Downdetector vs Visual Sentinel
Downdetector
downdetector.comVisual Sentinel
visualsentinel.comSide by side
| Figure | Downdetector | Visual Sentinel |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $13.99/mo | $4.50/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 15 |
| Spec score · Website Monitoring Software | 8.5 (#9) | 8.5 (#11) |
| Intended users | Downdetector Explorer is aimed at NOC and customer care teams, with listed sectors including banking, gaming, communications, SaaS, streaming, cloud hosting, and travel. | The maker describes the product as serving small teams, agencies, and site owners. |
| Purpose | Downdetector collects and displays user reports about service issues so consumers can check service status and enterprises can see when customers report problems. | Visual Sentinel monitors websites and servers and detects visual page changes that ordinary uptime checks may miss. |
| Security | Ookla says it uses appropriate technical and organizational security measures to protect personal information from unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, misuse, or unauthorized access. | The privacy policy states that data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and sensitive integration credentials and API tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. |
Plans
Visual Sentinel
- Solo$6 a month
- Solo$54 a year
- Starter$12 a month
- Starter$108 a year
- Business$39 a month
- Business$351 a year
- FreeFree
- Agency$149 a month
- Agency$1,341 a year
- FreeFree
In their own words
Downdetector
Downdetector collects user reports and monitors other online sources so consumers can check service status and businesses can see when customers report problems. It identifies an incident when reports rise significantly above the average for that time of day over the prior six months, and updates monitored service status every four minutes. Downdetector says it covers over 36,000 services in 72 countries and processes tens of millions of reports each month. Consumers can use the Free plan for up to five favorites, with outage notifications through the Speedtest app subject to daily limits. Pro costs $13.99 a month and allows up to 10 favorites, offers more daily notifications and removes ads on the web and in the Speedtest app. For organizations, Explorer has a real-time dashboard for multiple services, configurable alerts, geographic breakdowns and historical analysis. Communicate lets companies post customizable status updates for affected customers. Downdetector is available on Android, iOS, web and API, and mobile access is also available in Speedtest. A free trial is listed.
Visual Sentinel
Visual Sentinel monitors websites and servers, including page changes that ordinary uptime checks may miss. Its monitoring covers uptime, screenshot-based visual comparison, SSL, DNS, performance, content, APIs, endpoints, and servers. For visual checks, it captures a page in a browser and compares the screenshot with a prior baseline. Users can exclude changing page elements with CSS selectors and set the amount of change needed to flag a capture. Failed uptime checks are repeated; a site is marked down only if it fails from all selected regions. Alerts can go to email, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, webhooks, Prometheus, and browser push. The REST API manages monitors, incidents, status pages, maintenance windows, reports, and notification channels; API access is listed for Business and Agency. The Free plan costs nothing and includes three monitors, 10-minute checks, and one status page. Solo costs $6 a month. Visual Sentinel is built and operated by Acefina LLC and is intended for small teams, agencies, and site owners.