Are you a developer, part of a DevOps team, or involved in SaaS? If so, you understand the importance of making sure your website or server is always functional and performing at its best.
There are many different website monitoring software solutions available—both free and paid—but which do you choose?
In this Instatus article, we'll explore free website monitoring software solutions available on the market. We’ll also share some insights into what makes a monitoring tool great, so you can evaluate tools and make the right call.
Want to know more? Read on.
Website monitoring software constantly checks your website's performance.
It identifies problems and glitches before your users notice, which is essential for maintaining their trust and preventing issues.
A good website monitoring software makes it easy to keep an eye on your users' experience. It does this by combining synthetic and real-user monitoring, which helps you see what's happening on your site and troubleshoot issues effectively.
One excellent tool in this domain is Instatus. It keeps an eye on your website 24/7, ensuring they're performing at their best. Instatus also lets you communicate any issues to your customers before they have a chance to complain. Explore Instatus today!
Synthetic monitoring actively checks a website's performance and functionality. It checks things like loading pages, forms, and API requests to see how the site behaves in different situations. This helps find problems before real users face them.
Here are some key aspects of synthetic monitoring:
Real User Monitoring (RUM) actively collects and examines user data to give you a clear view of how real people use your website. It observes their actions and behavior as they use your site in real time.
Here are some important aspects of RUM:
Customers don't like slow-loading pages or broken buttons, especially when they're trying to make a purchase. Website monitoring helps you quickly spot and fix errors to make sure your site works well and provides a satisfying user experience.
Website monitoring helps you keep a close eye on your website's performance. To identify and fix common technical problems that bug down your site’s performance, you need a mix of qualitative and quantitative website monitoring.
Having scheduled usability and website monitoring sessions monthly or quarterly can help uncover hidden user insights and product improvement opportunities.
Collecting and acting on customer feedback based on real-time data enhances your site’s performance and boosts customer satisfaction.
Downtime and page breaks can stop users from using your website, harming your credibility and ranking. Continuous monitoring now becomes essential as it helps you catch issues like site downtimes. This helps prevent problems, keeps your site available, and alerts customers during emergencies.
URL monitoring frequency refers to how often a website monitoring tool checks a specific web page. It's crucial to find the right balance between timely issue detection and not overloading the site.
Monitoring can be as frequent as every minute or as spaced out as every hour, depending on the site's needs and the desired level of detail.
Integrated server and log monitoring means a monitoring tool can watch both server performance and log files at the same time. This setup offers a complete way of monitoring. It tracks different aspects of a server like CPU, memory, and network use, while also checking log files for errors and warnings.
Synthetic monitoring involves imitating user actions on a website or app to proactively test system performance. This reveals availability, response times, and transaction functionality.
Real user monitoring (RUM), on the other hand, captures data from real user interactions with a site or app, offering insights into the user experience. Combining synthetic and real user monitoring gives a complete view of your network or website’s performance.
When picking a monitoring tool, think about having testing locations where your users are. Monitoring from various places ensures your site or app works well in different areas and gives all users a smooth experience.
A website monitoring tool's alerting features are essential for quickly notifying you of issues. Strong alerts help you react fast and reduce downtime. A good tool should offer different alert methods like emails, SMS, and push notifications.
Before we dive into the details, here’s an overview of our top pics:
Let’s delve deeper into these tools.
Instatus is a comprehensive monitoring tool that offers an exceptional user experience by providing you with real-time insights on your website’s performance and uptime.
Instatus offers fast and dependable outside-in monitoring tools to help you keep an eye on your website's performance.
It provides various monitoring types (Website, API, keyword, SSL, TCP, Ping, DNS monitoring) and status pages to track your website's availability worldwide. Instatus ensures smooth site operations and integrates seamlessly with your favorite tools, including Freshping, Pingdom, Prometheus, and Site24x7.
Instatus offers a free Starter plan with basic monitoring features and limited teams & subscribers.
Paid plans include Pro ($15/month) and Business ($225/month). The Pro plan allows custom domains and unlimited teams & subscribers. The Business plan offers advanced monitoring features for larger enterprises with 1,000 monitors, unlimited team members & subscribers, and 3 custom domains.
We also provide an option for a customizable Enterprise plan that can be tailored to your specific needs.
Uptrends has 150+ monitoring spots worldwide and checks your website every 1-60 minutes for any performance issues or downtimes.
They offer website monitoring, web performance monitoring, API monitoring, server monitoring, SSL certificate monitoring, and real user monitoring. Real user monitoring includes features like third-party content tracking, mobile site monitoring, waterfall reports, and transaction screenshots.
Uptrends provides a 30-day free trial for all their features and supports unlimited users.
Their paid plans include Starter ($17.50/month), Premium ($50.27/month), Professional ($245.09/month), Business (starts at $24.42/month), and Enterprise (from $58.36/month). Each plan comes with an increasing number of monitors and alerting systems.
Montastic is free and open-source software that offers basic monitoring features. It also allows users to keep track of their website’s performance and response times.
Users can also set keywords to trigger email alerts based on their presence or absence on the page you're monitoring.
Monastic has a free plan that covers most features. It lets you monitor up to nine URLs every 30 minutes. The free plan does not, however, include SMS notifications.
Paid plans begin at $10 per month for the Business plan, which allows for up to 50 URLs to be monitored every five minutes. The Enterprise plans range from $19/month to $49/month. These plans allow monitoring up to 500 URLs every five minutes and up to 600 SMS alerts.
Site24x7 offers comprehensive alerts for various website and application issues like resource loading failures, network connection problems, and performance issues.
Their real user monitoring tool provides real-time insights into user interactions on your website. Site24x7 supports multiple protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, REST, DNS, TCP, POP, IMAP, SMTP, and FTP.
Site24x7 offers a free plan that includes uptime monitoring of up to 50 resources and downtime alerts.
If you want advanced monitoring features from over 120+ locations, you can switch to their paid plans: Starter ($9/month), Pro ($35/month), Classic ($89/month), and Enterprise (starts at $225/month).
UptimeRobot is a trusted platform for website monitoring. It helps ensure your websites stay up and run smoothly through uptime and performance monitoring.
UptimeRobot offers real-time monitoring at regular intervals. This allows users to promptly detect and respond to downtime or performance issues that may impact user experience.
UptimeRobot has a free version with limited features and users. If you choose to pay annually, their prices begin at $7 per month and can go up to $54 per month.
But if you prefer to pay monthly, you'll pay between $8 and $64.
Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted, open-source, fancy uptime monitoring, and alerting system. It can monitor HTTP, HTTP with keywords, TCP, Ping, and DNS systems.
It gives users complete control over their website data. Uptime Kuma also provides multiple customization options for setting up website notifications.
Uptime Kuma provides free forever access to all its website monitoring features, including 2FA and proxy support, certificate info, ping charts, status page mapping, and 90+ integrations.
Ensuring the performance and availability of your websites is crucial. Like the ones mentioned above, free website monitoring tools protect your online assets and user trust. Proactively monitor and optimize your websites to provide the best possible experience. It's a small effort that yields big rewards.
If you're in the business of creating exceptional online experiences, consider integrating a robust website monitoring tool into your toolkit; check out Instatus for a seamless and proactive approach to website monitoring.
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