Pingdom started in Sweden in 2005 and has been part of SolarWinds since 2014. It checks from more than 100 probe servers, runs transaction checks that walk through logins and checkouts, and offers real-user monitoring with 13 months of history. If your site serves customers on several continents, that reach is hard to match.
What surprises smaller teams is how it is sold. There are no named plans and no free tier, just a 30-day trial. Uptime checks and real-user monitoring (RUM) are two separate products, each priced by a quantity slider.
CheckHTTP is built the other way round: one plan covers uptime checks from three cloud providers, real-user monitoring, and visitor stats with bots filtered out, all fed by the same site.
What a small site pays
These are the smallest steps on each of Pingdom's sliders, read from its pricing page:
Pingdom
- Synthetic: 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS$18
- Real User Monitoring: 100,000 pageviews$18
Both, per month$36
About $33 a month billed yearly. The next steps up are $40 (25 checks) and $40 (250,000 pageviews).
CheckHTTP
- 1 site, 60-second checks from 3 clouds, RUM and visitor stats$0
- 5 sites, 9 runners, Slack and webhooks, RUM and visitor stats$7
10 sites, all 13 runners, per month$15
Uptime checks, real-user monitoring and visitor stats are on the same plan. Real-user allowance: 4,000 events a month free, 100,000 on Premium, 1 million on Professional.
Pingdom's tiers count checks, not sites: one site with a homepage check and an API check uses two of the ten uptime checks, and a login transaction uses the one advanced check. CheckHTTP's plans count sites.
A second opinion, from which network?
Pingdom handles false alarms well. When a probe cannot reach your site, the check is marked "unconfirmed down" and another probe server, geographically different when possible, tries the same request. Only if that also fails is the site recorded as down.
CheckHTTP applies the same principle along a different axis: the second opinion comes from a different cloud provider. Every site is checked by runners on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and an alert condition says how many of them must see the failure, and for how many checks in a row. Distance helps when the problem is a route across an ocean. A different provider helps when the problem is the provider: on October 20, 2025, a DNS fault in DynamoDB disrupted much of AWS's US-East-1 region for most of a day, and anything that only looked from inside it was looking through the fault.
aws/us-west-1 and gcp/us-west-1.Alerts name the runners that saw the failure, so "down from aws/us-east-1 only" and "down from all three clouds" read differently in your inbox or Slack channel.
Real-user data is only as good as its visitors
Uptime checks tell you a server answered. Real-user monitoring tells you what people's browsers went through: how long the main content took to appear (LCP), how quickly the page responded to a tap (INP), how much it jumped around (CLS), and which JavaScript errors they hit. It is the half of monitoring that synthetic checks cannot see.
It also has a quiet problem: not every page load comes from a person. Scrapers, SEO crawlers and headless browsers in data centers load pages too, often fast, sometimes broken, always in bulk. On one of our own sites, uidomains.com, StatsHarbor (the analytics engine behind CheckHTTP's RUM) recorded this on October 14, 2026:
If those bot loads fed the page speed percentiles, the "75th percentile LCP" would mostly describe a data center, not a customer, and the visitor count would be off by a factor of eighty. CheckHTTP ties every speed measurement, error and visit to its pageview's bot verdict and leaves the bots out of every chart. Whichever tool you use, it is worth asking how it treats automated traffic.
Because the same script powers both, CheckHTTP's Visitors & RUM tab sits next to the uptime chart: real visitors, engaged sessions, time on page, Core Web Vitals and the top JavaScript errors. Referrers, countries, devices and visitor paths open in StatsHarbor with one click.
At a glance
Competitor details from their own pricing and documentation pages, checked October 18, 2026.
Where Pingdom is the better choice
- Sheer reach. More than 100 probe servers across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. CheckHTTP's widest plan covers seven locations on three clouds, which answers "is it up, and is it the provider?" better than "how fast is it in every country?".
- Browser-driven transactions. Pingdom's transaction checks script multi-step journeys such as a login or a checkout. CheckHTTP's scripted checks work at the HTTP level with JavaScript and
fetch: good for APIs and server-rendered pages, not for flows that need a real browser to run client-side code. - SMS and long retention. SMS credits come with every synthetic tier, and RUM keeps 13 months of data. CheckHTTP alerts by email, Slack and webhook.
- An established vendor. Procurement teams like a name they recognise, with invoices and support contracts to match.
Where CheckHTTP fits
CheckHTTP is built for the site that needs both halves without two line items: a check every 60 seconds from AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, with DNS, TLS and first-byte timing on each one, and one script that adds visitors, engagement, Core Web Vitals and JavaScript errors from real people. When something breaks you see which clouds saw it, and how many visitors it affected, in the same place.
It also speaks to AI coding assistants. Through its MCP server, an assistant such as Claude or Cursor can set up a monitor, check status or verify an SSL certificate on request.
Multi-cloud uptime, real-user data and visitor stats, free. One site, checks every minute.
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