Vigil vs Pingdom
Pingdom is a veteran synthetic and RUM service with browser transaction checks and unlimited users. Its per-check slider makes 50 monitors cost several times Vigil Pro, and it has no server, log or Kubernetes monitoring. Vigil bundles all of that plus private status pages at $10/month, but lacks browser transaction checks.
Pingdom pricing September 2026
- Synthetic Monitoring: tiers from 10 uptime checks + 1 advanced (transaction) check + 50 SMS up to 30,000 uptime checks; unlimited users; monthly or annual billing. Third-party checks of the calculator in August 2026 put the first step at about $18/month monthly or $16.50/month yearly and the 50-check tier at about $78/month, but see their pricing page for current numbers.
- Real User Monitoring: tiers from 100,000 pageviews a month; unlimited sites and users; 13-month retention. Price on their page.
- 30-day free trial, no permanent free plan.
Source: as of September 2026, from pingdom.com/pricing (slider-based; exact figures render in the browser, so see their pricing page). Vendors change prices; the Pingdom 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 | Pingdom | |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | ✓ Uptime checks down to 1 minute from many regions, transaction checks, page speed. Priced per check |
| 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 in Pingdom (separate SolarWinds products) |
| Logs | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not in Pingdom |
| 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 | ✕ Not in Pingdom |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✕ Not in Pingdom |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise | ✓ Real User Monitoring priced by pageviews, 13-month retention |
| 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 | ~ Public status pages and reports; no private pages or password |
| Team seats | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 | ✓ Unlimited users |
| 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, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks; no Telegram or Discord |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✕ SaaS only |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month | ✕ Not offered |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) | 50 uptime checks tier: see their pricing page (about $78/month per third-party checks). Servers not available. Users free |
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 Pingdom does well
- Mature synthetic monitoring with transaction (browser) checks and page-speed tests from many global locations.
- Unlimited users on every plan.
- A real RUM product with 13 months of retention.
- SolarWinds backing and long uptime history for reporting.
Where Vigil is ahead
- No free plan; per-check pricing makes 50–100 checks notably more expensive than Vigil Pro.
- No server, log or Kubernetes monitoring (SolarWinds sells those as separate products).
- Status pages are basic and public only; no Telegram, no Discord.
- No self-hosted option, no AI analysis, no failure evidence beyond the response.
When to pick Pingdom instead
Pick Pingdom if you need transaction (browser) checks and page-speed tests from many regions, if you rely on its RUM with 13-month retention, or if your organisation is already standardised on SolarWinds.
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 Pingdom to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Pingdom 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
How much cheaper is Vigil than Pingdom?
Pingdom prices per uptime check on a slider (see their page; third-party checks put 50 checks at roughly $78/month). Vigil Pro is $10/month for 100 monitors, and includes servers, logs and status pages Pingdom does not sell.
Does Vigil have transaction or browser checks?
No. Vigil has multi-step API flows (log in, extract a token, call endpoints, assert on JSON) but does not drive a real browser. If you need clicks and page rendering, Pingdom or Checkly are better.
Does Vigil do Real User Monitoring like Pingdom?
Yes: Web Vitals p75 (LCP, CLS, INP, TTFB, FCP), page views, sessions, JS errors and audience breakdown. Pro covers 5 sites and 500k views a month; Pingdom keeps 13 months of RUM history versus Vigil's plan retention.
How do I move checks from Pingdom to Vigil?
Export your checks from Pingdom's API or UI, write them as Vigil YAML (name, url, interval, expected status) and apply with PUT /api/v1/config, or use the REST API. Point your alert integrations at the same Slack channel or PagerDuty service.
Try Vigil next to Pingdom
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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