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Free plan comparison

Best free uptime monitoring in 2026: what each free plan really includes

Nine free uptime monitoring plans and tools, read from each vendor’s own pricing page, docs and terms on October 17, 2026. Every figure links to its source, including the ones that favor other tools.

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No credit card Every figure linked to the vendor Checked October 17, 2026
Verdict

No single free plan is best, because each one limits something different. UptimeRobot gives the most monitors (50, every 5 minutes) and its terms allow commercial use. HetrixTools is the only hosted plan here that checks every minute (15 monitors, 4 of 12 locations). Better Stack gives 10 monitors at 3 minutes and a bigger telemetry and replay allowance than ours, but labels the tier “Free for personal projects”. Site Qwality gives 100,000 checks a month at 5 minutes from one location, about 11 monitors at that interval, plus a status page, 25 cron monitors and free logs, RUM and session replay. If you only need many URLs watched every 5 minutes, UptimeRobot is the better pick. If you want monitoring, a status page and observability in one product, that is what we built.

Last verified against each vendor's own pages. See sources.

At a glance

  • Most monitors: UptimeRobot, 50 at 5 minutes. Its terms say it is “available for any use, including commercial and business use.”
  • Fastest checks: HetrixTools, 15 monitors every minute from 4 of 12 locations. Free accounts must log in every 90 days.
  • Site Qwality: 100,000 checks a month at 5 minutes from one location (about 11 monitors), 1 status page, 25 cron monitors, and free tiers for logs, RUM and session replay.
  • Free status pages: Pulsetic and HetrixTools list a custom domain for free. StatusCake lists none on its free plan. Ours is on a Site Qwality subdomain until the $50/mo white-label pack.
  • Personal-use wording: StatusCake’s terms, and the Better Stack and Hyperping plan labels, describe their free plans as personal. UptimeRobot says the opposite.
  • Not free: Pingdom is trial only. Freshworks announced Freshping free accounts would be disabled on March 6, 2026.

Free plans compared (1 of 2): UptimeRobot, Better Stack, StatusCake and HetrixTools

Site Qwality UptimeRobot Better Stack StatusCake HetrixTools
Monitors 100,000 checks a month, about 11 monitors at 5 minutes. Plus 25 cron monitors 50 10 monitors and heartbeats 10 uptime monitors 15 uptime monitors and 15 server monitors
Minimum check interval 5 minutes 5 minutes 3 minutes 5 minutes 1 minute
Locations 1 per monitor One region. Multi-location is a paid feature Not stated for free. Docs: at least 4 by default No choice. Custom locations are paid 4 of 12
Status page 1 page on a Site Qwality subdomain, with our badge. Custom domain and white-label: $50/mo 1 basic page on an UptimeRobot URL, no customization. Own domain needs Solo 1 page included. White-label: $250 per page per month Not listed on free. StatusCake Pages is separate, from $12.46/mo billed annually Public pages on every plan. Free has partial white label and 3 own domains
Alerts on free Email, Slack, Discord, Teams and webhooks. 10 SMS credits a month Email, Google Chat, Discord, Pushover, Pushbullet and Splunk. Slack and Telegram need Solo. No SMS credits Slack and email Email and integrations. No SMS credits Email, chat and webhook integrations. SMS and calls cost $0.10 a credit, none included
API REST API and MCP server on every plan Yes, 10 requests a minute on free Not stated for the free tier Not stated for the free plan Yes (v3 API). 1,000 v1/v2 calls a month on free
Data retention Check timings 1 year. Failure response bodies 5 days 3 months Monitor history not stated. Free logs and traces: 3 days Not stated on the pricing page Uptime report history unlimited. Activity log 15 days
Commercial use Our Service Agreement has no personal-use limit on free accounts Terms: “UptimeRobot is available for any use, including commercial and business use.” Pricing page label: “Free for personal projects”. No free-plan use rule found in its terms Terms: “The Free Account is for your own personal use and it is a breach of the Agreement to share the login credentials with any third party” No personal-use rule found in its terms. One free account per person or organization
Other included products Cron monitoring, browser checks (100 minutes), logs, metrics and traces (1 GB), RUM (1,000 sessions), session replay (100), on-call for 1 responder HTTP, keyword, ping and port checks. SSL, domain, DNS and heartbeat monitoring are paid 100,000 exceptions, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB logs and 3 GB traces (3 days), 30 GB metrics, 3 GB web events (3 days) 1 page speed, 1 domain and 1 SSL monitor 15 server monitors, MCP access, and a separate free blacklist monitor (32 monitors)

Figures are as published on each vendor’s own pages on October 17, 2026. “Not stated” means the page does not say. Hyperping, Pulsetic, OpenStatus and Uptime Kuma are in the second table further down the page. Sources are listed at the end.

