad. It is a well-built tool with a free lifetime plan, twelve monitoring locations, and a feature range that genuinely exceeds ours in three directions. Its entry paid plan is $9.95 a month against our $19. On price and on breadth, there is no argument to make.

The reason a team moves is almost always the same one: HetrixTools has a one-minute floor on its check interval and no plan lifts it. If your SLA is written in a way that a 60-second sampling rate cannot evidence, or if a minute of unnoticed downtime costs real money, that floor is a wall rather than a preference. Everything else on this page is detail. That is the decision.

A one-minute floor, on every plan

HetrixTools documents that it checks uptime monitors "as often as every minute". Paying more buys more monitors and more API calls, not a faster interval. AlertPing runs 60-second checks on Starter, 30-second checks from Team upward, and 15-second checks on Enterprise. If you only need minute resolution, this difference is worth nothing to you.

SMS on credits versus SMS included

HetrixTools gives each paid plan a monthly SMS credit allowance and charges a flat $0.10 per credit beyond it. One credit is consumed per phone number per notification, so a three-person on-call list burns three credits per alert. AlertPing includes SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts on every plan with nothing to top up, so a bad month bills the same as a quiet one.

Three named confirming regions

Every failed check is re-run from Virginia, Frankfurt and Singapore before anyone is paged. HetrixTools spreads checks across twelve locations, which is better coverage than ours, but it publishes no rule for how many nodes must agree before it fires. Coverage and quorum are different things, and only one of them can go in a runbook.

hetrixtools pricing

HetrixTools pricing in full, in US dollars

HetrixTools sells uptime monitoring and blacklist monitoring as two separate subscriptions on parallel price lists. The table below is the uptime monitor list, billed monthly. Annual billing gives two months free, so the effective monthly rate is the figure in brackets. HetrixTools quotes in USD, so none of these are converted numbers.

Plan	Price	Interval	Locations	SMS	White label
Free	$0 forever	1 minute	Limited subset	No	No
Professional	$9.95/mo billed monthly ($8.29 billed annually)	1 minute	12	Monthly credit allowance	No
Business	$19.95/mo billed monthly ($16.63 billed annually)	1 minute	12	Larger allowance	Yes
Enterprise	$49.95/mo billed monthly ($41.63 billed annually)	1 minute	12	Largest allowance	Yes

What we could not verify, and are not going to guess

HetrixTools blocks automated fetches of its pricing page, so the figures above are reconciled from US software listings and HetrixTools' own documentation rather than read directly off the rate card. Third-party listings put Professional at around 30 uptime monitors and Enterprise at around 200 of each monitor type, but those counts move with promotions and we could not confirm them at source, so treat them as indicative. We also found per-plan SMS credit allowances quoted in older write-ups and have deliberately left the numbers out, because the ones in circulation date from an earlier price list. Confirm anything decision-critical on the vendor's own page before you buy.

What sits outside the plan price

$0.10 per SMS credit beyond the monthly allowance, charged per recipient per alert.
Blacklist monitoring is a separate subscription on its own price list, not an add-on to the uptime plan.
White labeling and sub-accounts begin on Business, which is the plan built for hosting resellers.
Server resource monitoring needs an agent installed on each machine you want covered.

side by side

AlertPing vs HetrixTools, feature by feature

HetrixTools' figures come from its documentation and US listings and can change, so confirm anything decision-critical before you sign. Ours are on the uptime monitoring pricing page.

	AlertPing	HetrixTools
Free plan	No, free trial only	Yes: 15 uptime and 15 server monitors, forever
Entry paid plan	$19/mo, 20 monitors, 60-second checks	$9.95/mo, 1-minute checks
Fastest interval available	15 seconds on Enterprise, 30 seconds from Team	1 minute, on every plan including Enterprise
Check locations	3 regions (Virginia, Frankfurt, Singapore)	12 worldwide locations
Published confirmation rule	Yes: all 3 regions re-run a failure before paging	Not published
SMS alerts	Unmetered on every plan, no credit balance	Monthly credit allowance, $0.10 per credit after
SSL certificate monitoring	Every plan	Yes
Domain expiry monitoring	No	Yes
Blacklist monitoring	No	Yes, across roughly 100 RBLs, separate subscription
Server resource monitoring	No, external checks only	Yes, via an installed agent (CPU, RAM, disk)
API assertions	Status code, keyword, JSON path, response-time budget	Status code and keyword
Escalation chains and on-call hours	From Team ($59/mo)	Not offered
SLA reports	From Business ($189/mo)	Uptime reports, not SLA reporting
White labeling and sub-accounts	No	Yes, from Business ($19.95/mo)
Status pages	1 on Starter, 5 branded on Team, custom domain on Business	Public status pages included
Scripted browser flows	No	No

