The success of your website directly affects your company’s bottom line. Thus, choosing the best website monitoring solution is essential. They do routine testing and notify you when your site is down, making it simpler for you to identify problems and find solutions.
Several alternatives are available, ranging from straightforward uptime or transaction monitoring to sophisticated online performance monitoring tools. Therefore, if searching for the most acceptable website monitoring software, go no further than our carefully compiled list.
There are various approaches to determining what’s causing your performance to decline, from keeping an eye on the server resources to examining how the website responds to user input using tools like accurate user monitoring and synthetic monitoring.
With many factors to consider, including commercial and open source tools, selecting the best tool for the task can be challenging. I want to concentrate on the SaaS solutions since they have more significant support and can offer service level agreements, which most open source tools cannot. There are several excellent open source options available as well.
The Top 15 Best Website Performance Monitoring Tools, both Free and Paid
Here are the top 15 paid and free website performance monitoring tools accessible right now;
1. Sematext
Price: $0 per month. Premium plans begin at $19 per month.
A complete solution for log management and monitoring, Sematext Cloud offers end-to-end visibility and observability. The suite’s accurate user monitoring (RUM) solution, Sematext Experience, and a synthetic monitoring tool, Synthetics, are both available for website monitoring.
Sematext became the go-to solution for developers trying to get insight into their infrastructure while keeping an eye on the metrics related to the user experience after the release of Sematext Experience and Synthetics.
With Sematext Experience, you’ll receive a report on your customers’ real experience and happiness, along with vital details about how well your website or application functions across various environments, gadgets, and connection speeds.
On the other hand, Synthetic Monitoring enables you to quickly create a sophisticated network of monitors for all your resources. The monitors will ping your resources from various points worldwide and send back statistics on website performance, uptime, error rates, answers to third APIs, SSL certificate expiration, and many other crucial data. Even better, you can use it to benchmark against rival websites and find areas that need to be optimized for better website performance.
The straightforward setup tutorial that every new user is presented with makes getting started with Sematext incredibly simple and intuitive.
Every plan offers a 14-day risk-free trial period without enrolling in a credit card. Since each product has unique pricing, we also provide precise control over what you pay for. You may spend money on the features and items he needs.
Features:
One spot where all of your logs, analytics, and events are collected
Determine which resources and requests have the largest detrimental effects on the operation of your website.
Debugging tools and real-time notifications
Availability of all main frameworks
Features that are widely recorded
2. Pingdom
Cost: $10 per month
Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service that notifies users in-depth anytime a program or website is unavailable. Pingdom has reached the top of the list of monitoring services thanks to its user-friendly interface, competitive pricing, and wide range of features. Including website performance monitoring and SSL certificate monitoring (about which you can learn more in our review of the best SSL certificate tracking tools).
With data gathered from actual people, Pingdom’s accurate user monitoring solutions may help you improve your performance by tracking real-time site visitors. To guarantee that your site will function at its peak regardless of where people are visiting it, geographic performance is also being tracked.
Although you can watch a lot of endpoints, performance seems to be affected, especially when monitoring single objects.
Every time a service or third-party resource goes down, Pingdom will notify you. However, there are occasionally irregularities with the alerting as customers have reported the service sending false positives or no alerts.
With their $10/month entry-level subscriptions, you receive 10 uptime monitors, 1 advanced monitor, and testing from their 100+ check sites spread out over the globe. They don’t have a free tier, but they do have a 14-day trial that allows you to see all of their features.
Features:
Detailed user interfaces with convenient functions
An immediate warning system
Both actual user monitoring and fake monitoring
The mobile application offsets the slightly challenging setup.
Notifications through SMS and email are available.
3. Uptime Robot
Price: $0 per month. Professional packages begin at $7 per month.
If you’re searching for a straightforward tool that will inform you when your services are down, Uptime Robot has been the “new kid” on the block for a while and is one of the finest value-for-money options. The 50 monitors included in the free account are more than adequate for most small websites and online applications. You also get 5-minute monitoring intervals from 12 locations worldwide and three months of log storage.
