Even just a few minutes of website downtime can cost you customers, erode user trust, and compromise search engine rankings. The stakes are too high - you need a reliable uptime monitoring solution in your arsenal.
There are tons of options at your disposal, which can overwhelm the process of choosing one that aligns with your needs. But we’re here to help you skip over the guesswork by reviewing two of the most popular options on the market: SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot.
Each of these is considered the best uptime monitoring service for a specific use case. You’ll learn what you can monitor with either tool along with the quality of the monitoring capabilities, the extent of alerting features, which is more affordable, and more.
Want to skip to the good part and see our verdict for which you can trust to protect your digital presence? The answer is actually neither. While these are definitely two great tools, we’ve developed our own website monitoring service that addresses the shortcomings of each.
You also get built-in incident management to help you restore website functionality fast, something the others don’t offer. Try Odown to see the difference yourself - a 14-day free trial is a few clicks away!
What is SiteUpTime?
SiteUpTime is a comprehensive website monitoring service trusted by professional system administrators. It detects and notifies you of any downtime so you can address issues before they impact your customers or reputation.
Countless individuals and organizations alike trust SiteUpTime, and you don’t have to just take our word for it. The tool is rapidly approaching 10 billion checks!
Key Features of SiteUpTime:
- Multi-Location Monitoring: Check your website's availability from 11 different locations spread across four continents. This global monitoring network accurately assesses your website’s accessibility to users worldwide, so you can ensure reliable performance in the US, Hong Kong, Australia, and everywhere in between.
- Advanced Verification System: SiteUpTime employs a fail-safe mechanism where any detected failure is confirmed from an alternative geographic location to avoid false alarms. You can trust that when an alert pops up, it’s legitimate.
- Flexible Monitoring Intervals: While free plans are limited to just 30-60 minute intervals, others run checks as frequently as every 2 minutes, ensuring that any downtime is quickly detected and addressed.
- Diverse Monitoring Options: Including HTTP (Web Server), SSL (Secure Socket Layer), DNS (Domain Name Server), and even specific page content or FTP services. This is a versatile tool for comprehensive web performance oversight.
Pricing Plans:
- Free Plan: Includes 1 monitor with 30-minute checks, uptime reports, email alerts - fairly bare-bones but perfect for basic monitoring needs.
- Standard Plan ($10/month): Includes 3 monitors with 2-minute checks, SMS/call alerts, DNS monitoring, ping monitoring, multiple alert contacts, and API access. You also get access to web error details, webhooks, user accounts, reports, and custom ports.
- Pro Plan ($20/month): Includes 6 monitors with 2-minute checks, page content monitoring, public status pages, sub-user accounts, and failure traceroot.
Whether it's a small personal project or a large e-commerce platform, SiteUpTime provides tailored plans and features to meet diverse monitoring needs.
The website appears a bit dated, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It speaks to how simple and straightforward SiteUpTime is as a web monitoring tool, perfect for those who don’t want any more complexities in their software stack.
What is UptimeRobot?
UptimeRobot is one of the world's leading uptime monitoring services, trusted by GoDaddy, NASA, Expedia, and many others. In fact, the service currently manages 7.5 million monitors for more than 2 million users!
This comprehensive and reliable monitoring solution keeps you informed about your website’s status with a promise of simplicity and effectiveness. Businesses and individuals alike can monitor their online presence with minimal setup time.
Key Features of UptimeRobot:
- Broad Monitoring Scope: You can monitor website uptime, SSL certificate validity, domain expiration, and even ping, port, cron job, and keywords. All critical aspects of your site’s functionality are under constant surveillance.
- Rapid Notification System: You’re the first to know about website issues, which could save you from lost revenue and maintain customer trust. Alerts can be received through multiple channels such as email, SMS, voice calls, and various integrations including Slack, Telegram, and Microsoft Teams.
- User-Friendly Interface: Setup is straightforward, so you can start tracking your site’s performance in under 30 seconds. The dashboard provides clear and actionable insights, making it accessible even for those with minimal technical expertise.
- Advanced Monitoring Features: Beyond basic uptime checks you can leverage response time monitoring, maintenance windows to prevent false alarms during scheduled downtime, and custom HTTP request setups for tailored monitoring.
