At the end of November, we’ll be migrating the Sematext Logs backend from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch

10 Best StatusCake Alternatives [2023 Comparison]

December 21, 2023

Table of contents

As one of the newer kids on the block, StatusCake has quickly made a name for itself as being decently cheap and reliable. It’s a very powerful tool for those looking for the basics like page speed and uptime monitoring, but it lacks some fundamentals that would truly make it great. StatusCake allows you to understand things from the surface, but it doesn’t really get down deep into the veins.

If you’re looking for a StatusCake alternative, then you’re not alone. The lack of functionality and capabilities leaves much to be desired, causing people just like you to weigh their options.

The good news is that in the market today, there are numerous website monitoring solutions to choose from. So much so that it can become overwhelming when looking for a new tool. We definitely don’t want you to feel overwhelmed, so we’ve put together a comprehensive list of the top 10 best StatusCake alternatives that you can sign up for today.

But before we dive too deep into these competitors, let’s go over a few things with StatusCake.

StatusCake Features

StatusCake offers what they call their “Monitoring Suite”. This is essentially a tool belt of products and features that they offer within their cloud. Here’s what you can expect from them:

  • Uptime monitoring
  • Page speed monitoring
  • Domain monitoring
  • Server monitoring
  • SSL monitoring

StatusCake Pricing

If nothing else, StatusCake does provide its users with some solid offers. It starts with a fairly comprehensive free plan that includes 10 uptime monitors, 1 page speed monitor, 1 domain monitor, and 1 SSL monitor.

After that, the paid options start with the Superior plan at $24.49 per month. This includes 100 uptime monitors, 15 page speed monitors, 50 domain monitors, 50 SSL monitors, and 3 server monitors. It’s also worth mentioning that the monitoring intervals are reduced considerably compared to the free plan.

Their final option, the Business plan, starts at $79.99 per month and offers 300 uptime monitors, 30 page speed monitors, 30 page speed monitors, 120 domain monitors, 100 SSL Monitors, and 10 server monitors. Again, the monitoring intervals are reduced as compared to the Superior plan.

The 10 Best StatusCake Alternatives

1. Sematext

Sematext is a powerful monitoring solution that stands out as a top alternative to StatusCake.

Synthetic Monitoring provides the ability to actively monitor the availability and performance of your APIs and websites, and simulate user interactions from multiple locations around the globe.

With status pages, you can share the response time and status of your services with your customers and internal teams. Schedule planned maintenance incidents to inform your users of downtimes or minor delays your service is experiencing. Additionally, it provides SSL monitoring, validates certificates, checks expiration dates and detects certificate changes, and notifies users to make sure their website is reliable.

While Synthetic Monitoring monitors endpoints, websites, and APIs, Experience tracks real user performance of your websites and gives you an overview of User Satisfaction using Apdex scores. Track page loads, HTTP requests, resources, UI interactions, and more.

Combined with logs and metrics, Sematext empowers users to gain complete visibility into their applications and infrastructure. It provides out-of-the-box dashboards for 100+ integrations, focuses on vital metrics and logs to monitor specific to each service, and lets users gain observability to their whole infrastructure in minutes.

With Custom Dashboards and Split Screen features, users can correlate metrics, logs, real user performance, website, and API metrics on a single page without switching context.

Additionally, the platform incorporates anomaly detection and a robust alerting engine that leverages machine learning algorithms to promptly notify users of any emerging issues.

With comprehensive visibility across infrastructure components such as containers, servers, and databases, Sematext facilitates efficient root cause analysis, enabling users to identify and resolve issues swiftly.

Features

Pros

  • Flexible payment options, plans, and per-App pricing
  • Separate solutions for Synthetics, RUM, Logs, and Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Seamless setup process with extremely helpful support staff according to a number of reviews on G2
  • Versatile internal and external monitoring capabilities
  • Anomaly detection with browser checks
  • Customizable alert triggers
  • Smooth incorporation with Incident Management Systems

Cons

  • Fewer integrations than some larger competitors
  • No support for transaction tracing

Pricing

Sematext provides easy-to-understand pricing options that outline exactly what each plan comes with. Each plan is easy to scale, depending on what you need, and comes with zero obligations.

Synthetic Monitoring has a few pricing options. You can opt to pay per monitor by picking the pay-as-you-go plan or you can pick one of the other pricing plans. The pay-as-you-go option is $2 per HTTP Monitor and $7 per Browser Monitor.