Uptime Robot won’t be the one if you’re seeking a product that can provide you with both actual user monitoring and synthetic monitoring. As its name implies, it concentrates on running automated tests on your website and APIs every five minutes. It sends warnings via several connections with programs like Slack, Pagerduty, OpsGnie, Telegram, and VictorOps.
Although it lacks some capabilities, such as speed insights, the premium plan’s 24-month log storage and 1-minute checking intervals are an excellent addition.
Features:
You may set up your alerts’ prerequisites using advanced notifications. as in x mistakes in y minutes.
easy setup procedure
Heartbeat monitoring for cron tasks and the intranet
Notifications through SMS and email are available.
4. Team Viewer Web Monitoring
Pricing: Monthly rates begin at $10.90.
The Team Viewer Web Monitoring, which is marketed as an all-in-one, cloud-based IT monitoring solution, will scan your website up to once per minute and report back on any abnormalities using a customizable alerting system.
Combining Team Viewer’s Web Monitoring tool with their Uptime Monitoring, Transaction Monitoring, and Full Page Load monitoring tools yields the most outstanding results. Their actual user monitoring tool will provide comprehensive data on the users’ browser and platform performance, page load times, regional user breakup, and more, even on its own.
Our solution distinguishes itself from the competition by offering an utterly configurable price structure that enables consumers to pick and choose whatever services they wish to employ. While the Basic plan starts at $10.90 per month, they also offer a bespoke project, which means the total amount of customizations you select will determine the ultimate monthly cost.
Although Team Viewer Web Monitoring doesn’t have a free tier, you can still test it out by joining up for their free trial, which will give you a first-hand look at all they offer.
Features:
25 Simple Monitors.
5 Check Locations
Up to one minute, check the frequencies
Several Protocols
Instant Alerts for Checking Website Content
5. New Relic Browser
Price: $0 to $99/mo – $0.3 per gigabyte
Your resource-intensive queries are broken out by volume, response time, callback time, throughput, and data transfer in the New Relic Browser. Monitoring your website and apps provides a robust ecosystem typically better suited for big corporations and organizations with plenty of business-critical services.
New Relic Browser offers two data regions, one in the US and one in the EU, keeping with the company’s dedication to assisting its clients with their security. Additionally, they are SOC2 certified, ensuring consumer data security.
You may anticipate more current metrics with New Relic Browser, as opposed to just old load times focused on the consumers’ demands. By tracking contentful paint times, and interaction metrics and offering varied insights on what slows down your website and all the many issues you could face, the browser will help you learn how code changes affect end users.
Features:
Complete Backing of Google’s Core Site Vitals
Individual dashboards
Modern Alerting Mechanisms
Adaptation to your preferred ticketing system
6. Datadog Synthetics
Pricing: $5 per 10,000 tests
You may generate alerts based on established criteria and proactively monitor your API endpoints using Datadog Synthetics. You’ll be able to analyze network timings, eventually making it easier to identify the source of your problems.
Datadog Synthetics tests can be directly included in your CI pipeline to enable early problem detection, allowing you to assess the condition of your production environment after each deployment and reduce downtime by fixing mistakes before your users ever see them.
Without creating a single line of code, you can use Datadog Synthetics to track your important transactions using the web recorder. En-user images, step-by-step waterfall visualizations, and a clever algorithm that can still recognize items after UI changes lead to fewer failed tests.
Price-oriented Datadog Synthetics is designed exclusively for monitoring SLAs and SLs from locations worldwide and costs $5 for every 10,000 tests done monthly. You may record tests without using any code, self-maintaining intelligent tests, and screenshots for each step using browser tests, which start at $12 for every thousand tests.
Features:
Watch the site’s latency and uptime.
Displaying latency for DNS, SSL, TTFB, and other services
Web-Recorder for creating tests without coding
Self-maintaining Tests Powered by AI
7. Dynatrace
Pricing:$11/mo
By measuring and recording important data, Dynatrace makes it simple for you to comprehend how your users are using your website and apps by keeping track of the performance and availability of your internal resources.
