Datadog Synthetic Monitoring vs UptimeRobot

From $5 per 1k API test runs / 12 USD per 1k browser test runs (indicative)

From $7 per month (indicative, Solo)

Priced per test run and separately for browser versus API. Costs land inside a wider Datadog contract that is rarely small.

One of the best free tiers in infrastructure tooling; paid plans are still inexpensive.

14-day trial.

50 monitors at 5-minute intervals, free forever.

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

Widely used

UptimeRobot · since 2010

• Correlation with APM traces and logs makes root-cause analysis dramatically faster.
• Private locations let you monitor internal services behind the firewall.
• Recorded browser tests are authorable by people who do not write code.

• Free tier covers what most small projects actually need.
• Five-minute setup with no configuration to learn.
• Status pages included even on lower tiers.

• Only worth it if you are already a Datadog customer; standalone it is expensive.
• Datadog billing complexity is a well-known source of budget surprises.
• The recorder produces tests that are harder to version and review than code.

• No browser-based transaction monitoring — availability only.
• Basic alerting logic; expect some noise from transient failures.
• Limited reporting and no observability integration.

Existing Datadog customers who want monitoring in the same pane as their observability data.

Side projects, small businesses and anyone who currently has no monitoring at all.