by Albright Labs
If you are shopping for uptime monitoring, UptimeRobot is probably the first name you found. It has been around for years, it is simple to set up, and a lot of developers have used its free plan at some point. For basic “is my site up” checks, it does the job.
So why look at anything else? Usually because a team outgrows the basics. They want alerts in Slack instead of an inbox, a status page customers can check, a way to know a nightly backup actually ran, or an on-call rotation so the same person is not woken up every night. That is where the differences between tools start to matter.
This post compares Pulsey with UptimeRobot on the things small teams ask about most. We make Pulsey, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to describe UptimeRobot fairly, using their own pricing page and help center as of late September 2026. Plans change, so confirm anything that matters to you on their site.
The short version
- Pick UptimeRobot if you want a long-established tool with a large user base and your needs are simple website checks.
- Pick Pulsey if you want Slack or Teams alerts, a status page and cron heartbeats on the free plan, and on-call schedules, SMS and PagerDuty at a flat $15 or $30 a month.
Free plan
Pulsey’s free plan includes 50 server monitors and 50 heartbeats, checked every five minutes, for one team member. It is free for good, needs no credit card and can be used for commercial projects.
On the free plan you get email alerts for yourself plus one other alert destination: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram or a webhook. You also get a public status page, incidents, maintenance windows and uptime badges.
UptimeRobot’s free plan is also built around 50 monitors at five-minute intervals, and it can be used for commercial projects too. The difference is what comes with it. As of October 2026, UptimeRobot’s free plan includes email alerts and one status page on an UptimeRobot URL, and its free integrations are Google Chat, Discord, Pushover, Pushbullet and Splunk. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram and SMS start on its paid plans.
One trade-off on our side: Pulsey’s free plan does not show uptime percentages or status history. Those screens need a paid plan.
Paid plans and pricing
Pulsey has two self-serve paid plans, both with one-minute checks:
- Basic, $15 a month ($162 a year): 200 servers and 200 heartbeats, up to 3 team members, 30 days of logs.
- Pro, $30 a month ($324 a year): 500 servers and 500 heartbeats, up to 10 team members, 90 days of logs.
Both paid plans include SMS alerts, on-call schedules and rotations, unlimited alert destinations including PagerDuty and Opsgenie, per-monitor alert routing and escalation. There are no setup fees or contracts, and changes take effect immediately with pro-rata billing.
UptimeRobot’s paid tiers work differently. As of October 2026, its plans are Solo ($13 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly, for 10 or 50 monitors at 60-second checks), Team ($46 a month, or $39 billed yearly, for 100 monitors at 30-second checks and 3 login seats) and Scale ($98 a month, or $79 billed yearly, for 200 or 500 monitors at 15-second checks and 5 login seats), plus a custom Enterprise plan. So 200 monitors means the Scale plan. UptimeRobot checks more often than Pulsey on its higher tiers, which matters if 15 or 30 seconds of detection time is worth paying for.
SMS and voice alerts work on credits at UptimeRobot. Each paid plan includes some, and more are sold as one-time credit packs. Pulsey’s paid plans include SMS alerts up to a monthly cap (100 on Basic, 500 on Pro).
It is worth pricing out the exact number of monitors and team members you need on both sites before deciding.
Alert channels
This is where teams usually feel the difference day to day.
Pulsey sends alerts to email and SMS for people on your team, and to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram and signed webhooks on every plan. Paid plans add PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Pushover. PagerDuty and Opsgenie incidents open when something goes down and resolve on their own when it recovers.
Each destination can be limited to certain events and certain hours. On paid plans you can send each monitor’s alerts to only the people and tools that care about it, and escalate to backup on-call if an incident is not acknowledged in time.
UptimeRobot also supports a range of alert integrations. As of October 2026, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Telegram start on its Solo plan, and webhooks and PagerDuty start on its Team plan. Its pricing page does not list built-in on-call schedules or rotations.
Cron jobs and scheduled tasks
A lot of outages are not a website going down. They are a backup that stopped running three weeks ago.
Pulsey handles this with heartbeats. Each heartbeat gets a unique URL. Your job requests it when it finishes, and if the ping does not arrive in the window you chose (from 10 minutes to 1 month), Pulsey alerts you. A job can also request the URL with /fail on the end to report a failure right away, with an optional message that shows up in the alert. Heartbeats are evaluated every minute on every plan, including free.
UptimeRobot offers heartbeat (cron job) monitoring too, as one of its monitor types. Check its pricing page for which plan you need.
Status pages
Pulsey status pages show your logo, each service’s status, 90 days of daily uptime bars (as far back as your plan keeps history) and recent incidents. They refresh every 60 seconds, support light and dark mode, and use a status-colored favicon. They never show your URLs, IP addresses or error messages. The free plan includes one status page.
One limit to know: Pulsey has no built-in custom domain for status pages. You can redirect your own domain to the page, but not CNAME it.
UptimeRobot includes status pages in every plan rather than selling them separately. As of October 2026, the free plan gets 1 page on an UptimeRobot URL, Solo gets 3, Team gets 100 and Scale gets unlimited pages, and custom domains start on Solo. If you want a status page on your own domain, that is a point in UptimeRobot’s favor.
Check types
Pulsey checks HTTP and HTTPS URLs, TCP ports and DNS records on every plan. HTTP checks can validate the response body with “contains”, “does not contain” or a regex, so a page that returns 200 with an error on it still counts as down. You can also set a response-time threshold and get a warning when an endpoint stays slow.
Before alerting, Pulsey re-checks a failing endpoint so a brief blip does not page anyone.
UptimeRobot supports more monitor types: HTTP, keyword, ping, port, heartbeat, DNS, API, UDP, SSL and domain expiry, and website change checks. Some of these need a paid plan.
Where UptimeRobot may be the better fit
Be honest with yourself about what you need:
- If you want a tool with a long track record and a very large user base, UptimeRobot has that. Pulsey is newer.
- If you need checks from several geographic locations, UptimeRobot’s paid plans can check from up to four regions (North America, Europe, Asia and Australia). Pulsey checks from its own infrastructure.
- If you need checks more often than once a minute, UptimeRobot’s Team and Scale plans check every 30 and 15 seconds.
- If you need a custom domain on your status page without a redirect, Pulsey does not offer that today.
Try Pulsey alongside what you have
You do not have to switch in one go. Add your five most important endpoints and one cron heartbeat to Pulsey’s free plan, connect Slack, and run it next to your current monitor for a couple of weeks. Then compare which one told you first.
Start monitoring free. No credit card, 50 monitors, and about five minutes to set up.