How Watchpup compares
An honest, factual comparison of free plans across popular uptime monitors, last verified against each vendor's public pricing and docs pages on 28–29 July 2026. Vendors change plans; if anything here is out of date, email me and I'll fix it the same day. A — means the feature isn't offered on that free plan as far as their public docs show (it may exist on a paid plan).
| Watchpup | UptimeRobot | Better Stack | Healthchecks.io | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | everything is free while in beta | free plan (paid tiers above) | free plan (paid tiers above) | free plan (paid tiers above) |
| Fastest check interval, free | 1 minute | 5 minutes (1-min is paid) | 3 minutes (30-sec is paid) | n/a — passive checks only |
| Monitors on the free plan | 15 (all kinds) | 50 | 10 + 10 heartbeats | 20 cron checks |
| Active HTTP(S) checks | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | — |
| Expected-status / keyword rules | ✔ incl. keyword-absent | ✔ keyword | ✔ | — |
| Cron / heartbeat monitoring | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ (10) | ✔ — its specialty |
| Heartbeat ping by email | ✔ | — | — | ✔ |
| Job run durations measured + limits | ✔ start signal; over-limit run warns, stays up | — | — | ✔ start signal; over-grace run goes down |
| TCP port checks | ✔ every minute | ✔ every 5 min | ✔ | — |
| TLS certificate expiry alerts | ✔ any TLS port; self-signed OK | — paid plans | ✔ | — |
| Domain (registration) expiry | ✔ | — paid plans | ✔ | — |
| DNS record monitoring | ✔ 8 record types, value matching | ✔ | ✔ | — |
| Public status pages, free | ✔ unlimited, logo + accent color | ✔ | ✔ (1) | — badges only |
| Status-page email subscribers, free | ✔ double opt-in | — | — | — |
| Scheduled maintenance windows, free | ✔ one-off & repeating; shown on status pages ahead of time + subscriber heads-up emails | — paid plans only | ✔ daily window per monitor | — manual pause only |
| Maintenance calendar (ICS) your users can subscribe to | ✔ per status page | — | — email/webhook/RSS/JSON only | — |
| Team members (extra logins), free | ✔ up to 10, full co-management | — seats start on the paid Team plan | ✔ unlimited members (on-call responders are paid) | ✔ unlimited |
| Phone push without a vendor app | ✔ ntfy or Telegram | — own app | — own app | ✔ ntfy, Telegram, Teams, … |
| Acknowledge incidents ("I'm on it") | ✔ pauses reminder alerts; UI, CLI & API | — | ✔ | — |
| Per-channel quiet hours | ✔ alerts held, delivered after; down alerts can break through | — | — on-call schedules are paid | — |
| Delayed (escalation) alerts | ✔ per-channel delay; cancelled if it recovers first | — "if down for x min" is a Pro-plan option | ✔ escalation policies (on-call responders are paid seats) | — alerts are immediate & one-shot |
| Prometheus metrics endpoint | ✔ account + per-status-page | — | — | ✔ |
| SLA targets & error budgets | ✔ with 75%/100% burn alerts | — | — | — |
| Raw check data export (CSV) | ✔ | — | — | — |
| Full JSON API on the free plan | ✔ + OpenAPI + llms.txt | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| One-call migration in | ✔ from UptimeRobot & Healthchecks.io | — | — | — |
Where the others beat us — honestly
- UptimeRobot gives you 50 monitors free vs our 15, has a decade-plus track record, mobile apps, and multi-region probes. If you need lots of 5-minute checks, it's a fine choice.
- Better Stack's paid plans add 30-second checks, error screenshots, traceroute/MTR on failure, on-call scheduling and phone-call alerts — a full incident-management suite we don't try to be.
- Healthchecks.io is open source, self-hostable, and battle-tested for cron monitoring specifically. If you only need heartbeats and want to run it yourself, use it.
- Watchpup is in beta and checks from Cloudflare's edge (one vantage network, not multi-region), and our history retention is shorter (~3 days raw, 90 days daily). We're newer — that's the honest trade-off for getting 1-minute checks and everything above free.
Sources: vendors' public pricing/docs pages, checked 2026-07-28/29. All trademarks belong to their owners; no affiliation. Found an error? Tell me — corrections ship same-day.