Vigil vs Checkly
Updated · prices checked September 2026
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 for API checks and Vigil's flat $19–49/month covers far more ground. Vigil also does monitors as code (YAML through the API) and simple scripted browser checks, but not Playwright code from your repo.
Checkly pricing September 2026
- Hobby: free. 10 uptime monitors at 2 minutes, 10,000 API check runs and 1,000 browser check runs a month, 1 user, 7 days raw retention.
- Starter: $24/month billed annually. 50 uptime monitors at 1 minute, 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. 75 uptime monitors at 30 seconds, 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: 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.
| Vigil | Checkly | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 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) | ✓ Uptime monitors (50 Starter / 75 Team), API and Playwright browser checks from 20+ regions; API and browser checks priced per run (100k API runs on Team) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 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 | ✕ Not offered |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not offered |
| APM / traces | ~ 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 | ~ Checkly Traces links check failures to OpenTelemetry spans from your backend; not a standalone APM |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✕ Not offered |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ 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 | ✕ Not offered |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ✓ Status pages included on all plans, custom domain |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ✓ 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, 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 | ✓ 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, $149/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 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ~ AI-assisted check generation; not incident root-cause analysis |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | 50 plain uptime monitors fit Starter ($24, 3 users); 5 people needs Team ($64). 50 API checks every minute is about 2.2M runs a month: Team $64 plus about $515 of overage, or about $93/month at 10-minute intervals. 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
Limits of Checkly that Vigil does not have:
- Per-run billing punishes API checks with assertions: 50 API checks every minute is about 2.2 million runs a month, far past the Team plan's 100,000. Plain uptime monitors are counted separately (50 on Starter, 75 on Team).
- 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
- 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 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 also a Terraform/OpenTofu provider (downloaded from the Terraform page, not yet on the public registry). There is no CLI and no Playwright.
Can Vigil run browser checks?
Yes, simple ones: a short line-by-line script (open a URL, click, type, expect text) runs in headless Chromium with screenshots on failure, counted per run each month. Checkly is the better tool for complex journeys written as Playwright code.
How does the cost compare at one-minute intervals?
Vigil: $19/month for up to 50 monitors or $49/month for 200, any type including API assertions, any interval down to 1 minute, no run counting. Checkly counts plain uptime monitors separately, but 50 API checks every minute is about 2.2 million 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: 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.
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