Comparison
Keel vs UptimeRobot
This page is for people watching a handful of URLs who searched "UptimeRobot alternative" and want to know whether the smaller tool does the job — not for anyone who needs fifty monitors for free, because on that count UptimeRobot wins and we'd rather say so.
The comparison
UptimeRobot's figures below are from their pricing page 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 | UptimeRobot |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Single-purpose uptime monitor. Nothing else, on purpose. | Long-established uptime monitoring service: keyword, port, and ping checks, status pages, a mobile app, and an alert pipeline. |
| Free tier | 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, webhook alerts, 30-day history. | 50 monitors, 5-minute checks, HTTP/port/ping/keyword monitoring, 1 status page (no customization), and 5 integrations — Google Chat, Discord, Pushover, Pushbullet, Splunk. |
| Paid pricing | £5/month flat — 50 monitors, 60-second checks. No seats, no add-ons, no usage tiers. | Tiered: Solo from €10/month (10 monitors, 60-second checks; the 50-monitor tier is from €22/month), Team €41/month (100 monitors, 30-second checks), Scale €77–€179/month (200–500 monitors, 15-second checks). Extra seats and SMS/voice credits billed separately; 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 and voice calls (credit packs), mobile push, and integrations — Slack, Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, Zapier. The webhook integration is a paid feature (Team plan and up). |
| 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; alerts go out per the notification settings on each monitor. |
| 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, keyword, port, and ping on Free; API, UDP, DNS, SSL/domain expiry, heartbeat, multi-location, and slow-response checks from Solo up. |
| Status pages | Not offered. | 1 on Free, 3 on Solo, 100 on Team, unlimited on Scale — with custom domains and subscriber notifications on paid plans. |
| History | 30 days of every check — status, status code, latency, error text. | 3 months on Free, 12 on Solo, 24 on Team and Scale. |
When Keel is the better fit
When the URLs are few and the webhook is the point.
You want one price, not a tier tree
Fifty monitors at 60-second checks is £5/month flat on Keel — the whole schedule, enforced server-side. At UptimeRobot the same count and interval is Solo's 50-monitor tier, from €22/month as served here. Their plan buys more features; Keel's buys nothing you didn't ask for.
Your alert pipeline is the webhook
If alerts already flow into Slack, Discord, or a receiver of your own, Keel's webhook is on every plan including Free — plain JSON with a readable summary plus the full monitor, check, and incident objects. On UptimeRobot, the webhook integration arrives with the Team plan.
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 configure a platform
No monitor types to evaluate, no seats to provision, no SMS credit packs to keep topped up. Add a URL, point a webhook at it, done — the free tier is playable without paying anything.
When UptimeRobot is the better fit
Often, honestly — and the first reason is the big one.
You need more than three monitors for free
UptimeRobot's free plan is 50 monitors at 5-minute checks against Keel's 3. On quantity for nothing, they win outright, and no framing changes that arithmetic.
You want the whole alert pipeline
Email, SMS, voice calls, mobile push, escalation to a team — Keel has none of that by design; its webhook is the entire alerting surface. If the phone needs to ring without you writing a receiver, that's UptimeRobot's category.
Keyword, port, ping, and SSL checks
UptimeRobot checks keywords in page content, raw ports, and ping, includes keyword monitoring even on Free, and adds SSL/domain-expiry, DNS, and heartbeat monitoring on paid plans. Keel does HTTP and HEAD against an expected status code, and nothing else.
Status pages and scale
A public status page on every plan — including Free — plus 30-second and 15-second intervals, multi-location checks, and up to 24 months of history as you go up the tiers. If customers expect status.yourdomain.com, Keel isn't the tool.
Pick the small one on purpose.
If you need fifty free monitors or a phone that rings, use UptimeRobot — 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.