UptimeRobot's Solo plan gives you 10 monitors for $13/month. PingDeck gives you 50 monitors, 1-minute checks and SSL alerts for $9. Same job, a third of the price per monitor.
Monitor 5 sites free →No credit card. Upgrade only when you need more than 5 monitors.
| Plan | Monthly price | Monitors | Check interval | Per monitor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UptimeRobot Free | $0 | 50 | 5 min | — |
| UptimeRobot Solo | $13 | 10 | 1 min | $1.30 |
| UptimeRobot Team | $46 | 100 | 1 min | $0.46 |
| PingDeck Free | $0 | 5 | 5 min | — |
| PingDeck Pro | $9 | 50 | 1 min | $0.18 |
UptimeRobot prices as published in their 2026 pricing; verify current figures on their site. PingDeck prices are flat — no per-seat or add-on fees.
The 2025–2026 restructure introduced a Solo plan capped at 10 monitors for $13/month. If you were happily running 20 or 30 sites on the old free tier, the step up to paid drops you to 10 monitors — the "Solo cliff." For a freelancer or small agency watching a handful of client sites, that's the worst of both worlds: pay more, monitor less. The 50-monitor free tier still exists, but it was briefly restricted to non-commercial use, and the ambiguity around that rule is exactly why so many teams started shopping around.
Honestly: breadth. UptimeRobot offers public status pages, keyword/port/heartbeat monitor types, a mobile app, and 50 free monitors if you fit the free tier. PingDeck is a younger, leaner product focused on doing HTTP uptime and SSL monitoring simply and cheaply. If you need those extra monitor types today, UptimeRobot Team may still be your answer — if you need 50 reliable HTTP monitors with SSL alerts for $9, that's exactly what PingDeck is for.
If you need fewer than five monitors, PingDeck's free plan covers you indefinitely — 5-minute checks, SSL-expiry alerts and webhook notifications, no credit card. UptimeRobot's free tier is larger (50 monitors) but its commercial-use terms have shifted more than once; if your monitors watch a business, read their current terms before relying on it. For 5–50 monitors with 1-minute checks, PingDeck Pro at $9 is the cheapest paid option in this comparison.
Honest answer: if you enjoy running servers, Uptime Kuma is excellent and free — a self-hosted, open-source monitor with a great UI and dozens of notification channels. The trade-off is the thing it can't do: monitor itself. A self-hosted monitor on the same infrastructure as the sites it watches goes dark in the same outage, and you carry the updates, backups and the VPS bill (typically $4–6/mo before your time). PingDeck is the "I don't want to operate a monitor" option: hosted, independent of your infrastructure, $0 for 5 sites or $9 for 50. Many teams run both — Kuma for internal dashboards, an external hosted check as the tripwire.
POST /v1/monitors using an API key.