Instatus alternative: Vigil
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Teams look for an Instatus alternative when they need a private status page without moving to a $50 plan, or when they want server, log and error monitoring behind the page. Vigil Starter is $19/month for 50 monitors, 3 private status pages with custom domains and unlimited team members. If a public, beautifully designed page is the whole job, Instatus does it well.
Why people look for a Instatus alternative
Instatus pricing September 2026
- Starter: free. 15 monitors at 2 minutes, 5 team members, 2 on-call members, a public page with 200 subscribers, no custom domain, email alerts.
- Pro: $20/month, or $15/month billed yearly. 50 monitors at 30 seconds, 50 team members, 20 on-call, public page with custom domain, 5,000 subscribers, email and SMS alerts.
- Private Pro: $50/month, or $37.50/month billed yearly. Select: $100/month, or $75/month billed yearly.
- Business: $300/month, or $225/month billed yearly. 1,000 monitors, unlimited team members, 50 on-call, all status page types, 3+ custom domains, 25,000 subscribers, SMS and call alerts, SAML SSO.
- Enterprise: custom. Free trials: 7 days on Pro, 14 on Select and Private Pro, 30 on Business.
Source: as of September 2026, from instatus.com/pricing (prices read from the page's own plan data). Vendors change prices; the Instatus site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Instatus | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 15 free at 2 minutes; 50 on Pro and 1,000 on Business at 30 seconds | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | ✕ Not offered | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling |
| Kubernetes | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ✕ Not offered | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Its speciality. Custom domain from Pro ($20); private pages from Private Pro ($50); all types on Business ($300) | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on every paid plan. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 5 free, 50 on Pro, unlimited on Business | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ~ Email free, SMS on Pro, SMS and calls on Business, plus chat integrations | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account |
| Self-hosted option | ✕ SaaS only | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ✕ No incident root-cause analysis; check their site for current AI features | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | Pro $15–20/month covers 50 monitors and 5 people on a public page; a private page needs Private Pro ($37.50–50). Servers not available | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Instatus does well
- Beautiful, fast status pages with a generous free tier (5 team members, 200 subscribers).
- Monitors, on-call and status pages in one product at flat prices.
- 30-second checks from Pro and SMS and call alerts on Business.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of Instatus that Vigil does not have:
- Private pages need Private Pro ($50/month) or higher; the free page is public only, without a custom domain.
- No server metrics, logs, error tracking, Kubernetes or RUM.
- No self-hosted option.
When to pick Instatus instead
Pick Instatus if the status page is the product you care most about, you want its design and speed, or you need SMS and call alerts and SAML SSO on one flat Business price.
What Vigil does not do
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Instatus to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Instatus monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Are Vigil status pages as nice as Instatus?
Honestly, Instatus pages are more polished out of the box. Vigil pages have groups, 90-day uptime bars, latency, incidents, maintenance, logo, custom CSS and white-label on paid plans, and are private by default.
How do private pages compare?
Vigil includes private pages (members only, password or signed private link) on every plan, including Free. Instatus starts private pages at Private Pro, $50/month or $37.50 billed yearly.
How fast are checks?
Vigil checks every minute on paid plans and every 5 minutes on Free, with a confirmation retry before alerting. Instatus checks every 30 seconds from Pro.
Does Vigil have on-call?
Yes: rotations, overrides, escalation to a second channel set and acknowledgements. The hosted service does not page by SMS or phone (the self-hosted edition can, through your own Twilio account); Instatus Business does.
Ready to leave Instatus?
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
Vigil vs Instatus · All comparisons: Better Stack · UptimeRobot · Freshping · Uptime Kuma · Pingdom · StatusCake · Hyperping · Checkly · Atlassian Statuspage · OpenStatus · Cronitor · Healthchecks.io · Sentry · GlitchTip · BugSnag · Rollbar · Honeybadger · PagerDuty · Opsgenie · Datadog · New Relic · Grafana Cloud · AppSignal · Dynatrace