Checkly vs Upptime vs Better Uptime: Synthetic Monitoring Compared (2026)

Checkly is built around a simple but powerful idea: your monitoring checks should be code, stored in your repository, reviewed in pull requests, and deployed alongside your application. You write Playwright scripts that navigate your site, click buttons, fill forms, and assert on page content. Checkly runs these scripts on a schedule from global locations and alerts you when they fail.

This approach is a natural fit for teams already using Playwright for E2E testing. You can reuse your existing test scripts as monitoring checks with minimal modification. The Checkly CLI lets you define checks, alert channels, and dashboards in TypeScript or JavaScript config files, which means your monitoring configuration is version-controlled and reproducible.

Beyond browser checks, Checkly supports API checks with flexible assertions on status codes, response times, headers, and JSON body content. The alerting integrates with Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, SMS, and webhooks. The dashboard shows check results, response times, and failure trends. Checkly is not the cheapest option for simple uptime monitoring, but for teams that want their monitoring to evolve with their codebase, it is the most developer-friendly tool available.

Upptime takes an unconventional approach: it uses GitHub Actions as its monitoring infrastructure and GitHub Pages as its status page host. You fork the Upptime repository, configure your monitored URLs in a YAML file, and GitHub Actions runs uptime checks every 5 minutes. Results are committed to the repository as data files, and a static status page is generated and hosted on GitHub Pages.

The result is a monitoring system that costs nothing, requires no server, and is entirely transparent. Incident history is stored in GitHub Issues, uptime data lives in your repo, and the status page is a static site that loads fast and is nearly impossible to take down. For open-source projects and small teams, this is genuinely appealing.

The trade-offs are real. Check intervals are limited by GitHub Actions scheduling (roughly every 5 minutes, though actual timing varies). Alerting is limited to GitHub notifications and Slack via webhooks. There are no browser checks, no transaction scripting, and no multi-step API validation. The status page is clean but customization options are limited without forking the template. Upptime is best understood as a free status page with basic uptime monitoring attached, not a monitoring platform that competes with Checkly or Better Uptime on features.

Better Uptime (part of Better Stack) focuses on the full lifecycle from monitoring to incident response to public communication. The monitoring itself covers HTTP(S), ping, SSL, DNS, keyword, and cron job checks from multiple global locations with 30-second check intervals on paid plans. When a check fails, the incident management workflow kicks in.

The incident management is what sets Better Uptime apart. You define on-call schedules, escalation policies, and alert channels (phone calls, SMS, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie). When an incident is triggered, Better Uptime calls your on-call engineer. If they do not acknowledge within a configurable window, it escalates to the next person. The incident timeline tracks acknowledgment, updates, and resolution with timestamps.

The status pages are genuinely beautiful and customizable. You can use a custom domain, match your brand colors, add subscriber notifications, and display individual component status. For SaaS companies that need to communicate uptime to customers, this is a significant advantage over a generic status page. Better Uptime also integrates with logging and error tracking through the broader Better Stack platform (formerly known as Logtail).