Checkmate vs Middleware
Checkmate
checkmate.so
Middleware
middleware.ioSide by side
| Figure | Checkmate | Middleware |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.30/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Container Monitoring | 8.4 (#11) | 9.0 (#3) |
| API | The maker says the API accepts JSON for bulk monitor setup and provides a REST API reference. | Middleware's documentation lists a Public API and links to API documentation. |
| Audience | The maker names homelabs, SaaS founders, agencies, sysadmins and DevOps, e-commerce, and open-source maintainers as users. | Middleware says its mission is to empower organizations of all sizes to modernize their infrastructure stack with observability tools. |
| Founded | 2023 | 2022 |
| Integrations | Alert channels include email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Twilio SMS, Pushover, ntfy, Matrix, Rocket.Chat, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, and webhooks. | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel, databases, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Logstash, Fluentd and the OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Product | Checkmate is an open-source, self-hosted infrastructure monitoring dashboard for uptime, PageSpeed, hardware, Docker, and incident alerts. | Middleware describes itself as a full-stack observability platform that detects issues across infrastructure, APM, and real user monitoring and helps resolve them with its AI SRE Agent. |
| Support | The maker identifies Discord as the fastest help channel and GitHub issues for bugs and feature requests, and says there is no paid support tier. | Free users receive community support, pay-as-you-go customers get a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, and custom-contract customers receive an account team and 24x7 support. |
Plans
In their own words
Checkmate
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.
Middleware
Middleware is a hybrid observability platform for detecting and resolving issues across infrastructure, application performance, and real-user monitoring. Its listed coverage includes infrastructure monitoring, logs, metrics, distributed tracing, database monitoring, synthetic monitoring, browser testing, and LLM observability. The AI SRE Agent and OpsAI capabilities include root cause analysis, automatic issue detection, faster issue solving, and automatic PR generation. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and includes up to 100GB of data, 1k RUM sessions, 20k synthetic checks, 10 browser test runs, and 2 million OpsAI tokens, with 14-day retention and community support. Pay As You Go costs $0.30 a month, billed according to use, with default 30-day retention. Middleware lists 450+ integrations and a Public API. It runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows, and API. The company says it encrypts customer data in transit and at rest using TLS 1.2+ and AES-256.