The other pricing plans for Synthetics start at just $29 per month, but offer you more options. The $29 plan comes with 40 HTTP Monitors, 5 Browser Monitors, and 30 days of retention. Additionally, you have an allowance of 5,000,000 HTTP runs and 50,000 Browser runs.

Log Monitoring offers a free plan, but pricing starts at just $50 per month. This can go up depending on your needs for ingested data and log retention, but the $50 plan comes with 1GB of ingested data per day and 7 days of retention and more features.

Infrastructure Monitoring also offers a free plan, but prices start at just $3.6 per month per host. This will go up depending on your retention needs, the $3.6 price tag comes with a standard 7 days of retention already.

Real User Monitoring starts at just $9 per month. This allows you to monitor 25,000 page views per month and gives you 7 days of retention.

2. Uptime.com

Uptime is a monitoring solution very, very similar to that of StatusCake. It is known for being very reliable, especially if you’re looking for worldwide monitoring locations, which you can get with the Business plan.

One of the biggest differentiators between Uptime and StatusCake is the price. Of course, we will give more details below this section, but just know that this tool is considered to be expensive.

It’s important to note that this is not the best tool for freelancers or agencies, either. Although reliable, the platform only allows for a maximum of 4 status pages at a time.

Features

  • Synthetic Monitoring
  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Real User Monitoring
  • Transaction Checks
  • API Checks
  • Status Pages

Pros

  • Friendly support
  • Flexible SLA settings
  • Custom dashboards
  • Considered to be very reliable

Cons

  • Pricey!
  • No root cause analysis or advanced analysis tools
  • Users report an interface that is not user-friendly
  • Users report that it does not support UI checks when multiple windows are involved

Pricing

There are 4 paid tiers of Uptime’s pricing. Each plan has a monthly and yearly pricing option, with the yearly option being cheapest.

The Starter plan is priced at $24 per month and is very limited in functionality. Users get 20 basic checks, 1 transaction check, and 1 API check. With this tier, there are zero status pages, 10 minute frequencies, 4 check locations, and only 1 seat.

Next, the Essential plan starts at $80 per month. It comes with 40 basic checks, 2 transaction checks, 3 API checks, and only 1 status page. This is also the tier where users can start to take advantage of Real User Monitoring with 200,000 pageviews.

The Premium plan starts at a massive $455 per month and comes with 200 basic checks, 12 transaction checks, 20 API checks, and 4 status pages. This is the only tier with unlimited users and unlimited global checks.

Finally, the Custom plan starts at $699 per month. Essentially, it is everything the Premium plan is, but offers a few extra features, all of it being highlighted as “custom”.

We’ve also compared Uptime.com to Sematext in Sematext vs Uptime.com.

3. Site 24×7

Site24x7 is an all-in-one Cloud Monitoring solution. Although there are a few gaps in their toolkit lineup, one of their more comprehensive tools is their Website Monitoring, which includes Uptime Monitoring.

What makes Site24x7 a good StatusCake alternative is the fact that it offers a bit more insight than a simple uptime request. In fact, they market their Uptime Monitoring as sort of a secondary benefit to their full-stack monitoring.

More than that, Site24x7 offers an APM solution that is pretty decent in terms of capabilities. Site24x7 is great for monitoring apps and microservices, as well as Real User and Synthetic Monitoring.

Features

  • Website Monitoring
  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Pros

  • Easy agent installation
  • 1-minute polling
  • Multiple webhooks
  • Monitors multiple locations

Cons

  • Price is not transparent or flexible
  • Limited functionality compared to others on this list
  • Some solutions are locked behind others
  • User reviews indicate that the tool can be heavy and difficult to use
  • User reviews indicate that dashboards are difficult to set up

Pricing

Site24x7 pricing is a little complicated in the sense that there are so many add-ons that can be attached. They have core prices for their 5 main solutions, but those are sort of arbitrary when you consider how much can be added.

Nevertheless, Website Uptime monitoring starts at $10 per month, and what they call “Enterprise Plus Web” starts at $999 per month. The difference between the two is essentially the number of monitors they allow.

Infrastructure monitoring starts at $10 per month, but it is incredibly limited and basic without the addition of the handful of add-ons they offer. For example, they charge an extra $15 per month for 10 extra monitors and an additional $10 per month per 10GB of Logs.

APM starts at $39 per month, but again has a list of add-ons that will surely increase that base price. Here is where you can add RUM to your toolset, but it’ll cost you $24 extra per month for 500k pageviews, and those can only be spread across 4 websites.