where they win

Four reasons to stay on HetrixTools

If any of these describe you, switching would be a downgrade. We would rather you read this than sign up and churn in a month.

You need blacklist monitoring

HetrixTools watches your IPs and domains against roughly a hundred realtime blackhole lists and tells you the moment one of them lists you. For anyone running mail servers, this is the whole product, and we do not offer it in any form. There is no version of this comparison where we win that argument.

You want server resource metrics

HetrixTools ships an agent that reports CPU, RAM and disk from inside the box, so you see a server filling its disk before it takes the site down. AlertPing checks from the outside only. We will tell you the site is down; HetrixTools can tell you why it is about to be.

You resell monitoring to clients

White labeling and sub-accounts start at $19.95 a month on HetrixTools Business, which is aimed squarely at hosting resellers. We have no white-label product at any price. Agencies that need our alerting anyway usually run one account and share status pages instead, which we cover on agency uptime monitoring.

A minute is fast enough, and free is the budget

Plenty of sites do not need sub-minute detection. If a one-minute check meets your obligations and you are monitoring fifteen things, HetrixTools does that for nothing, forever. Paying us $19 a month for the same outcome would be a worse decision, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

the interval math

When does a one-minute floor actually cost you something?

The honest answer is: less often than vendors imply, and more often than you would guess. A check interval is a sampling rate, so it sets the smallest outage you can reliably see and it adds an average of half an interval to every detection. Here is what that means against the uptime targets people actually sign, using an average month of 30.44 days (43,833 minutes).

Monthly target	Downtime allowed per month	Average detection delay at 60s	Average detection delay at 30s	Share of the budget spent just noticing
99.0%	7h 18m	30 seconds	15 seconds	Negligible
99.9%	43m 50s	30 seconds	15 seconds	About 1%
99.95%	21m 54s	30 seconds	15 seconds	About 2%
99.99%	4m 23s	30 seconds	15 seconds	About 11%
99.999%	26s	30 seconds	15 seconds	Exceeds the budget

Read the bottom two rows carefully, because they are where the floor bites. At a 99.99% target you have 4 minutes and 23 seconds of downtime for the whole month, and a 60-second sampling rate spends roughly a ninth of that budget before anyone has been told. At five nines the arithmetic stops working entirely: your entire monthly allowance is shorter than the average time a one-minute monitor takes to notice. No monitoring vendor can evidence a target its own sampling rate cannot resolve, and that includes us at 30 seconds. We walk through the same arithmetic in more depth on SLA monitoring and in what counts as a good uptime percentage.

The practical test is simple. If nobody has ever asked you to prove uptime in writing, a one-minute interval is fine and HetrixTools is the cheaper tool. If a customer contract, a procurement questionnaire or an internal error budget puts a number on it, check whether that number survives a 60-second sample before you renew.

who buys which

A shortlist, including the tools that beat both of us

HetrixTools is not the only thing you should be comparing. This is the honest shortlist for the jobs people are usually trying to do when they land here.

If this is your situation	Buy	Why
Mail servers, IP reputation matters	HetrixTools	Blacklist monitoring across roughly 100 RBLs. Nothing here replaces it.
Fifteen monitors, no written SLA	HetrixTools free	Free forever at one-minute checks. Paying anyone is a downgrade in value.
You resell monitoring under your own brand	HetrixTools Business	White labeling and sub-accounts at $19.95/mo billed monthly.
A contract puts a number on your uptime	AlertPing	30-second checks, three-region confirmation, SLA reports from $189/mo.
Alert volume is unpredictable and SMS bills sting	AlertPing	Unmetered SMS on every plan, so the invoice does not track your worst week.
You need to script a login and a checkout	Neither	Neither tool runs browser flows. Use a Playwright-based synthetic vendor.
Only cron jobs and background workers	Healthchecks.io	Heartbeat-only tooling costs a fraction of a full monitoring plan.
Full APM with traces and RUM	Datadog	Neither of us does application performance monitoring at all.

switching

How to move off HetrixTools without a blind window

Step 1

Export the monitor list first

Pull your monitors out through the HetrixTools API rather than copying them from the dashboard. You want the target URL, the expected status code and any keyword assertion, because those are the parts people forget and then discover missing during an incident.