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How to choose, by situation

Pick the limit that will bind you first.

  • Hobby or personal site. Any of these works. For the most monitors, UptimeRobot (50 at 5 minutes). For one-minute checks, HetrixTools (15 monitors from 4 of 12 locations). To run it yourself, Uptime Kuma.
  • Commercial side project. Read the terms before the feature list. UptimeRobot’s terms allow commercial use on free. StatusCake’s terms call the free account “for your own personal use”, and Better Stack and Hyperping label their free plans for personal projects. The exact wording is in the table and the FAQ. We quote it and do not interpret it, so ask the vendor if your use is borderline.
  • Small SaaS. You will want a status page, Slack alerts and a way to see why a check failed. Site Qwality keeps failure response bodies for 5 days and includes free logs, RUM and session replay. Better Stack includes 10 monitors, a status page, Slack and email alerts and 5,000 session replays. Hyperping gives 20 monitors from 18 regions with a basic status page. UptimeRobot’s free plan has no Slack.
  • Agency with client sites. UptimeRobot’s help center says a freelancer monitoring client sites is welcome on the free plan, but its terms say its data, status pages, alerts and API responses may not be “repackaged, white-labeled, or offered to third parties as a standalone or rebranded monitoring service” without a separate agreement. White-label status pages are paid almost everywhere: $50/mo at Site Qwality, $250 per page per month at Better Stack. HetrixTools lists partial white label with 3 own domains on free, and Pulsetic lists a custom domain on free.
  • Ports, ping and other non-HTTP services. Site Qwality cannot check a TCP port or ping a host. Our check types are HTTP, cron, browser, TLS, DNS, DNS record and page speed. UptimeRobot, Hyperping and Pulsetic list port or ping checks on their free plans, and Uptime Kuma checks TCP and ping.
  • Data location and compliance paperwork. Hyperping’s pricing FAQ says all its data is stored in the EU. Site Qwality runs in one AWS region (us-east-1), has no EU-hosted deployment, and holds no SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certificate.

Free plan traps, only the ones we could verify

Each item comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, terms or help center.

  • Monitor count versus interval. Site Qwality meters checks, not monitors. At 5 minutes one monitor uses 8,640 checks in 30 days (288 a day), so 100,000 checks cover 11 monitors. At 15 minutes a monitor uses 2,880, so about 34. UptimeRobot’s 50 monitors at 5 minutes would use 432,000 checks a month, more than four times our allowance. Better Stack and HetrixTools trade the other way: fewer monitors (10 and 15) with 3-minute and 1-minute checks.
  • Inactivity rules. StatusCake’s terms require a free account to be logged into within 90 days, or it may be paused, suspended or deleted. HetrixTools says to log in every 90 days, and its terms allow disabling inactive free accounts. OnlineOrNot’s terms say it terminates accounts after 6 months without a login. Hyperping’s terms allow ending access after more than 24 months of inactivity. Site Qwality emails at 150 and 173 days without a login, pauses a free account’s checks at 180 days and archives the account at 365 days. Logging in restarts the clock, but paused monitors stay paused until you re-enable them.
  • One free account. StatusCake’s terms allow one free account. HetrixTools asks for one per person or organization and may suspend accounts that breach this. Pulsetic applies free limits per customer across accounts. It says agencies may keep one account per client, as long as accounts are not used to spread usage across free plans.
  • Status page limits. The free status page is usually the part that is cut back. StatusCake does not list one on free. UptimeRobot’s free page has no customization and sits on an UptimeRobot URL. Hyperping’s has no custom domain or subscribers. OpenStatus Hobby allows 3 components. Ours is on a Site Qwality subdomain and shows a “Powered by Site Qwality” badge until you buy the $50/mo white-label pack.
  • Commercial-use limits. StatusCake’s terms tie the free account to personal use. Better Stack, Hyperping, Checkly and OnlineOrNot label their free plans for personal projects or similar. UptimeRobot says commercial use is allowed on free. See the table for the exact wording.
  • SMS and phone alerts. UptimeRobot, StatusCake, HetrixTools and Hyperping include no SMS credits on their free plans. UptimeRobot sells 10 credits for $3 and HetrixTools charges $0.10 a credit. Better Stack’s free tier lists Slack and email alerts only. Site Qwality includes 10 SMS credits a month.