Their All-in-one solution has 4 individual prices, each increasing in capabilities and prices. It starts at $39 per month and goes all the way up to $499 per month. Each tier going up adds more monitors, shorter frequencies, and larger data allowances.

Finally, they offer MSP for $49 per month. But, big surprise, they have a long list of add-ons that will definitely bring that price up.

Want to see how Site24x7 compares to Sematext? We went over some key differences between the two in our Sematext vs Site24x7 page.

4. Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot is a trusted StatusCake competitor for website monitoring, providing essential features to ensure the uptime and performance of your websites. As a dependable alternative to StatusCake, Uptime Robot offers real-time monitoring at regular intervals, typically every 1-5 minutes, allowing you to promptly detect and respond to any downtime or performance issues that may impact your online presence.

Some of the StatusCake alternatives on this list offer a suite of tools that allow users to monitor their whole stack. Uptime Robot, on the other hand, is primarily focused on uptime monitoring for HTTPs, browsers, and SSLs.

Features

  • HTTPs monitoring
  • Keyword monitoring
  • Ping monitoring
  • Port monitoring
  • SSL monitoring

Pros

  • Simple functionality for beginners
  • Short monitoring intervals (1-5 minutes)
  • Straightforward dashboard
  • Reasonably fast set-up time

Cons

  • Some users complain about monitors not working properly
  • Only offers Synthetic Monitoring
  • Users complain about confusing reports
  • Users report spotty and inconsistent support

Pricing

Uptime Robot offers a free, limited version of their tool. After that, the prices start at $7/month and go all the way to $54/month, but that’s if you decide to pay annually. If you’re looking for a monthly, commitment-free solution, you will end up paying between $8-64/month. Additionally, each plan has a limited number of users. After a certain point, you can expect to pay $15/month extra per user.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs Uptime Robot.

5. Datadog

Datadog is a full-stack monitoring solution that covers basically every aspect of your monitoring needs as a business. It is designed for large-scale enterprises, and the prices heavily reflect that. So if you’re looking for a simple tool for only Uptime Monitoring, or you’re looking for a tool that isn’t expensive, then this one isn’t for you. How do we know? That’s one of the major complaints about Datadog, plus we have looked at Datadog pricing in detail when we compared Datadog and Sematext, where we visually show the pricing differences.

Datadog offers 20+ individual solutions, one of which is Synthetic Monitoring, which includes Uptime Monitoring. Datadog is massive, and if it’s in your budget, it offers anything from Infrastructure Monitoring and Log Management to Cloud SIEM and Application Vulnerability Management.

Features

  • Serverless Monitoring
  • Synthetic Monitoring
  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Log Management and Monitoring
  • Browser Monitoring

Pros

  • Comprehensive monitoring features
  • Extensive range of integrations
  • Intuitive data visualization
  • Customizable graph widget

Cons

  • Very expensive – Only for very large budgets
  • Overwhelming with 20+ individually priced solutions
  • Users report poor customer service
  • Users report a steep learning curve

Pricing

Datadog has 20+ individually priced solutions. If we went into pricing details for each solution, this section would be as long as a book. But, there are some solutions that are worth highlighting.

Synthetic Monitoring is $7.20 per 10,000 API tests and $18 per 1,000 browser tests. If you choose the annual, upfront payments, then those prices will go down slightly, but they are still considered expensive, so you will have to fork out a sizable chunk of cash.

They offer a free version of Infrastructure Monitoring, but it is limited. If you want to go for a paid option, it starts at $18 per month per host. Again, you can choose annual payments and lower it to $15, but even then, that is a pretty outrageous price for anyone other than giant corporations.

Real User Monitoring starts at $2.20 per 1,000 sessions per month. Again, if we look at the annual plan, it gets very expensive at $1.50 per 1,000 sessions.

Just taking a quick glance above, you can probably tell that your expenses can stack up quickly with Datadog. Some users are even running to X to rant about it. On top of that, some users are saying that without overage protection, their bills increased by substantial amounts without their knowledge.

If you really want to see how expensive Datadog is, then check out our page on Sematext vs Datadog. We broke down their pricing and compared it to Sematext so that you can get a clear visual of how much you could be saving.

6. SolarWinds Pingdom

Owned by SolarWinds, Pingdom is a tool dedicated to Uptime and Real User Monitoring. If you’re looking for a simple Synthetic or Real User Monitoring with basic alerts, then this might be a great choice for you as a StatusCake aternative. However, please note that if you’re looking for an alternative to save money, this might not be the ideal choice.