Step 2

Run both tools for two weeks

Keep HetrixTools running while AlertPing is live. Two weeks of overlap is enough to catch a mismatched assertion or a firewall rule that blocks one set of probe IPs but not the other. It costs one extra month of the cheaper plan and it removes the only real risk in switching.

Step 3

Allowlist the new probes

If you allowlisted HetrixTools' check IPs at your firewall or WAF, do the same for ours before you cut over, or your first alert will be a false one. Behind Cloudflare there are extra wrinkles, which we cover in Cloudflare uptime monitoring.

Step 4

Keep what we do not replace

If you used blacklist or server-agent monitoring, keep the HetrixTools free plan running for those after you move the uptime checks. Two tools at $19 and $0 is a perfectly sensible outcome, and it beats picking one tool that does neither job properly.

questions people ask

HetrixTools questions, answered straight

How much does HetrixTools cost?

HetrixTools uptime monitoring costs $0 on the free plan, $9.95 a month for Professional, $19.95 for Business and $49.95 for Enterprise, all billed monthly in USD. Annual billing gives two months free, so Professional works out at about $8.29 a month. Blacklist monitoring is a separate subscription with its own price list.

Is HetrixTools free?

Yes. HetrixTools has a free lifetime plan with 15 uptime monitors and 15 server monitors, which is one of the more generous free tiers in this category. The limits are email-based alerting, a reduced set of check locations, and the same one-minute interval as every paid plan. There is no trial clock on it.

What is the best HetrixTools alternative?

It depends which part of HetrixTools you are replacing. For faster checks and a documented confirmation rule, AlertPing is the direct swap at $19 to $59 a month. For blacklist monitoring there is no clean substitute, so keep HetrixTools for that. If you only need cron heartbeats, a Healthchecks.io alternative costs far less than either of us.

How often does HetrixTools check uptime?

Once a minute, and that is the floor on every plan including Enterprise. HetrixTools documents that it checks monitors as often as every minute; higher plans buy more monitors, more API calls and white labeling rather than a faster interval. AlertPing runs 30-second checks from the Team plan and 15-second checks on Enterprise.

Does HetrixTools send SMS alerts?

Yes, but on a credit meter. Each paid plan receives a monthly SMS credit allowance, and extra credits cost a flat $0.10 each. One credit is spent per phone number per notification, so an alert to three people costs three credits. AlertPing includes SMS on every plan with no allowance and nothing to top up.

HetrixTools vs UptimeRobot: which is better?

HetrixTools is the broader tool: its free plan allows commercial use, includes SSL monitoring and adds blacklist and server-agent monitoring that UptimeRobot has no equivalent for. UptimeRobot's free tier allows more monitors at 50, but it is non-commercial and excludes SSL. For a paying business, HetrixTools is usually the better value. Our UptimeRobot alternative page has the full breakdown.

How many locations does HetrixTools monitor from?

Twelve worldwide locations on paid plans, with a reduced subset on free. That is broader geographic coverage than AlertPing's three regions. The difference is what the locations are for: HetrixTools uses them as a coverage map, while we use all three as a confirmation quorum, re-running every failure before an alert is sent.

Does HetrixTools monitor SSL certificates?

Yes, and it also tracks domain expiry, which we do not. Both are worth having as certificate lifetimes keep shrinking: the maximum went to 200 days in March 2026 and drops again in 2027. We cover what that change means for renewal automation in the 200-day certificate change.

30-second checks, confirmed from three regions before anyone is paged

SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts included on every plan with no credit meter, plus SSL, API, port and cron checks in one flat price from $19 a month.

See pricing