Pingdom, Freshping and the smaller free plans

These did not fit the tables, either because there is no free plan or because the plan is small or status-page-first.

  • Pingdom has no free plan. Its sign-up page offers a 30-day free trial.
  • Freshping (Freshworks) announced that free-plan accounts would be disabled on March 6, 2026, and that moving from free to paid was no longer supported. We could not confirm the end state beyond that notice.
  • OneUptime lists a free plan with 1 status page, 100 subscribers and unlimited manual monitors. The same list says “Active Monitors at $1/month”, so probed uptime checks are not free.
  • OnlineOrNot (Hobby, free): 3 monitors, 3-minute checks, 14 days of data retention, 1 status page without a custom domain, email, Slack, Discord and Telegram alerts, API and MCP access, 2 users. The plan is described as “Perfect for home labs and personal projects”.
  • Checkly (Hobby, free): 10 uptime monitors, checks as often as every 2 minutes, 6 locations, 1,000 browser checks and 10,000 API checks. The plan is described as “Perfect for personal projects and learning”.
  • Instatus (Starter, free): a status-page-first product with 15 monitors, 2-minute checks, email alerts, 1 public status page without a custom domain and 200 subscribers.

How we checked

On October 17, 2026 we read each vendor’s own pricing page, help or docs pages and terms (all linked under sources) and used only what they state. “Not stated” means the page does not say, not that the feature is missing. Some pricing pages are rendered by JavaScript or vary by region (UptimeRobot serves EUR or USD by location), so we read them as served to us that day. Plans change, so the source link is the authority if a figure here has moved. We make one of the products compared, so check the sources rather than trusting our summary.

Where other free plans beat ours

  • UptimeRobot gives 50 monitors at 5 minutes. Our free allowance covers about 11 at that interval.
  • HetrixTools checks every minute from 4 locations on its free plan. Ours is every 5 minutes from one location.
  • Better Stack’s free tier includes 5,000 session replays. Ours includes 100.
  • Pulsetic and HetrixTools list a custom domain for free status pages. Ours needs the $50/mo white-label pack.
  • UptimeRobot, Hyperping, Pulsetic and Uptime Kuma include port or ping checks on free. Site Qwality has no TCP, ICMP or port checks.
  • Our browser, TLS, domain and DNS-record checks run from Virginia only, and the platform runs in one AWS region (us-east-1).

Free plans compared (2 of 2): Hyperping, Pulsetic, OpenStatus and Uptime Kuma

The same rows as the first table. Uptime Kuma is software you host yourself, so its limits depend on your own server.

Site Qwality Hyperping Pulsetic OpenStatus Uptime Kuma
Monitors 100,000 checks a month, about 11 monitors at 5 minutes. Plus 25 cron monitors 20 monitors and 1 server monitoring agent 10 (monitors, heartbeats and domains combined) 1 monitor (Hobby plan) No limit stated. You host it yourself
Minimum check interval 5 minutes 5 minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes 20 seconds
Locations 1 per monitor 18 regions 3 region checks 6 regions Wherever you host it
Status page 1 page on a Site Qwality subdomain, with our badge. Custom domain and white-label: $50/mo 1 basic page on a Hyperping domain. No custom domain or subscribers 3 pages with a custom domain. No status badges. White-label starts on Team 1 page, 3 components Multiple pages, mappable to your own domains
Alerts on free Email, Slack, Discord, Teams and webhooks. 10 SMS credits a month Email, Slack and Teams. No SMS, phone calls, PagerDuty or Opsgenie Email and 1 webhook per monitor. No Slack, Discord, Telegram or SMS Not stated for Hobby 90+ notification services, including Telegram, Discord, Slack and email (SMTP)
API REST API and MCP server on every plan Paid plans only Not on free. API, MCP and n8n start at Solo Not stated for Hobby Not stated in its README
Data retention Check timings 1 year. Failure response bodies 5 days Uptime history not stated. Server metrics 2 days 3 months. Error logs 30 days 14 days Not stated in its README
Commercial use Our Service Agreement has no personal-use limit on free accounts Plan label: “For personal projects and trying out Hyperping”. Terms: free plan users are subject to the same Terms No personal-use rule found in its terms. Free limits apply per customer, not per account No personal-use rule found in its terms MIT license
Other included products Cron monitoring, browser checks (100 minutes), logs, metrics and traces (1 GB), RUM (1,000 sessions), session replay (100), on-call for 1 responder HTTP, port, ping and keyword checks. Healthchecks, SSL monitoring and maintenance windows SSL, port, TCP and ICMP checks, keyword monitoring, 1 dependency monitor, RUM (1,000 page views a month) Open source (AGPL-3.0). Can be self-hosted HTTP, TCP, keyword, JSON query, websocket, ping, DNS record, push and Docker checks

Figures are as published on each vendor’s own pages on October 17, 2026. “Not stated” means the page does not say.