Three different kinds of synthetic monitors are available from Dynatrace. The first one is a single-URL browser monitor that can be set up to operate from any of their accessible locations at a frequency of 5 minutes or more, simulating a user accessing your app or website. The second is browser click routes, which behave like single-URL user actions but take a path across your application instead—the third version of the HTTP monitor may be configured and executed at different intervals.
Dynatrace has straightforward pricing that starts at $11 per month for every 10,000 monitoring units. Accurate user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic monitoring are three options. Additionally, Dynatrace provides a risk-free, no-obligation trial.
Features:
Flexibility to employ session replay, synthetic monitoring, and real-user monitoring
To comply with your GDPR obligations, it was built with privacy and security in mind.
Real-user analytics monitoring for single-page, hybrid, and mobile apps 8. Exam [paid]
Price range: $0 – $1500 per month
8. Checkly
Checkly simulates user interactions with your website or application within a Chrome browser using the Puppeteer and Playwright frameworks. The test scripts may be written by you, although Checkly does provide a Headless Recorder browser plugin to help. Once the code is complete, you may execute it once every ten minutes.
The extremely flexible alerting system enables you to get an alert anytime one or more criteria are satisfied. The notification may be sent to you by SMS, Pagerduty, Slack, or email.
Six American locales, eight places in Europe and Africa, and six more Asian locations are used to conduct tests. Receiving feedback from various parts of the world will help you get a clearer picture of how your visitors are using your website and will provide you with the information you need to make important choices that boost performance.
Depending on the number of SMS credits, team members, Publica dashboards, API checks, Browser checks, and other integrations, the price ranges from $7/month to $499/month.
Features:
Integrate CI/CD
An image for each transaction
Real browsers are used to execute the tests.
No coding is required.
9. Calibreapp
Cost: $75 to $1500 per month
By replicating real-world settings, Calibreapp enables you to provide outstanding experiences to your consumers regardless of their location, platform, or connection speed. You may use it to automate performance testing, understand the effects of third-party code on your systems, and be alerted as soon as a problem affects your users.
Calibreapp offers robust performance reporting that gives you a detailed picture of your complete system and enables you to keep track of any potential problems. The time it would take to construct conventional reports using dashboards is now saved by the autonomous insights reports that are being sent out.
Pricing is consistent and determined by the number of test profiles and tests. It costs $75 per month for the first 5000 tests and three test profiles per site and $1500 for the next 50,000 tests and fifty test profiles for each location. They provide a 15-day free trial period during which you may explore all of their options.
Features:
Testing authenticated pages is supported by Core Web Vitals.
10. Site24x7
Price: $9 to $225 per month
Whenever a resource on your website or application fails to load, there are network connection problems, performance problems, server CPU utilization, timeouts, and other difficulties, Site24x7 sends a specific and complete warning.
Site24x7 is fast emerging as the standard for resource monitoring thanks to its outstanding products, quick and highly friendly support personnel, and an alerting system that sends messages through email or SMS.
With the help of their real user monitoring tool, you can see how people interact with your website and gain a thorough grasp of the issues impacting their experience in real time. Additionally, you may monitor and comprehend the variables influencing their experience, including browser, region, isp, and platform.
Numerous protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, REST, DNS, TCP, POP, IMAP, SMTP, and FTP, are supported by Site24x7. For alerts, they also feature several connectors with well-known outside providers like PagerDuty and Zapier. Additionally, 120 monitoring stations with 1-minute check intervals are included.
One of the product’s main selling points is its affordable cost, which grows with your business. However, this benefit may be partly negated by the relatively archaic design, which occasionally feels confusing. It’s important to note that all of their tiers provide a 30-day no-credit-card required free trial period.
Features:
There is a smartphone application.
Clean and simple setup procedures
Virtually universal support for ecosystems
There are voice, email, and SMS notification options.
11. Uptime
Cost: $79 to $449 per month
most effective website monitoring service
Uptime is a great website monitoring tool that prioritizes dependability and simplicity. It includes SSL monitoring, 24/7 support, malware scanning, and several third-party integrations.
