Netdata vs Checkly
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Netdata and Checkly.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
Netdata
0 reviews
4.1/5
Checkly
0 reviews
Both Netdata and Checkly are equally rated at 4.1/5. Netdata is a free, open source real-time server monitoring tool. 2,000+ collected metrics, zero configuration, and a beautiful dashboard. Self-hosted or Netdata Cloud. Checkly enables monitoring as code using Playwright for E2E browser checks and HTTP API checks. Define checks alongside your code in TypeScript. Global check locations.
Netdata Real-time infrastructure monitoring with per-second granularity | Checkly Monitoring as code with Playwright and API checks | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.1 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Operators who want per-second infrastructure visibility without per-GB pricing, especially small teams and homelabs under five nodes that want data to stay on their own machines | Engineering teams who want to define synthetic and API monitoring tests as code in their repository and run them from global locations |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceself hostable | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Netdata → | Visit Checkly → | |
Netdata
Pros
- + Free Community tier is a real deployment: up to 5 active nodes with per-second metrics and local storage
- + Flat per-node pricing ($4.50/node/month billed annually on Business) — no ingest, cardinality, seat, or retention charges
- + Agent is open source (GPLv3+) with 80,000+ GitHub stars and 690+ contributors; data stays on your own infrastructure
- + 800+ integrations plus Prometheus, OpenTelemetry/OTLP, StatsD, SNMP, eBPF, and Nagios plugin support
- + ML anomaly detection runs in the agent at every metric, not as a paid add-on
Cons
- - Centralized dashboards cap at 5 nodes and custom dashboards at 1 per room on the free tier
- - RBAC, SSO, and SCIM require the Business tier even for small teams
- - No published uptime SLA for Netdata Cloud; priority support is an Enterprise On-Premise item
- - Operating at scale requires provisioning tooling (Ansible/Terraform-like) for consistent agent configuration
- - Dashboard customization is more limited than fully programmable alternatives; larger fleets effectively need Netdata Cloud
Checkly
Pros
- + True monitoring as code: TypeScript + Playwright checks versioned in your repo and deployed via CLI
- + Useful free Hobby tier and clear published plan pricing
- + 22 global check locations plus private locations for internal services on Team+
- + Full check types (HTTP, TCP, DNS, ICMP, SSL/TLS, gRPC, traceroute, heartbeat) with rich alerting and status pages
- + Local test mode in CI catches broken checks before deploy; SOC 2 since 2022
Cons
- - Usage-based billing scales with frequency x locations x checks — overage at $4 per 1,000 runs adds up
- - Developer-only tool: no point-and-click path for non-technical teams
- - Synthetic monitoring only — not a replacement for APM, logs, or metrics platforms
- - No public uptime SLA for the platform itself; best features (1-second checks, parallel scheduling) gated to Enterprise
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