Better Uptime vs Checkmate

Better Uptime monitors websites and servers for availability and helps teams respond to incidents. Its monitoring includes SSL expiry alerts, keyword monitoring, and server monitoring, with checks from four monitoring locations and a limit of 10 monitors on the listed plans. Alerts can be sent by phone call, SMS, email, push notification, critical alert, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or webhook. The Free for personal projects plan costs nothing and includes 10 monitors and heartbeats, one status page, and Slack and email alerts. Responder costs $29 a month when billed annually. It includes uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call, a status page, 10 monitors, and unlimited phone call and SMS alerts. Better Uptime is available on the web, iOS, and Android. Its maker, Better Uptime, was founded in 2021.

Checkmate is a free, open-source, self-hosted dashboard for monitoring infrastructure, service uptime, PageSpeed, and incidents. It checks HTTP, ping, TCP, gRPC, WebSocket, DNS, SSL, and more than 100 game server types. Its Capture agent reports server CPU, memory, disk, temperature, and network metrics, while PageSpeed monitoring tracks Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals over time. Public status dashboards can show per-service uptime and incident history with custom branding. Alerts can go to email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Twilio SMS, Pushover, ntfy, Matrix, Rocket.Chat, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, and webhooks. The maker says metrics, logs, incidents, and user accounts remain in the database configured by the operator, with no phone-home or telemetry pipeline. Checkmate is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and can be installed with Docker Compose or Kubernetes/Helm; its image runs on x86, Apple Silicon, and Raspberry Pi. The maker says the API accepts JSON for bulk monitor setup and provides a REST API reference. The free plan includes all features, no monitor limits, self-hosting, and 12 alert channels. There is no one-click migration import or paid support tier.