Other than what’s stated above, there’s not much else to say about Pingdom. It offers Email and SMS alerting, Uptime Monitoring, and public status pages.

Features

  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Synthetic Monitoring
  • Real User Monitoring
  • Email and SMS alerts

Pros

  • Effective summary dashboard
  • Real-time monitoring
  • Live alerts
  • Multi-metric reporting

Cons

  • Expensive at scale
  • Lacks some of the functionality of others on this list
  • Need credits for SMS alerts
  • Users report random account cancellations
  • Users report instability with the product and random outages

Pricing

SolarWinds Pingdom has 2 products: Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring. However, for each of the 2 products, there are a multitude of pricing options, all depending on how many monitors or pageviews you want.

For example, if you want 10 Uptime and 1 Advanced Monitoring, you’ll be paying $15 per month. If you want to up the ante and go for 500 Uptime and 50 Advanced, it’ll cost you $566 per month.

With Real User Monitoring, the prices start at $15 per month for 100,000 pageviews. If you want to monitor 10 million pageviews, your bill goes up to $520 per month.

Want more details? Check out our page on Sematext vs Pingdom.

7. ITRS Uptrends

Uptrends offers a lot of observability solutions, much like others on this list. They offer RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, Uptime Monitoring, and more.

What makes Uptrends a good fit for this list is its wide monitoring checkpoints that can be set up from multiple locations. They even offer screen capturing during downtime events so that you can review and learn from issues that arise.

Overall, Uptrends is a good alternative to StatusCake as it provides good reliability and web performance tracking.

Features

  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Synthetic Monitoring
  • Real User Monitoring
  • Infrastructure Monitoring

Pros

  • Personal and team dashboard views
  • Multi-location support
  • Private checkpoints
  • Decent price compared to Uptime Robot

Cons

  • Hard-coded alerts – no customization
  • User reviews state that Contracts take 90 days to terminate
  • User reviews state that dashboard views are rudimentary
  • User reviews state that the interface is hard to navigate

Pricing

Uptrends has 5 basic plans, each of which has optional charges. Starting from the cheapest, the Starter plan is $19.45 per month and offers 10 uptime Monitors only.

Next, they have the Premium plan. This one starts at $55.86 per month and offers 50 uptime monitors only.

After that, the Professional plan starts at $272.32 per month. This plan includes 250 uptime monitors only.

The Business plan is next, starting at $27.13 per month. This plan is the first to offer unlimited monitors, for which you have to pay per monitor. They do not specify the price of each monitor, but this is also the first plan that offers uptime SLA monitors in addition to uptime monitors.

Finally, there’s the Enterprise plan. This plan starts at $64.84 per month and includes the same details as the Business plan. From what I can see, the only real difference between Enterprise and Business is the price and a few admin capabilities.

Keep in mind that all of these prices only include basic uptime and/or uptime SLA monitors. If you want to include RUM, Synthetics, or Infrastructure Monitoring, then you will have to pay more. This is an additional cost that they do not specify online.

We’ve compared Uptrends with Sematext as well. You can see the details of that comparison in Sematext vs. Uptrends.

8. New Relic

New Relic is another full-stack observability tool that has a lot to offer. Keep in mind, though, that these types of tools usually come with a big price tag, and New Relic is no different. It offers Uptime Monitoring, sure, but it is mostly geared towards big, big organizations that are more worried about brands than budgets.

New Relic is known in the industry as a Performance and Infrastructure Monitoring tool. In fact, not too long ago, it was primarily an APM tool. Since then, it has evolved to become much more, making it a decent StatusCake alternative if you don’t care about costs.

Features

  • APM
  • Browser monitoring
  • Synthetic Monitoring
  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Log management and monitoring
  • Serverless monitoring
  • Infrastructure Monitoring

Pros

  • All-in-one observability
  • 600+ integrations
  • Preconfigured dashboards that are customizable
  • Easily deployable agents

Cons

  • Pricey! They charge excessive per-seat pricing
  • Lots of upcharges
  • Users report difficulties with navigating the interface
  • Users report heap/memory issues
  • Users report a lack of functionality with Log Management

Pricing

Understanding the cost structure of New Relic can be a bit intricate. Across all plans, there’s a base charge of $49 for what they term “core” users. If you aim to provide users with complete access to the platform, you’ll need to invest $99 for the standard plan, $349 for the pro plan, and $549 for the enterprise plan, per user. Additionally, with every New Relic plan, you receive an initial 100GB of ingested data for free. However, any data beyond this limit incurs charges, with $0.30 for “Original” data ingestion and $0.50 for “Plus” data ingestion.

