Vigil vs Checkly
Checkly is the tool to pick when you need real browser checks written in Playwright and kept in git; nothing here competes with that. For plain uptime, heartbeats, servers and logs, Checkly's per-run model becomes expensive fast and Vigil's flat $10/month covers far more ground. Vigil also does monitors as code (YAML through the API), but not browser checks.
Checkly pricing September 2026
- Hobby: free. 10,000 API check runs and 1,000 browser check runs a month, 1 user, 7 days raw retention.
- Starter: $24/month billed annually. 25,000 API runs, 3,000 browser runs, 3 users; overage $2.60 per 10k API runs and $6.50 per 1k browser runs.
- Team: $64/month billed annually. 100,000 API runs, 12,000 browser runs, 10 users, 30 days raw retention, private locations; overage $2.50 per 10k API runs and $6.25 per 1k browser runs.
- Enterprise: custom.
Source: as of September 2026, from checklyhq.com/pricing (prices shown billed annually). Vendors change prices; the Checkly site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 10 monitors, 1 server, 1 status page, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Free forever.
- Pro $10/month: 100 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 5 servers, 5 seats, 5 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 1M log lines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 100 AI analyses. 10-day trial, no card.
- Enterprise $25/month: 500 monitors, 50 servers, unlimited seats, SSO, SLOs, private locations, 1-year history. 30-day trial.
- Self-hosted $49/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons from $2: +25 monitors, +5 servers ($3), +5 seats, +5 status pages, +1M log lines.
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 $10 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Checkly | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 10 Free / 100 Pro / 500 Enterprise. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 11 monitor types (uptime, API assertions, multi-step flows, heartbeats, TCP, domain/DNS, app health, dependency, change, price, keyword) | ✓ API and Playwright browser checks from 20+ regions, priced per run (100k API runs on Team) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 5 / 50 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ✕ Not offered |
| Logs | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not offered |
| APM / traces | ~ Endpoint latency and 5xx rates, request traces and a service map through the agent's Python and Node SDKs. Not a full APM: no profiling, no distributed tracing across other languages | ~ Checkly Traces links check failures to OpenTelemetry spans from your backend; not a standalone APM |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✕ Not offered |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise | ✕ Not offered |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on Pro. 1 / 5 / 50 pages | ✓ Status pages included on all plans, custom domain |
| Team seats | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 | ✓ 1 / 3 / 10 users on Hobby / Starter / Team |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls | ✓ Email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, SMS, phone calls, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Incident.io, webhooks |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✕ SaaS only; private locations for running checks inside your network |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month | ~ AI-assisted check generation; not incident root-cause analysis |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) | 50 checks every minute is about 2.2M API runs a month: Team $64 plus about $515 of overage. At 10-minute intervals about $93/month. Servers not available |
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 Checkly does well
- The best Playwright-based browser checks anywhere: real user journeys, screenshots, traces, run from 20+ regions.
- Monitoring as code done properly: a CLI, a Terraform provider, checks living in your repo and deployed in CI.
- Status pages, dashboards and private locations included; a genuinely developer-first product.
Where Vigil is ahead
- Per-run billing punishes plain uptime checks: 50 checks every minute is about 2.2 million runs a month, far past the Team plan's 100,000.
- No server, log, Kubernetes or RUM monitoring.
- Heartbeat/cron monitoring is a separate check type with its own limits; no domain/DNS diffs or security grading.
- No self-hosted option.
When to pick Checkly instead
Pick Checkly if Playwright browser checks of real user journeys are important, if you want checks in your repo deployed from CI with their CLI or Terraform provider, or if run counts are low enough that the Starter or Team plan fits.
What Vigil does not do
- No browser / Playwright checks: Vigil scripts APIs, not clicks in a real browser.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting; alerts go to chat apps, push services, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- No on-call rotations or schedules: escalation policies and acknowledgements only.
- APM covers Python and Node apps on hosts running the agent; 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 Checkly to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Checkly 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
Does Vigil support monitoring as code like Checkly?
Yes, at a simpler level: GET /api/v1/config exports every monitor as YAML, you keep it in git, and PUT applies it. There is no CLI or Terraform provider and no Playwright.
Can Vigil run browser checks?
No. Vigil's multi-step API flows cover login-then-call-endpoints journeys against APIs, not rendered pages. Checkly is the better tool for browser journeys.
How does the cost compare at one-minute intervals?
Vigil: $10/month for up to 100 monitors, any interval down to 1 minute, no run counting. Checkly: 50 checks every minute is about 2.2 million API runs a month; Team includes 100,000 and bills the rest at $2.50 per 10k, so roughly $580/month. At 10-minute intervals it is around $93.
Can I use both?
Yes. Keep Playwright journeys on Checkly and put uptime, API, heartbeat, server and log monitoring on Vigil. Route Checkly alerts into Vigil's alert-ingestion endpoint to show them on a Vigil status page.
Try Vigil next to Checkly
Start free: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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