Comparison
Keel vs Pingdom
This page is for people watching a handful of URLs who searched "Pingdom alternative" and want to know whether the smaller tool does the job — not for anyone who needs transaction monitoring or real-user metrics, because on those counts Pingdom wins and we'd rather say so.
The comparison
Pingdom's figures below are from their pricing page and SolarWinds' own Pingdom documentation as of October 2026 — monthly billing, EUR amounts as served to us. Keel's are from ours. Both will drift; the shape of the difference won't.
| What you get | Keel | Pingdom |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Single-purpose uptime monitor. Nothing else, on purpose. | Monitoring service running since 2007, now part of SolarWinds: uptime, page speed, and transaction checks plus real-user monitoring, from 100+ probe servers worldwide. 1-minute checks are the recommended default in their setup docs. |
| Free tier | 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, webhook alerts, 30-day history. | None on the pricing page — a 30-day free trial (synthetic monitoring and RUM included) stands in for one, then you pay. |
| Paid pricing | £5/month flat — 50 monitors, 60-second checks. No seats, no add-ons, no usage tiers. | Volume-priced: from €16/month for 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS alerts; 50 uptime checks is €66/month; it scales to 30,000 uptime checks at €23,262/month. Real-user monitoring is priced separately from €16/month per 100k pageviews. Annual billing is cheaper. |
| Alerting | Webhooks only — down, up, or both, to any HTTPS endpoint, on every plan including Free. Payloads are plain JSON, so Slack, Discord, and curl work without adapters. Failed deliveries retry once. | Email, SMS (per-tier credit allowance), mobile push, integrations — Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and more — and webhooks. Alerts can be delayed up to an hour and resent up to 4 times for ongoing issues. |
| Incident threshold | Two consecutive failures open an incident; one blip is ignored on purpose. The first passing check closes it and fires up. | Before alerting you, Pingdom performs a second check on every incident to filter out false positives; alerts then follow the per-check notification settings. |
| Check types | HTTP and HEAD, against a status code you choose. Redirects are not followed — a 3xx counts as down unless you set it as the expected code. | HTTP(S) uptime with string matching, POST data, custom headers, and basic auth; SSL-certificate expiry monitoring; network and email checks; page speed; browser-recorded transaction monitoring; real-user monitoring. |
| Status pages | Not offered. | Public status pages on every plan, with customization and historical data. |
| History | 30 days of every check — status, status code, latency, error text. | Up to 13 months of real-user-monitoring data per their datasheet; a retention figure for uptime checks isn't published on the pages we could verify. |
When Keel is the better fit
When the URLs are few and the webhook is the point.
You want one price, not a volume slider
Fifty monitors at 60-second checks is £5/month flat on Keel — the whole schedule, enforced server-side. Pingdom's 50-uptime-check tier is €66/month as served here (€60.50 annual). Their plan buys transactions, RUM, and a probe network; Keel's buys nothing you didn't ask for.
You'd rather not start on a trial clock
Keel's free tier is three monitors, forever, with webhook alerts and 30-day history — no card, no expiry. Pingdom's entry is a 30-day trial of the full suite; after that, there's no free plan on the pricing page to land on.
The webhook is the product, not a feature
Pingdom has webhooks too — alongside email, SMS, push, and a dozen integrations. Keel has exactly one alerting path and documents it properly: plain JSON with a readable summary plus the full monitor, check, and incident objects, down/up/both per channel, a test send, and one retry on failure.
One blip shouldn't wake anyone
Keel opens an incident after two consecutive failures, deliberately: a single timeout is usually noise, and noise that wakes you is a cost. The first passing check closes the incident and fires up, so the alert always matches the history you can see.
When Pingdom is the better fit
Often, honestly — and the first reason is the big one.
You need more than availability
Browser-recorded transactions, page-speed waterfalls, real-user metrics, string-match checks, SSL expiry — Pingdom monitors things Keel doesn't attempt. Keel does HTTP and HEAD against an expected status code, and nothing else.
Global coverage and root-cause tools
100+ probe servers, region selection, and per-incident root-cause analysis with traceroute and server response detail. Keel checks from one place and records status, code, latency, and error text — if you need to know where a site is down, that's Pingdom's category.
The phone needs to ring
Email, SMS with per-tier credit allowances, mobile push, integrations, team alerting with resend escalation. Keel's webhook is the entire alerting surface — if a human has to be paged without you writing a receiver, Pingdom does that and Keel doesn't.
Maturity, status pages, and users
Monitoring since 2007, part of SolarWinds, with public status pages on every plan and unlimited users on synthetic monitoring. If customers expect status.yourdomain.com or an auditor wants a vendor with a decade of receipts, Keel isn't the tool.
Pick the small one on purpose.
If you need transactions, real-user data, or a phone that rings, use Pingdom — it's the better tool for that. If you need a handful of URLs watched and a webhook fired when they break, that's £5/month and about a minute of setup.
The webhook payload and public API are documented at keelmonitor.com/docs; the two-line price list lives at keelmonitor.com/#pricing.