Vigil vs UptimeRobot
Updated · prices checked September 2026
UptimeRobot is the default free pinger and it does that job well. Vigil Pro costs $49/month for 200 monitors at 1 minute: more than their Team tier ($35–41 for 100 monitors), less than Scale ($65–77 for 200), and it adds servers, logs, Kubernetes, private status pages and unlimited team members, but UptimeRobot has faster public checks from more regions and SMS credits.
UptimeRobot pricing September 2026
- Free: 50 monitors, 5-minute interval, 1 status page, no login seats, 5 integrations.
- Solo: $9/month billed yearly or $10/month monthly. 10 to 50 monitors (slider), 60-second interval, 3 status pages.
- Team: $35/month billed yearly or $41/month monthly. 100 monitors, 30-second interval, 3 seats, 100 status pages, 30 SMS credits.
- Scale: $65/month billed yearly or $77/month monthly. 200 to 500 monitors (slider), 15-second interval, 5 seats, unlimited status pages.
- Enterprise: custom. Extra seats and SMS credits are add-ons (see their pricing page).
Source: as of September 2026, from uptimerobot.com/pricing (their page shows yearly and monthly prices side by side; third-party roundups list higher figures, so check the live page). Vendors change prices; the UptimeRobot 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 | UptimeRobot | |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | ✓ 50 free at 5 min; 100 on Team ($35–41/month) at 30 s. HTTP, keyword, ping, port, heartbeat, SSL and domain expiry |
| 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 | ✕ Not offered |
| 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 | ~ Public pages with custom domain on paid plans; password protection on paid plans; 3 pages on Solo, 100 on Team |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ~ No seats on Free, 3 on Team, 5 on Scale; extra seats are an add-on |
| 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 and voice credits, Slack, Telegram, Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, webhooks on paid plans; Free has 5 integrations |
| 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) | Team at $35–41/month covers 50 monitors and 3 seats; 5 people needs seat add-ons. Servers are not available at any price |
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 UptimeRobot does well
- 50 free monitors at 5-minute intervals, more than any other free tier here.
- Fast intervals on paid plans (30 s Team, 15 s Scale) from many public regions.
- SMS and voice-call credits included on paid plans.
- Simple, familiar, been around since 2010.
Where Vigil is ahead
- Servers, logs, Kubernetes, errors and real-user monitoring in the same account; UptimeRobot only pings.
- Unlimited team members on every paid plan; UptimeRobot Team has 3 seats and charges for more.
- Multi-step API flows, domain and DNS change diffs and security-header grading are included.
- Every incident keeps the failure evidence (headers, body, timing) and can get a one-click AI analysis.
When to pick UptimeRobot instead
Pick UptimeRobot if 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals is all you need and free matters most, if you want SMS or voice calls included, or if 15–30-second intervals from many public regions is a hard requirement.
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 UptimeRobot to Vigil
1. Import in about a minute
Paste a read-only UptimeRobot API key into the importer. It shows every monitor it found before anything is created, skips URLs you already watch, and stops at your plan's monitor number.
2. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels and set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs.
3. Run both for a while
Keep UptimeRobot running until Vigil has caught a real failure for you. Monitors can live in git afterwards: GET /api/v1/config exports them as YAML.
Step-by-step switching guide with a price calculator: switch from UptimeRobot.
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
Is Vigil's free plan as good as UptimeRobot's?
No, if monitor count is what you care about: UptimeRobot gives 50 free monitors at 5 minutes; Vigil gives 20 at 5 minutes. Vigil's free plan adds one server with the agent, 10k log lines, a private status page, 3 team members, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts and 5 AI analyses. Above free, Vigil Starter ($19) costs more than their Solo ($9–10) but adds servers, logs, private status pages and unlimited team members; Vigil Pro ($49, 200 monitors) sits between their Team ($35–41, 100 monitors) and Scale ($65–77, 200 monitors).
Does Vigil check as fast as UptimeRobot?
Vigil's fastest interval is 1 minute (paid plans). UptimeRobot offers 30 seconds on Team and 15 seconds on Scale. Vigil confirms every failure with a retry after 12 seconds before alerting, which removes most false positives.
How do I migrate from UptimeRobot?
Use the importer at /app/import: paste a read-only UptimeRobot API key, check the preview and confirm. Names, URLs, intervals and keyword checks come across in about a minute. Set the same channels (Telegram, Slack, Discord) and you are done.
Does Vigil send SMS?
Not on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition can, through your own Twilio account. Hosted Vigil alerts through Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, email and webhooks, and can open tickets in PagerDuty or Opsgenie, which can page by phone.
Try Vigil next to UptimeRobot
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.
All comparisons: Better Stack · Freshping · Uptime Kuma · Pingdom · StatusCake · Hyperping · Checkly · Atlassian Statuspage · Instatus · OpenStatus · Cronitor · Healthchecks.io · Sentry · GlitchTip · BugSnag · Rollbar · Honeybadger · PagerDuty · Opsgenie · Datadog · New Relic · Grafana Cloud · AppSignal · Dynatrace