Not every team has budget for monitoring. Here are 7 uptime monitoring services with genuinely useful free tiers, compared honestly.
Quick Comparison
| Service | Free Monitors | Min Interval | Regions | Status Page | SSL Check |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime Robot | 50 | 5 min | Multi | No | No |
| Freshping | 50 | 1 min | 10 | Yes | No |
| Uptime Kuma | Unlimited | 20 sec | 1 | Yes | Basic |
| Warden | Unlimited | 10 sec | 1 | Yes | Yes |
| Grafana Cloud | 5 | Configurable | 20+ | No | No |
| Cronitor | 5 | 1 min | Multi | Yes | No |
| Oh Dear | 1 | 1 min | Multi | No | Yes |
1. Uptime Robot (Best Free Managed Option)
50 monitors at 5-minute intervals. The most popular free monitoring tool for a reason. The free tier covers basic HTTP, ping, port, and keyword monitoring with email and webhook alerts.
Good: Generous monitor count. Reliable. Simple setup. Bad: 5-minute intervals are slow. No status page on free tier. Limited alerting.
2. Freshping (Best 1-Minute Free Checks)
50 URL checks at 1-minute intervals from 10 locations. Better check frequency than Uptime Robot’s free tier, with multi-location checks included.
Good: 1-minute intervals. 10 check locations. Clean UI. Bad: URL checks only (no TCP/DNS). Limited customization.
3. Uptime Kuma (Best Self-Hosted)
Unlimited monitors, 20-second minimum interval. The gold standard for self-hosted monitoring. One Docker command to deploy. 90+ notification integrations.
Good: Completely free. Unlimited monitors. Fast checks. Great notification support. Bad: Single-region only. You manage the infrastructure. No SLA on the monitor itself.
4. Warden (Best Self-Hosted for Teams)
Unlimited monitors, 10-second intervals, full RBAC, REST API. Open-source like Uptime Kuma but with the team features Kuma is missing: multi-user, PostgreSQL, Google SSO, and smart alerting — confirmation thresholds, cooldowns, recovery confirmation, and flap detection.
Good: Fastest free checks (10s). RBAC with 4 roles, including a status_viewer role that gives a client a private login to their own status page. Full REST API. PostgreSQL support. Integrated SSL monitoring. Status pages.
Bad: Single-region only — checks run from the host you install it on. HTTP(S) checks only, no TCP/DNS/ping. Slack and JSON webhook alerts only, no email. Newer project, smaller community.
Join the waitlist if you’d rather have it hosted and run for you.
5. Grafana Cloud (Best for Grafana Users)
5 synthetic checks integrated with Grafana dashboards. If you already use Grafana for observability, this adds monitoring without a new tool.
Good: Deep Grafana integration. Multiple probe locations. Bad: Only 5 checks. Requires Grafana knowledge. Not standalone.
6. Cronitor (Best for Cron + Web Monitoring)
5 monitors at 1-minute intervals. Cronitor is primarily a cron job monitor that also does website monitoring. Good for teams that need both.
Good: Multi-region. Combines web and cron monitoring. Good alerts. Bad: Only 5 free monitors. Primarily designed for cron monitoring.
7. Oh Dear (Best for Single-Site Monitoring)
1 site with comprehensive checks. Oh Dear monitors one site for free but does it thoroughly: uptime, SSL, mixed content, broken links, and more.
Good: Deep monitoring of a single site. SSL and link checking included. Bad: Only 1 site. Must upgrade for more.
Which Free Service Should You Use?
For personal projects: Uptime Robot (managed) or Uptime Kuma (self-hosted). Both are mature and reliable.
For production with SLA: Self-host Warden for 10-second intervals, RBAC, and REST API. The error budget math demands faster than 5-minute checks.
For dev/staging: Freshping’s 1-minute checks from 10 locations catch deployment issues quickly.
For Grafana shops: Grafana Cloud synthetic monitoring. Keep everything in one platform.
The Real Cost of “Free”
Free monitoring has hidden costs:
- Slow detection: 5 minutes of undetected downtime at $100M/year revenue = $950 per incident
- False positives: Single-region checks generate noise, causing alert fatigue
- Missing features: No SSL monitoring means preventable certificate expiry outages
- Self-hosted overhead: Running and maintaining your own monitoring infrastructure
Calculate your actual exposure with the downtime cost calculator. If the cost of one undetected outage exceeds a year of paid monitoring, the math is clear.
Related tools:
- Uptime Calculator — Understand SLA levels
- Downtime Cost Calculator — Calculate outage costs
- SSL Checker — Check certificate status