Comparison
Keel vs StatusCake
This page is for people watching a handful of URLs who searched "StatusCake alternative" and want to know whether the smaller tool does the job — not for anyone who needs ten free monitors or SSL and domain checks, because on those counts StatusCake wins and we'd rather say so.
The comparison
StatusCake's figures below are from their pricing page as of October 2026 — 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 | StatusCake |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Single-purpose uptime monitor. Nothing else, on purpose. | Uptime, page-speed, domain, SSL, and server monitoring in one product, with reporting, dashboards, and team tools as you go up the plans. |
| Free tier | 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, webhook alerts, 30-day history. | 10 uptime monitors at 5-minute intervals, plus 1 page-speed, 1 domain, and 1 SSL test; email alerts and the integrations are included. Custom test locations are not. |
| Paid pricing | £5/month flat — 50 monitors, 60-second checks. No seats, no add-ons, no usage tiers. | Superior from €16.66/month (annual) or €19.99 monthly — 100 uptime monitors at 1-minute intervals, 50 domain and SSL tests, 3 server monitors, 75 SMS credits. Business from €58.33/month (annual) or €69.99 monthly — 300 monitors at 30-second intervals, 400 SMS credits, team tools. Enterprise is custom. |
| 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 plus 14 integration platforms on every plan including Free — webhook, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, DataDog, Telegram, Teams, and more. SMS and phone-call alerts are paid-plan credits (75/month on Superior, 400 on Business). |
| Incident threshold | Two consecutive failures open an incident; one blip is ignored on purpose. The first passing check closes it and fires up. | Not published as a single number on the pricing page; alerts follow the per-test 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. | Eight uptime test types per their knowledge base — HTTP (with POST data, custom headers, and string matching), HEAD, TCP, DNS, SMTP, SSH, PING, and PUSH — plus page-speed tests, domain expiry with blacklist and record monitoring, SSL expiry with mixed-content alerts and certificate scoring, and server monitoring on paid plans. |
| Status pages | Not offered. | Offered as a separate product, StatusCake Pages — its plan availability isn't on the pricing page, so we won't quote terms we couldn't verify. |
| History | 30 days of every check — status, status code, latency, error text. | Uptime test results kept for up to a month per their uptime feature page — comparable to Keel's 30 days. |
When Keel is the better fit
When the URLs are few and the webhook is the point.
You want one price, not three plans and a toggle
Fifty monitors at 60-second checks is £5/month flat on Keel — the whole schedule, enforced server-side. StatusCake's nearest plan is Superior at €16.66/month annual (€19.99 monthly) for 100 monitors at 1-minute checks — more monitors, more test types, and a faster interval, at more than three times the price.
The alert should just be a webhook
StatusCake has a webhook integration among its 14 — plus email, SMS credits, phone calls, and the rest to configure. 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.
You'd rather not evaluate five product families
Uptime, page speed, domain, SSL, server — StatusCake's pricing page is a matrix of them. Keel has one thing to configure: add a URL, choose the expected status code, point a webhook at it, done — the free tier is playable without paying anything.
When StatusCake is the better fit
Often, honestly — and the first reason is the big one.
You need more than three monitors for free
StatusCake's free plan is 10 uptime monitors at 5-minute checks against Keel's 3 — plus a page-speed, domain, and SSL test. On quantity for nothing, they win outright, and no framing changes that arithmetic.
Certificates, domains, and page speed
SSL expiry with mixed-content alerts, domain expiry with blacklist monitoring, page-speed tests — StatusCake watches things Keel doesn't attempt. Keel does HTTP and HEAD against an expected status code, and nothing else.
The phone needs to ring
SMS credits and phone-call alerts on paid plans, Telegram and Teams and PagerDuty among the 14 integrations, custom alert emails on Business. Keel's webhook is the entire alerting surface — if a human has to be paged without you writing a receiver, that's StatusCake's category.
Locations, speed, and teams
Paid plans choose the regions tests run from, Business checks every 30 seconds, and teams get members, audit logs, and dashboards. Keel checks from one place at 60 seconds max, single-user, and if you need per-region truth, Keel isn't the tool.
Pick the small one on purpose.
If you need ten free monitors, certificate and domain checks, or SMS alerts, use StatusCake — 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.