Checkmate vs PageLantern
Checkmate
checkmate.soPageLantern
pagelantern.comSide by side
| Figure | Checkmate | PageLantern |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $97/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · DNS Monitoring Software | 8.5 (#5) | 7.8 (#21) |
| Audience | The maker names homelabs, SaaS founders, agencies, sysadmins and DevOps, e-commerce, and open-source maintainers as users. | PageLantern is designed for founders, platform teams, developers, managed service providers, agencies, and operators. |
| Integrations | Alert channels include email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Twilio SMS, Pushover, ntfy, Matrix, Rocket.Chat, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, and webhooks. | Alert channels include email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, webhooks, and PagerDuty. |
| Product | Checkmate is an open-source, self-hosted infrastructure monitoring dashboard for uptime, PageSpeed, hardware, Docker, and incident alerts. | PageLantern is a SaaS monitoring service for websites, APIs, DNS records, certificates, domains, ports, and scheduled jobs. |
| Status pages | It provides public status dashboards with per-service uptime, incident history, and custom branding. | Plans include hosted status pages: one on Free, three on Starter, and ten on Team. |
| 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. | The contact page lists [email protected] and says a typical reply time is usually one business day, without a commitment. |
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.
PageLantern
PageLantern has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.