Want to see how Sematext stacks up? Check out our page on Sematext vs New Relic.

9. Webgazer

Webgazer is a feature-rich website monitoring solution that offers a range of functionalities, albeit with a higher price tag. With Uptime monitoring and SSL monitoring included in all paid plans, Webgazer ensures that your websites are continuously monitored for availability and secure connections. The check intervals are set at 5 minutes for the free plan and 1 minute for all paid plans, enabling you to receive timely updates on your website’s performance.

When it comes to alerting, Webgazer provides multiple notification options, including SMS, phone call, email, and Slack. However, it’s important to note that the alerts are not unlimited, even for paid plans. Instead, SMS and phone call alerts are based on pre-purchased credits, which vary depending on the selected plan.

Features

  • Uptime monitoring
  • Website performance monitoring
  • SSL monitoring

Pros

  • Clean and simple interface
  • Useful and nicely designed status pages
  • Easy to set up
  • Relatively quick email alerts

Cons

  • Status pages only available with the Pro plan
  • Limited alerts
  • Limited server locations
  • Inability to analyze error response
  • Lack of customization

Pricing

There are 4 different plans with Webgazer, including a very limited, free version. The free version only offers 1 “Gazer”, which is essentially a monitor, and 5-minute monitoring intervals.

The Basic plan, which starts at $19 per month, offers 15 gazers and the monitoring intervals go down to 1 minute.

The Pro plan, which starts at $69 per month. This plan offers 75 gazers and 1-minute intervals, too. As mentioned previously, this is the first plan that offers status pages, but it is not clear how many you get.

Lastly, the Business plan is $179 per month and offers 250 gazers and 1-minute intervals.

10. HetrixTools

HetrixTools is a very simple platform that focuses primarily on Uptime monitoring and it is very similar in price and functionality to StatusCake.

HetrixTools is a good choice for a StatusCake alternative because it has a lot built into each plan. What really makes it stand out are the webhooks integrations. HetrixTools offers a wide variety of options, including Discord for those who want to be alerted there.

That being said, HetrixTools is very limited in the number of API calls per month each user can benefit from. Even at the highest level, HetrixTools only allows for 50,000 API calls per month. Just to put that into perspective, for a single monitor to make 1 call per minute from a single location, would use up 43,200 calls per month. If you have multiple monitors, this could be a huge roadblock.

Features

  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Server Monitoring
  • SSL Monitoring
  • Alerts

Pros

  • Multiple location monitoring
  • White-labeled status pages
  • Decent selection of webhook integrations
  • Very straightforward

Cons

  • Limited API calls per month
  • Limited users
  • Users report lack of thorough checks

Pricing

HetrixTools offers 4 plans in total, the first one being free to use. This plan is very limited, as is to be expected, and only offers 1,000 API calls per month, which is hardly sufficient for even a single monitor.

The first paid plan comes in at $9.95 per month and includes 30 uptime monitors, 30 server monitors, and only 10,000 API calls for the entire month.

Next, you have the Business plan. This plan costs $19.95 per month and comes with 60 uptime monitors and 60 server monitors. Again, this plan offers a fairly low number of API calls per month and a measly 20,000.

Finally, the Enterprise plan is $49.95 per month, and comes with 200 uptime monitors and 200 server monitors. But, as stated above, it only comes with 50,000 API calls, which is not much considering this is the highest plan, and a single monitor could cover almost that entire allowance in just 30 days.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a StatusCake alternative, you’ll be happy to know that there are a lot of options out there. Everyone has their own needs, so be sure to scan this comprehensive list and find the best option for you and your team.

When deciding on a StatusCake competitor, we highly recommend reading and doing as much reading as possible before pulling the trigger.

With Sematext, you have the options for signing up for a free trial, scheduling a demo with one of our expert team members, or even testing our platform with an interactive demo.

Java Logging Basics: Concepts, Tools, and Best Practices

Imagine you're a detective trying to solve a crime, but...

Best Web Transaction Monitoring Tools in 2024

Websites are no longer static pages.  They’re dynamic, transaction-heavy ecosystems...

17 Linux Log Files You Must Be Monitoring

Imagine waking up to a critical system failure that has...