Pricing Plans:
- Free Plan: You get 50 monitors and a 5-minute monitoring interval, making this an excellent choice for hobby projects. You’re limited to 5 integrations, basic status pages, and only HTTP, port & ping monitors and keyword monitors.
- Solo Plan ($7/month): Checks every 60 seconds and includes enhanced monitoring features like SSL and domain expiration. You get up to 9 integrations and access to notify seats for additional users.
- Team Plan ($29/month): Designed for small teams needing collaborative tools and comprehensive monitoring with 100 monitors, all 12 integrations, and 3 notify seats along with fully featured status pages.
- Enterprise Plan ($54/month): Provides industry-leading 30-second checks for between 200-1,000 monitors. You also get 5 notify seats.
UptimeRobot provides its own public status page, too, so you can see exactly how the service works yourself. You can also take your web monitoring on the go with Android and iPhone apps. It’s a great solution for a variety of businesses - but is it right for you? Let’s find out.
Comparing SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot: Features, Pricing, and More
At first glance, it appears that UptimeRobot is a way more expensive solution than SiteUpTime. However, we need to peel the layers back to show you what you’re actually getting in each solution.
We’re going to assess what you can monitor through each service and the differences in monitor locations, speeds, and alerting. Then we’ll look at the pricing side of things, support, reporting, and more to determine which truly offers better value.
What Can You Monitor?
Website monitoring is a pretty vague phrase - we need to get more specific about what exactly you’re able to monitor through SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot.
SiteUpTime offers a broad range of monitoring capabilities, including HTTP, SSL, DNS, SMTP (email servers), POP3 (email receipt), FTP (file transfer protocol), and custom TCP ports. It also monitors webpage content and HTTP password-protected web pages, allowing for detailed oversight of web infrastructure.
UptimeRobot, on the other hand, allows you to monitor HTTP, keyword, ping, port, and SSL certifications. It also provides cron job monitoring and domain expiration tracking, ensuring comprehensive oversight of web performance and security.
As you can see, there are certain things each service brings to the table that the other does not. This is why you need to consider the specific needs of your website and choose accordingly.
Monitoring Locations and Speed
It’s not just about what you’re able to monitor - how it’s monitored matters too! This allows you to rest assured your site’s performance is reliable worldwide around the clock.
SiteUpTime performs checks from 11 different locations across four continents, ensuring global coverage. It verifies failures from alternate geographic locations to reduce false positives, with monitoring intervals as frequent as every 2 minutes on higher-tier plans.
Meanwhile, UptimeRobot says it monitors your website from “multiple” locations without giving an actual number or specific locations.
We took a quick look and saw that they have tons of IP addresses for monitoring websites, ranging from California to Ohio, Virginia, and even outside of the US to Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Montreal, Ireland, Germany, and more.
Furthermore, the service boasts the fastest checks in the industry, as little as 30 seconds on the more advanced plans. UptimeRobot has the advantage in both locations and speed.
Alerting Protocols
Monitoring for website downtime or domain/SSL expiration is one thing - letting site admins know when an issue pops up is what matters most. After all, this is what will influence the efficiency by which you’re able to get your site back up and running.
SiteUpTime alerts users via email, SMS, and direct phone calls, integrating multiple contact points per alert. This three-pronged approach is great, but there’s one problem - it doesn’t appear you can integrate with any 3rd party apps.
This is why we give UptimeRobot the edge here. Not only does it support alerting via email, SMS, and phone call, but you can integrate with:
- Slack
- Zapier
- PagerDuty
- Splunk On-Call
- Telegram
- Webhooks
- Discord
- Mattermost
- Pushbullet
- Microsoft Teams
- Pushover
- And more
If you don’t need to be alerted via any of these apps, this may not factor into your decision-making. That being said, many users end up choosing UptimeRobot for this reason alone!
Value Comparison
We mentioned earlier that SiteUpTime appears to be the most affordable service, but the truth is, UptimeRobot offers much better value for most websites that need sophisticated monitoring capabilities.
