PagerDuty vs Checkly
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PagerDuty and Checkly.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
PagerDuty
0 reviews
4.1/5
Checkly
0 reviews
Checkly is rated higher (4.1 vs 3.7). roughly 15,000 paid customers as of fiscal year-end January 2025, including 849 with over $100K ARR 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.
PagerDuty Incident management and on-call scheduling platform | Checkly Monitoring as code with Playwright and API checks | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Engineering organizations where on-call reliability is critical and budget allows per-seat pricing; small teams under 5 users on the free plan. | 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 tiermobile appapi accessteam features | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit PagerDuty → | Visit Checkly → | |
PagerDuty
Pros
- + Free plan for up to 5 users with real escalation policies and unlimited push/email
- + Most battle-tested notification and escalation machinery in the category
- + Published SLA with concrete notification-delivery commitments and credits
- + US and EU service regions on AWS with region selection at signup
- + Deep integration catalog and mature mobile apps
Cons
- - Per-seat pricing gets expensive fast; 6th user flips the whole account to paid
- - SLA is 99.9% notification delivery — competitors contract at 99.99%
- - Platform grown by acquisition; multiple surfaces, limits and fine print
- - SLA excludes free plan; no APAC service region
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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