We list the best website monitoring software, to make it simple and easy to keep your website online by sending automated alerts if it becomes accessible.
While most of the best web hosting services can guarantee 99.99% uptime for your website, unexpected problems with hardware, network routers, and even carriers, as well as routine maintenance windows, can all take your website offline.
For general websites the loss of visitors can be bad enough, but for any business website it can lead to lost sales, brand damage, or even opportunities for hackers.
All the more reason to ensure that if your website does go offline for any reason, you can be made aware of it as quickly as possible, and take steps to fix the problem - as well as communicate to customers via social media that you're already working to fix it.
This means being subscribed to a website monitoring service that will not only regularly test your website for problems, but also alert you in the event that any is detected. After all, small problems such as a SQL server crash or a broken plugin can stop your website functioning even if it is technically still online, something any good monitoring services will notice.
Note that there are also similar services for specifically alerting you to website changes or even defacement.
As cyberattacks continue to develop, it's also a good idea to consider additional safeguards, such as DDoS protection, and ensure your DNS nameservers are properly secured. It's also worth investing in a SSL certificate to help protect your users, too.
We compare website monitoring software across numerous points, from user interface and documentation to the learning curve and alerting policies. We also consider performance, pricing plans, and bonus features such as site optimization, among other things.
Here we feature the best website monitoring software, while also listing some contenders worth considering if you have different needs.
Also, take a look at the best content marketing tools.
The best website monitoring software of 2024 in full:
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Best website monitoring software overall
When it comes to website monitoring, probably your first stop should be Alertra, especially because it allows you to do a free spot check of access to your website from server locations around the world.
This means if you try - and fail - to access your website, you can use Alertra to quickly diagnose whether the website server really is offline, or whether it's a potential network/connection issue with your broadband.
In general, though, Alertra is a simple but useful monitoring solution to ensure basic website functions are up and running, such as HTTP, SMTP, POP3, DNS, and MySQL. This can be especially important when other services might see that your server is still up and running through a HTTPS request, but not notice that MySQL has crashed, for example, which can be especially important when most websites are database driven.
While Alertra is good for general spot checks, a subscription is worth considering as it's a very cost-effective service. There's also no contract, so you can start/stop the service whenever you feel like.
Best website monitoring software for business
Pingdom is regarded by many as the leader of the website monitoring market, with customers worldwide including the likes of Walmart, Salesforce and Spotify. It focuses on website performance and availability monitoring, meaning it looks at both whether the website is up, and whether it loads as expected.
Bonus features include a website speed test, allowing you to test the load time of a page (or an index page) and analyze it to find bottlenecks.
Pingdom also offers application monitoring, transaction monitoring, and real user monitoring, among other things. It has multiple alerting policies, like high and low importance, which alert individuals at different levels of an organization.
Note that Pingdom sits alongside other Solarwinds products (AppOptics, PaperTrail and Loggly) to provide a one-stop-shop for businesses looking to monitor almost everything that is connected.
Pricing is quite expensive, but there is one welcome plus: all Pingdom tiers come with a generous 30-day trial, plenty of time to sample the service's abilities before you buy.
Best website monitoring software for enterprises
Other than having a great URL, Uptime.com has a straightforward, easy to understand product that attracts clients of all sizes. The company has a lot of Fortune 500 organizations among its customer base: IBM, Kraft, and BNP Paribas to name a few.
Various subscription packages are available, each tier allowing a higher volume of checks, real user monitoring, user accounts, data retention, alerts, and locations. There's also a Single Sign On (SSO) option available after the basic pricing tier.
There’s no free tier, but would-be buyers can avail themselves of a 14-day trial across all the paid-for tiers, with no credit card required, and useful free tools (a Domain Health Test, Website Speed Test and Global Uptime Test) that’ll give them a taste of what to expect from the website monitoring service. Uptime.com also provides a free public status page for dozens of companies (including popular web hosting outfits) and you can even subscribe to alerts.
Best website monitoring software for multiple websites
In its simplest form, Site24x7 is a powerful website monitoring solution that scales all the way to become an all-encompassing, full-blown powerhouse that can do application performance monitoring and infrastructure monitoring for thousands of servers and websites simultaneously. That’s great for DevOps teams who want to monitor and troubleshoot applications, servers and network infrastructure, including private and public clouds.
The cheapest tier gives you the ability to monitor 10 websites or servers with one synthetic web transaction with the (rare) ability to buy more add-ons if needed – that might come in handy as the lowest RUM (real user monitoring) pageview count stands at only 100K.