This can be seen in both the free and paid plans. For example, SiteUpTime’s free plan offers just 1 monitor every 30-60 minutes. In contrast, UptimeRobot’s free plan gives you 50 monitors every 5 minutes, integrations, status pages, and more.
In comparing the Solo plan by UptimeRobot to the Standard plan by SiteUpTime, we see a similar takeaway. Not only is UptimeRobot $3 cheaper per month, but you get 50 monitors and 60-second checks compared to 3 monitors and 2-minute checks.
In terms of sheer cost-effectiveness, UptimeRobot’s free and paid plans have an undisputed edge. But in just a few moments, we’ll introduce a solution that does all this and more for even less! There are still a few other things worth considering, though - like support, community, and reporting.
Support and Community
This is where both solutions do an excellent job. SiteUpTime has a wealth of resources for its users like FAQs and a troubleshooting tab along with phone and email support.
However, UptimeRobot does appear to take things a step further with not just FAQs, support docs, and live chat customer service, but also a Discord server where you can network and get help from other users.
Reporting
Last but not least, we need to evaluate the reporting features of SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot. With SiteUpTime you gain access to detailed reports of uptime/downtime on a monthly basis, available through your control panel.
UptimeRobot offers a similar feature but with the added benefit of having this report emailed to you on a monthly basis so you don’t have to go looking for it.
SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot: The Verdict
There you have it - a detailed comparison of UptimeRobot vs SiteUpTime. Now it’s just a matter of choosing the right solution for your unique needs.
You are probably starting to see that UptimeRobot has an edge in just about every category. It’s more affordable while offering more robust monitoring features, alerting protocols, and support. If we had to recommend just one of these two services, it’d be this one.
However, these are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to web monitoring. You can see how they stack up to the field in our blog where you’ll gain access to similar resources:
- Pingdom vs WebPageTest
- StatusCake vs Pingdom
- Uptrends vs Pingdom
- Uptrends vs StatusCake
- UpTime Robot vs Pingdom
- Pingdom vs New Relic
- Pingdom vs Cloudwatch
- Uptime Kuma vs UpTime Robot
As we promised from the start, though, there’s another solution you can consider that was designed to address the shortcomings of all website monitoring services: Odown.
Why Odown is a Superior Solution to Both UptimeRobot AND SiteUpTime
Odown is an all-in-one website uptime monitoring service that doesn’t just alert you to downtime fast - it helps you resolve issues so you can get back up and running ASAP! The best part? It costs a fraction of what you’d pay for similar solutions through UptimeRobot or SiteUpTime.
- Extensive Alerting System: Notification channels include SMS, email, Slack, webhooks, Discord, Opsgenie, Telegram, and more on the way like Microsoft Team, Google Chat, and Twitter. You can customize alerting rules, too.
- Global Monitoring Network: With 17 data center locations worldwide, Odown offers unmatched insight into global website performance compared to both UptimeRobot and SiteUpTime.
- Advanced Incident Management: Integrated tools for managing and resolving issues facilitate efficient collaboration within teams, something you don’t get in other tools.
- Superior User Interface: Odown’s dashboard is intuitively designed for ease of use, offering detailed, actionable insights at a glance to save time and stress.
You also get a beautifully designed public status page, SSL certificate monitoring, and more. Plus, you’ll only pay $29 a month for what would cost more than $350 through UptimeRobot! It’s not just the best SiteUpTime or UptimeRobot alternative, though. You can see how it stacks up to all the popular monitoring solutions you have at your disposal over on our website:
Otherwise, get started with a 14-day free trial or request a demo to see exactly what makes Odown the #1 solution for small projects and large-scale businesses alike.
Final Thoughts on SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot
Knowing why website monitoring tools are important, you can’t afford to settle for anything less than the best. While you came here to find out whether SiteUpTime vs UptimeRobot aligned with your needs, it’s clear that Odown is the superior choice.
You get comprehensive website monitoring capabilities, global coverage, and advanced incident management tools for less than you’d pay through these two alternatives - what more could you ask for?
Don’t wait any longer and risk your digital presence being compromised. For peace of mind knowing your website is protected from downtime, get started with Odown risk-free today.