FAQ

It depends on which limit matters to you. UptimeRobot gives the most monitors here (50, every 5 minutes) and its terms allow commercial use. HetrixTools is the only hosted plan in this comparison that checks every minute (15 monitors, 4 of 12 locations). Pulsetic and HetrixTools list a custom domain for free status pages. Uptime Kuma is free software you host yourself. Site Qwality’s free uptime plan is 100,000 checks a month at 5 minutes from one location, with a status page and free logs, RUM and session replay.

Pingdom has no free plan: its sign-up page offers a 30-day free trial. The free plans above that cover basic uptime checks are UptimeRobot (50 monitors, 5 minutes), HetrixTools (15 monitors, 1 minute), Hyperping (20 monitors, 5 minutes), Better Stack (10 monitors and heartbeats, 3 minutes), StatusCake (10 monitors, 5 minutes) and Site Qwality. For a direct comparison see Site Qwality vs Pingdom.

UptimeRobot (1 basic page on an UptimeRobot URL), Better Stack (1 page), HetrixTools (public pages on every plan, with partial white label and 3 own domains on free), Hyperping (1 basic page on a Hyperping domain), Pulsetic (3 pages with a custom domain), OpenStatus Hobby (1 page, 3 components), Site Qwality (1 page on a Site Qwality subdomain) and Uptime Kuma (multiple pages, self-hosted). StatusCake sells status pages as a separate product, StatusCake Pages, from $12.46 a month billed annually.

It depends on the vendor’s wording. UptimeRobot’s terms say “UptimeRobot is available for any use, including commercial and business use.” StatusCake’s terms say the Free Account “is for your own personal use”. Better Stack’s pricing page labels its free tier “Free for personal projects” and Hyperping’s says “For personal projects and trying out Hyperping”. We found no personal-use rule in the terms of HetrixTools, Pulsetic and OpenStatus, and Site Qwality’s Service Agreement has none. This reports published wording, not legal advice. If your use is borderline, ask the vendor.

It meters checks rather than monitors: 100,000 checks a month at a 5-minute minimum interval from one location. One monitor at 5 minutes uses 8,640 checks in 30 days, so the allowance covers 11 monitors, or about 34 at 15 minutes. Cron monitoring is separate, with 25 free monitors. That is fewer HTTP monitors than UptimeRobot’s 50 at the same interval.

Some can. StatusCake’s terms treat a free account not logged into for 90 days as abandoned and allow pausing, suspending or deleting it. HetrixTools asks you to log in every 90 days. OnlineOrNot terminates accounts after 6 months without a login, and Hyperping may end access after more than 24 months of inactivity. Site Qwality emails at 150 and 173 days and pauses a free account’s checks at 180 days without a login.

Its pricing page lists, for the free tier: 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack and email alerts, 100,000 exceptions a month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB of logs and 3 GB of traces retained for 3 days, 30 GB of metrics, and 3 GB of web events retained for 3 days. Its docs give the free-plan check frequency as 3 minutes. The tier is labelled “Free for personal projects”.

Freshworks announced that Freshping free-plan accounts would be disabled on March 6, 2026, and that moving from a free to a paid plan was no longer supported. Its deprecation FAQ is linked under sources. We could not confirm the end state beyond that notice.

Sources

Every competitor figure on this page comes from the vendor's own pages.

Other comparisons

Site Qwality vs Pingdom Price, features, and monitoring depth side by side. Site Qwality vs UptimeRobot Price, features, and monitoring depth side by side. Site Qwality vs Better Stack Price, features, and monitoring depth side by side. Site Qwality vs StatusCake Price, features, and monitoring depth side by side. Site Qwality vs Hyperping Price, features, and monitoring depth side by side. Site Qwality vs Uptime Kuma Price, features, and monitoring depth side by side.

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