The Pingdom alternative that checks more than a status code
Pingdom tells you the URL answered. Checkly tells you the login worked, the checkout completed, and the API returned the right payload. Written in Playwright and TypeScript, versioned in your repo, run in CI.
Playwright-native Monitors live in git A trace on every run
Trusted to monitor mission-critical flows at teams like these
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“Currently we are working with Pingdom, one really old slash ancient product, let’s say. However, we kind of outgrew what it can offer us.”
Uptime is the floor, not the finish line
Pingdom was built in 2007, for a web where a 200 meant the site worked. Checkly is built for applications where the page loads fine and the checkout still fails.
Real Playwright, not a recorded script
Checkly browser checks are native Playwright. The same spec runs on your laptop, in CI, and in production. Pingdom transaction checks are a proprietary command script, authored in its portal and running in Chrome only.
Monitors live in your repo
Write checks in TypeScript, review them in a pull request, and ship them with the app. A Pingdom transaction script lives inside Pingdom. There is no git history, no code review, and no way to run it locally.
Failures arrive with evidence
Every check run captures a Playwright trace, a video, a screenshot, and console output, on passes as well as failures. When a Pingdom transaction fails you get the step that broke and a line of error text.
Checkly vs. Pingdom
A code-first synthetic monitoring platform against an uptime checker with a scripting portal bolted on. Here’s where the difference shows.
Browser check engine
What a check can assert
Local run and debug
Monitoring as code
Gate a deploy in CI
Failure evidence
Check frequency
Heartbeat monitoring
Status pages
● Full support·— Limited·✕ Not available
Where Pingdom leads: it is cheaper for plain uptime, it runs from 100+ probe locations against our 20+, and it covers protocols we do not, including ICMP ping, UDP, and the mail protocols. It also ships real user monitoring, which Checkly does not do at all, and a point-and-click recorder for teams with no engineer to spare. If you need a cheap ping from everywhere, Pingdom is a reasonable answer. If you need to know your product works, keep reading.
A cheaper check that tells you less
We are not going to pretend to undercut Pingdom on a basic uptime check. Pingdom is inexpensive because a Pingdom check is cheap to run: it asks for a URL and reads the number that comes back. The question is what that buys you on the night the page returns 200 and nobody can log in.
Proves the product works.
When it breaks at 3am, the on-call engineer opens the trace and sees the click that failed.
Proves the server answered.
That check is cheap to run, and it is cheap to buy. It also cannot tell you that the login is broken.
“When the check was failing, I got much more information from Checkly than in Pingdom. For us, [Pingdom] is a bit of a black box when it fails, and sometimes it’s hard to identify why it failed.”
From your IDE to production in three commands
Write checks in TypeScript, run them in CI, deploy them to production. The same workflow as the rest of your code, with the same tools. None of it happens in a portal.
Code your monitoring checks
Your app code lives in the repository. Your monitoring should too. Reuse the Playwright tests you already write and turn them into always-on production monitors. No proprietary script language, no recorder, no copy-paste into a portal.
Test and verify locally or in CI
Run checks from your machine or on every deploy in CI. They execute on Checkly’s global infrastructure, exactly as they will in production, and a failing check can block the release. Pingdom has no CLI and no local execution, so this step has no equivalent there.
Deploy for 24/7 monitoring
Deploy and version your monitoring from the command line, right alongside your application deploys. One command puts it live across 20+ locations.
Need more proof? Listen to the engineers
“Checkly is incredible: it combines Pingdom, Ghost Inspector, and Assertible in the same app, and the insights are much more detailed.”
“The Checkly CLI has enhanced our engineering team’s ability to quickly build, validate, and deploy an entire suite of checks from their local development environment.”
“We’ve been using Checkly for months and it’s been phenomenal. Super easy to set up, works flawlessly and intuitively. The team is super receptive and quick to help.”
“Checkly is a fabulous developer tool. The flexible features and developer-friendly API made the integration super easy, and their support is friendly and knowledgeable.”
“Checkly has helped us save engineering resources and expenses. When we get an alert, we can tell customers directly about issues.”
“A real advantage Checkly gives us is that we’re not waiting for users to report an issue, or waiting on a staff member to file a ticket. Checkly gives us real-time feedback on what is and isn’t working.”
Coming from Pingdom?
See the Migrator in action. We'll show you how your uptime checks and transaction scripts become version-controlled Playwright monitors, and what the coverage you actually want costs.
We map your Pingdom checks
Show us your uptime checks and transaction scripts. We translate them into Checkly constructs and native Playwright specs that live in your repo.
You see the cost of the coverage you actually want
We take your current check volume, locations, and frequency, and put a real number next to it. If a plain uptime ping is genuinely all you need, we will tell you that too.
Your first monitors go live with us
A guided session with our team to get checks running in CI and deployed to production, not a slide deck.