Vigil vs UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is the default free pinger and it does that job well. Vigil costs $10/month for the equivalent of their Team tier plus servers, logs, Kubernetes, private status pages and 5 seats, 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 monitors, 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 monitors, 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: 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 | UptimeRobot | |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | ✓ 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 / 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 | ✕ Not offered |
| 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 | ~ Public pages with custom domain on paid plans; password protection on paid plans; 3 pages on Solo, 100 on Team |
| Team seats | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 | ~ 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. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls | ✓ 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, $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) | 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
- No server, log, Kubernetes or RUM monitoring at all; it is a pinger.
- Team seats are limited (3 on Team) and cost extra beyond that.
- No multi-step API flows, no domain/DNS change diffs, no security-header grading.
- Incidents have no attached failure evidence (headers, body, timing) and no 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
- 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 UptimeRobot to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your UptimeRobot 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
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 10 at 10 minutes. Vigil's free plan adds one server with the agent, 100k log lines, a private status page, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts and 5 AI analyses. Above free, Vigil Pro ($10) beats their Team ($35–41) on almost every line.
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?
Export your monitors (their API lists them), convert to Vigil's YAML format and apply it with PUT /api/v1/config, or add them through the REST API. Both take a few minutes for 50–100 monitors. Set the same channels (Telegram, Slack, Discord) and you are done.
Does Vigil send SMS?
No. 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: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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