All tiers have a 30-day free trial period. Site24x7 distinguishes between basic monitors and advanced monitors: web page speed and website defacement for example count as advanced monitors, while a pure HTTP request is deemed basic.
The website monitoring service also provides far more free tools than its competitors. However, the sheer breadth and depth of Site24x7’s offerings runs the danger of confusing novice users who only want to check their sites for availability.
Read our full Site24x7 review.
Best affordable website monitoring software
UptimeRobot is a bit of a veteran having been launched at the beginning of the last decade. It was one of the first to offer a free service which is still running and offers HTTPS, ping, and port monitoring, all with 5-minute checks. You can monitor 50 URLs with the free plan, use the keyword monitor to check a website's content too.
Upgrade to the Pro Plan to get the monitoring interval reduced to 60 seconds with a range of extra options and improved limits, such as extended logs, SSL monitoring, maintenance scheduling and custom HTTP headers and statuses.
Notifications are a highlight. You can be alerted via email, SMS, voice calls and more, and there are third-party integrations with Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Telegram, Discord, Zapier, PagerDuty, Pushbullet and more.
However, if you would like more advanced features, you will need to look elsewhere. UptimeRobot provides basic performance monitoring (limited to response time) and the main monitoring locations are based in the US primarily.
Other website monitoring software to consider
There are other website monitoring services available, but whichever you choose, do ensure that it can test any services that should be active. A simple ping that shows that a URL is accessible doesn't necessarily mean that the website is up and running, hence all the more reason to include checking corresponding services you use such as MySQL for databases or POP3 for email. Here therefore are some additional tools you can use to check your website(s) are running as they should, some of which are free to use or have a free tier:
UpTrends provides a number of services on top of website monitoring, such as web performance and applications monitoring, as well as server, API, and real user monitoring. Push notifications are available through Android and iOS apps, as well as SMS and voice alerts as required. There are three pricing tiers for basic website monitoring. However, there are also two advanced website monitoring tiers which allow for much more customizations. As with others, there's a free trial available as well as discount for annual payments, and there are also a number of free tools available.
Host Tracker is targeted at webmasters and webhosts, allowing them to not simply monitor the availability of services to ensure that websites remain up and running, but also additional tools to check that IPs and domains have not been blacklisted, as well as security certificate expirations. Additional tools allow for the monitoring of server resources, not least RAM and CPU use, as well as load. There's also a feature that allows error log snapshotting.
Datadog website monitoring provides a more heavy-duty approach to website, server, and application monitoring, as well as monitoring cloud infrastructure, aimed primarily at enterprises. It provides a dashboard for the visualization of metrics, traces, and logs, and it can be customized using drag and drop to graph, analyze, or compare these. A collaboration feature allows for teams to work together on outages in real-time, or else check on historical performance. Pricing depends on whether you want synthetics, full-stack infrastructure, or APM monitoring. There is also a free 14-day trial available.
Alertbot is another service that allows the user to do much more than simply monitoring site availability, and it can also be used to monitor your APIs and web services, apps, and servers. Alertbot will pinpoint problems with your webpages beyond just simple downtime, giving you the ability to check on scripts or other page elements, and monitor load times, looking for any kind of problem that might be hampering your website in not just major, but also minor ways.
We've also listed the best website defacement monitoring service.
Best website monitoring software FAQs
What is website monitoring software?
Website monitoring software is designed to monitor and ensure uninterrupted site access and minimize downtime. It also optimizes site performance and helps in keeping the website online and running constantly. This software also provide alerts to users by email, SMS, or phone call.
How to choose the best website monitoring software for you?
When selecting the best website monitoring software, you'll want to look at the software's learning curve, the number of websites it'll check, and the alerting policies. Check whether it offers testing from servers across the globe, how long it retains data, and if it has real user monitoring.
Some services have the option to customize their alerting policies, you'll want to opt for this if you want to avoid unnecessary alerts or if you want to direct alerts to specific members of the team. Lastly, you'll want to assess the pricing plans, check whether there's a free trial available, and find out how helpful the customer support is.
How we tested the best website monitoring software
To test the best website monitoring software, we look at various factors, like the user interface, ease of setup, documentation and tutorials, and the learning curve.
We evaluate how many websites the software checks, whether the alerting policies can be customized, and if the software offers testing from servers across the world. We also check how long the software retains data, what platforms it sends alerts on (SMS, email, or phone calls), and how prompt and helpful the customer service is.
Lastly, we assess the pricing plans and check if there's a comprehensive free trial available, among other aspects.
Read more on how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar.
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