Pingdom (SolarWinds) is the enterprise incumbent. It has been measuring uptime since before most of its competitors existed, and in large organisations it is often already bought and already approved.
What Pingdom does better
Real user monitoring. Pingdom measures what actual visitors experienced — page load times from real browsers, filterable by geography and device, with 13 months of retention. We do not do this at all. Synthetic checks tell you whether a page responds; RUM tells you whether it was slow for someone in Brazil on a phone. Those are different questions and we only answer the first.
Transaction monitoring maturity. Their multi-step scripted checks have had a long time to grow up, with a recorder and a large library of assertions.
Scale. Plans configure up to 25,000 uptime checks and a billion pageviews. If you are that size, this page is not for you.
Where we differ
There is no free plan — only a trial. You cannot run Pingdom against your own services indefinitely at zero cost to see whether you like it. Ours stays free at 10 monitors with no card.
The price is not on the pricing page. Pingdom's pricing is a configurator: you pick quantities of uptime checks, advanced checks and SMS credits, and a figure appears. There is a "from" price in euros, but the page as published does not state a plain monthly number you can compare. Ours is €0 / €19 / €79 and written down.
We check things it does not. Game servers over their own protocols, Discord bot presence, databases with a real authenticated query, mail blocklists.
And the part we build the product around: an outbox before every alert with a ~50-minute retry ladder, a weekly test event through every channel with the failures named, an "Alerts are at risk" banner when the pipeline is degraded, and /api/health returning 503 when the checker itself dies so something outside can page you.
Side by side
| Pingdom | Uplance | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | No — trial only | Yes, 10 monitors, no card |
| Published price | Configurator; "from" price only | €0 / €19 / €79 per month |
| Real user monitoring | Yes, 13 months retention | No |
| Transaction / multi-step checks | Yes, mature | Yes, multi-step and browser flows |
| Max scale | 25,000 uptime checks | 250 on Business; more on request |
| Game server checks | No | Minecraft, Source/Steam, FiveM |
| Database checks | No | Postgres, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis |
| Proof alerts were delivered | No | Outbox, retry ladder, weekly drill |
| Self-serve signup | Trial, then sales | Card-free signup, upgrade when you want |
Which one to pick
Pingdom if you need real user monitoring, or if you are at a size where the answer is decided by procurement rather than by a pricing page. The RUM gap is real and we are not closing it soon.
Uplance if you want synthetic monitoring with a price you can read, a free tier you can evaluate properly, and coverage of protocols Pingdom has never spoken. Most teams under a hundred people are buying far more Pingdom than they use.