Vigil vs Pingdom
Updated · prices checked September 2026
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 Starter, and it has no server, log or Kubernetes monitoring. Vigil bundles all of that plus private status pages from $19/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: 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 | Pingdom | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 checks down to 1 minute from many regions, transaction checks, page speed. Priced per check |
| 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 in Pingdom (separate SolarWinds products) |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✕ Not in Pingdom |
| 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 | ✕ Not in Pingdom |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ✕ Not in Pingdom |
| 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 | ✓ 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 and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ~ Public status pages and reports; no private pages or password |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ✓ Unlimited users |
| 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, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks; no Telegram or Discord |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/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 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ✕ Not offered |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members 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
Limits of Pingdom that Vigil does not have:
- 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
- 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 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 Starter is $19/month for 50 monitors and Pro is $49/month for 200, and both include servers, logs and status pages Pingdom does not sell.
Does Vigil have transaction or browser checks?
Yes, both. Multi-step API flows log in, extract a token, call endpoints and assert on JSON; browser checks run a short line-by-line script (open, click, type, expect text) in headless Chromium and keep a screenshot of failures. For long recorded journeys, Pingdom's transaction recorder is more capable.
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 10 sites and 1M 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: 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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