12 Best Free and Paid Synthetic Monitoring Tools
Application downtime and errors continue to plague enterprises around the world. As it stands, synthetic monitoring tools are the most efficient way to measure the performance, availability, and reliability of any website or online application.
Whether you’re a budget-conscious developer or a business owner seeking top-tier monitoring capabilities, we’ve got you covered with a curated list of the 12 best free and paid synthetic monitoring tools.
#1 appNeura
#2 Datadog
#3 Pingdom
#4 Checkly
#5 AlertBot
#6 Uptime
#7 Sematext
#8 Dotcom-Monitor
#9 Uptrends
#10 SolarWinds
#11 Site24x7
#12 SmartBear AlertSite
Let’s dive right in!
1. appNeura
AppNeura’s synthetic monitoring system proactively measures and optimizes the performance and availability of online applications. By simulating user interactions, it helps identify potential issues before they impact end-users, ensuring smooth and effective application operations around the clock.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of appNeura:
- Ability to record transactions from any web application or through web access on the browser
- Simulation of user interaction on online applications from multiple locations
- Automatic execution of recorded transactions from any location and at a fixed time interval
- Clutter-free and user-friendly cloud-hosted dashboard
Credits: appNeura
At the higher level, appNeura enables organizations to collect metrics from synthetic agents. These metrics include rendering time, TCP, third-party calls, and response/processing time. With appNeura, organizations can extract granular details of transactions based on country, region, city, or branch level.
Benefits
appNeura offers a host of business benefits, including:
- Enhances the quality of customer experience by identifying the cause of any degradation in application performance.
- With end-to-end visibility, appNeura enables organizations to detect the factors that are affecting the end-user experience.
- Visual metrics enable companies to track the user’s perception of every page load.
- Measures the process workflows right from submitting online forms to user actions.
- Benchmarks or compares application performance and availability against industry standards and competitor products.
appNeura – Pricing
appNeura comes with a free trial for a limited period. For more information, get in touch here.
2. Datadog
As a synthetic monitoring tool, Datadog provides end-to-end visibility for testing APIs and browsers. This AI-powered tool enables companies to increase their application uptime and identify regional issues.
Credits: Datadog
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of Datadog:
- Web recorder functionality for creating code-free test cases.
- Automated testing capability to identify problems during off-hours.
- Sophisticated alert system for alert teams while minimizing false positives.
- Tracking of SLAs and SLOs.
As a cloud-powered tool, Datadog can monitor website performance from multiple locations around the globe. Additionally, this tool can check DNS servers and SSL certificates.
Benefits
Datadog offers benefits such as:
- Sophisticated alert capabilities that notify users of any impending issues
- Quick monitoring of user journeys that helps in faster troubleshooting
Datadog – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Designed for DevOps teams.Holistic view of the application performance & accessibilityReflects real-time changes to networksCan scale up application monitoring with flexible pricing | Limited 14-day free trial |
Datadog – Pricing
The API Test plan is priced at $5 for 10,000 monthly runs – while the Browser Test plan is priced at $12 for 10,000 monthly runs.
We’ve compared Datadog to Dynatrace in a recent article.
3. Pingdom
Pingdom synthetic monitoring is a cloud service operating from over 100 global data centers. As a synthetic monitoring tool, Pingdom is widely used to monitor website availability.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of Pingdom:
- Cloud-based monitoring
- Over 100 test launch locations
- Variety of testing methods
- Performance alerts
As a synthetic monitoring tool, Pingdom can execute a range of tests for examining website load times and transactional performance. Additional features include the “Downtime alerts” that notify your users when the website is inaccessible.
Benefits
Pingdom offers a host of business benefits, including:
- Ease of creating a test for synthetic monitoring without any technical knowledge.
- Beneficial for real-time measurement of website uptime and response time.
- Subscribers can choose the number and type of monitoring tests to run every month.
Pingdom – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| External monitoring from over 100 locationsCloud hosting, thus, ensuring no setup complicationCustomized alerts in the form of email, SMS, or through custom solutions | Limited free trial period |
Pingdom – Pricing
Pingdom is available with a 14-day free trial version that includes synthetic and real user monitoring.
Learn the 12 best real user monitoring tools for small businesses.