At one-minute intervals, uptime tracks the performance of your website on all six continents. You’ll get informed if something goes wrong by SMS, call, email, or any of the many custom integrations they support.
The RUM tool from uptime assists you in providing the greatest user experience by monitoring users across various devices, locations, and connection types. The information gathered will be presented in simple dashboards that will provide you with information you can use to improve the performance of your website.
Although uptime does not have a free tier, it provides a risk-free, 21-day trial across all of its products that should allow you to sample what the company offers.
While their entry-level package primarily serves US consumers, the more costly ones do receive several checks from other countries and, depending on the tier, have a long history of between four and twenty-four months.
Features:
Simple user interface
Websites that have been scanned by Yandex Safe Browsing and Google Safe Browsing.
Comprehensive Uptime Reports
Get notifications by push, webhooks, Twitter, email, SMS, and other channels.
12. Uptrends
Price range: $16.21 to $54.04 per month
Uptrends examine your applications between 1 and 60-minute intervals and provide a wide range of features to ensure you are always performing at your best. Uptrends has over 150 website monitoring sites across the world.
In addition to monitoring websites, they also boast monitoring web performance, APIs, servers, SSL certificates, and actual users, which includes capabilities like mobile website monitoring, third-party content monitoring, waterfall reports, mobile website monitoring, and transaction snapshots.
Although the basic plan lacks some of the more well-liked features, such as custom dashboards, maintenance modes, or multi-browser monitoring, Uptrends still provides minimal necessities for customers to monitor their websites efficiently. Additionally, they provide a variety of open-source, free tools. Additionally, because they don’t have a free tier, they provide customers access to all features during a 30-day trial period that doesn’t need a credit card.
Features:
Beautiful and simple UI
Monitoring of multiple-step transactions
Real-time user monitoring tool
Over 150 test sites worldwide
Thirteen. Host-tracker (paid)
Price: $14 to $99 per month
13. Host-tracker
Host-tracker is meant for site administrators who wish to keep an eye on the activities between their servers and clients and their servers’ availability. It is straightforward by design. It primarily concentrates on important metrics, including network difficulties, database connection issues, and page faults.
The price structure is straightforward enough, consisting of three distinct levels, each with a special collection of features and functionalities. It’s important to note that their entry-level pricing appears exorbitant when compared to the other products described here, but I think the feature-rich higher-tier pricing makes up for this.
The ability to track actual users is one feature that Host-tracker lacks in comparison to the other choices on this list. It’s not a significant concern if your goal is to concentrate on the server’s resources, but for websites that deal with a lot of users, such as online magazines or online shops, RUM will be essential to giving your users the greatest experience possible.
There is no free tier, but every signup includes a free, 30-day trial that doesn’t need a credit card and lets you try out all the capabilities of the platform without any risk.
Features:
A user-friendly dashboard that has 60 test sites worldwide and offers phone calls, emails, SMS, Skype, and Hangouts notifications makes up for the archaic appearance. Smartbear (fee)
Cost: Only upon request
14. Smartbear
For major businesses that want to keep tabs on practically every facet of their internet presence, Smartbear is one of the most comprehensive solutions available. In addition to maintaining a careful eye on your web application using a broad range of tools, including standard uptime and alerting solutions and some cutting-edge monitoring alternatives, Smartbear also monitors the condition of your mobile applications, APIs, and databases.
Not to mention, Smartbear has 350 testing nodes worldwide, which is at least twice as many as most of its rivals. Remember that Smartbear does not offer a real-user monitoring package; thus, you will need to search elsewhere if you want that specific functionality.
Despite being one of the best options available for internet monitoring, this has a high cost. Only by getting in touch with their sales team can you learn the prices for their programs.
Features:
Plenty of integrations with external parties
A lengthy list of references and supporting materials
Dependable reporting and analytics
15. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor
Pricing: begins at $1170 per year
For years, Solarwinds has led the monitoring industry, and throughout that time, they’ve created a wide range of services to aid their clients in understanding what’s happening behind the scenes, but that experience comes at a great(er) expense.
Their excellent software ecosystem includes web performance monitoring, which is now one of the most comprehensive DevOps solutions available globally. No one can dispute their expertise or the value that their software provides to users, but the price tag can still be difficult to accept, especially when you compare it to smaller rivals that charge a much lower price for what appears to be a very identical product.
Although the list of capabilities includes Endpoint detection and response, network device monitoring, and even a smart mobile app that enables you to keep tabs on your web app wherever you are, it’s crucial to bear in mind that Solarwinds does not offer a RUM solution. It’s important to note that they record each step of the interactions between the server and the user, which will give us some idea of how they felt.
Their Web performance monitoring tool delivers comprehensive load-time data from several global locations that track all browser-based interactions and offer essential details about what goes on behind the scenes of your website.
Features:
Dashboards and alarms that are already configured to speed up setup.
Artificial monitoring techniques
You may download an excellent smartphone application for nothing.
How Do I Pick the Best Tool for Monitoring Website Performance?
The list may have continued for quite some time, but I decided to limit it to simply 10 to spare some of your valuable time. There are more tools, of course, but I think the ones I’ve named above offer the best value in terms of functionality and cost.
The critical question is: how do you choose one? There is no easy solution, but there are a few essential elements you should consider.
URL Watching Frequency
A website monitoring service checks that your website is up and that all your resources are loading properly by pinging it every X minutes. The ideal X size is smaller.
5 minutes should be plenty unless you’re employing some unreliable third parties whose performance has to be regularly checked.
Integrated Server and Log Monitoring
Although not all website monitoring services include server monitoring tools and log monitoring solutions, I think they are crucial since CPU, memory, and disk consumption may directly influence how consumers interact with a website or application.
Keep this in mind since it will enable you to see the positives and negatives of your website and potentially address problems before they become major ones.
Real-time and Simulated User Monitoring
Using a combination of synthetic and actual user monitoring will probably be the safest approach for the greatest user experience. Although each approach has strengths of its own, employing only one will result in certain blind spots in user happiness.
Having both capabilities accessible from the same provider is a typical practice, although not all vendors offer them. It’s crucial to take the time to consider the kind of service you want to give, and if you find that you require a comprehensive monitoring solution, I highly advise looking at a vendor that can offer you both. You will have a better perspective and respond to issues more quickly and effectively if data from synthetic and actual user monitoring is combined in one location.
If you’re unsure which option to use, read our blog post on the advantages of employing both to achieve peak performance: Synthetic vs. Real User Monitoring. Your choice between a fundamental user monitoring tool, a synthetic monitoring tool, or a 2-in-1 website performance monitoring solution like Sematext Cloud, which includes all three, should be aided by this information.
Testing for Sites
Testing your website locally will yield entirely different results than having it operate in a foreign nation. In order to determine which areas of the website are sluggish to load and hinder your ability to provide your global audience with the same high-caliber experience, it is crucial to have global testing nodes. Check out our blog entries, where we describe what latency is and how to eliminate it to enhance website performance if you’re interested in learning more about how locations impact the performance of your website.
Support for Multiple browsers
You are undoubtedly already aware of the numerous incompatibilities across websites if you’ve ever had the “pleasure” of interacting with more than one. A script that functions OK on Safari may not perform in Internet Explorer or vice versa. You may learn more about how people interact with your services by running tests on various browsers.
If done correctly, alerts will serve as a priceless early warning system that will ensure you know exactly when things are about to go wrong and will need to be set up for various sections and functions throughout your website. Utilizing a service that enables you to set up alerts over several channels should be a top priority because many providers send false positives or have transmission problems.
Price
The cost will play a significant role in your selection, just like it would with everything else available. With website monitoring solutions, huge costs don’t always equate to greater functionality, even if more features typically mean a higher price.
It’s crucial to grasp your website’s requirements before choosing a provider, especially because some only take yearly contracts, and the cost may occasionally be close to $2000.
Conclusion
In the end, your specific demands will determine which website performance monitoring tool you use. If I may be so bold as to offer a recommendation, more than enough alternatives are available. Instead of rushing into anything, take the time to consider which metrics are crucial for your website and then select the tools that will allow you to analyze and monitor those metrics closely.
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