4. Checkly
With the Checkly monitoring tool, organizations can check and monitor website transaction flows in a browser and monitor the API endpoints. Easy to install and set up, Checkly uses the Chrome Puppeteer framework to simulate transactions on the Chrome browser.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of the Checkly tool:
- Displays the application performance and correctness on a single dashboard
- Support for Chrome Puppeteer framework
- Support for open-source Puppeteer recorder extension for Chrome browser
- Powerful REST API to automate checks with Terraform
Checkly is popular for its ease of installation and use. You can also use Checkly to configure alerts for Opsgenie, Pagerduty, and Slack.
Benefits
Here are a few benefits of the Checkly tool:
- Ideal for use in a DevOps environment
- The centralized dashboard provides minute details of your app’s performance and accuracy
Checkly – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to install and configureExceptional customer support | Lack of documentation for reusing code snippets |
Checkly – Pricing
Checkly is available with a free plan that includes the 1-minute check interval.
5. AlertBot
Among the leading tools for synthetic monitoring, AlertBot uses web browsers to execute performance testing and identify problem areas. Easy and intuitive, AlertBot can assist its customers in configuring web transaction monitoring.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of AlertBot:
- Simple and intuitive user interface
- AlertBot web recorder tool to simulate business processes on any website.
- Timely alerts about slow websites to the right team
- Web page monitoring from locations across the world
AlertBot offers a variety of advanced features, such as multi-step synthetic recording and Health Map reports that share website performance metrics via daily emails.
Benefits
Here are a few benefits of the AlertBot tool:
- Improves user experience by reducing downtime and identifying bottlenecks
- Monitors web pages from across the globe
AlertBot – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Support for monitoring real browsers.Accurate page error screenshotsAlerts on email, text messages, and phone calls | Poor website designDelayed alertsBasic website monitoring features |
AlertBot – Pricing
Along with a 14-day free trial, AlertBot is priced on monthly and annual terms – along with custom plans.
6. Uptime
Uptime offers synthetic monitoring along with other services, including web asset testing and real user monitoring. With synthetic monitoring, companies can quickly identify any issues in online funnels, forms, and flows.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of the Uptime tool:
- 15 different locations to launch tests from servers
- Automated synthetic monitoring that automatically matches SLA expectations
- Live performance graphs
With Uptime, organizations can launch their monitoring tests from servers in 15 locations across the world. They can also set up website uptime checks to run continuously on network assets and email systems.
Benefits
Here is how Uptime can benefit your enterprise:
- Facilitates a built-in no-code editor for checking transactions
- Enables transaction checking for obtaining critical information on what is not functioning on the website
Uptime – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Ideal for web asset monitoringSimple intuitive dashboardsDesigned for smaller enterprises | Limited free trial period |
Uptime – Pricing
Uptime is based on a subscription pricing model with a prepaid credit for a specific number of tests.
7. Sematext
Sematext is a cloud-powered synthetic monitoring tool that monitors website performance using tests for checking loading speeds and errors. It enables companies to monitor both websites and applications from multiple locations.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of Sematext:
- Status pages provide information on the availability and performance of any monitored services
- Statistical reports about error rates, page speed, loading time, and other metrics are made available
Sematext is among the best monitoring tools for DevOps environments. This tool can easily monitor uptime and APIs from private networks and multiple locations.
Benefits
Here are some of the business benefits of Sematext:
- The flexible pay-as-you-use pricing model
- Repeated checks on SSL certificates, DNS records, and network protocols
- Ability to choose the frequency of test launches according to the allocated budget
Sematext – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| 8 test launch locationsCustomized alertsFailed test notification | Frequent testing can increase charges. |
Sematext – Pricing
Sematext comes with a 14-day free trial and a pay-as-you-go plan priced at $29 monthly with 40 HTTP and 5 browsers.
8. Dotcom-Monitor
This synthetic monitoring platform can easily test the performance, availability, and uptime of web pages, web applications, and APIs. The Dotcom-Monitor tool enables users to focus on monitoring data instead of spending time on installation and setup.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of Dotcom-Monitor:
- Monitoring of web services, including SOAP, TCP, and ICMP
- Web page monitoring that includes load time for single pages using real browsers from global data centers
- Multi-step web transaction monitoring for performance, availability, and accessibility
Additionally, with this tool, you can easily create scripts to monitor critical web transactions – including portal logins, shopping carts, and customer signups.
Benefits
Among its major benefits, Dotcom-Monitor enables users to focus on their monitoring scripts instead of spending time on installation and configuration.
Dotcom Monitor – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Real-time monitoring resultsUser-friendly dashboard | Web services monitoring is not exhaustivePoor diagnosis of website errors |
Dotcom-Monitor – Pricing
Dotcom-Monitor is available with a 30-day free trial. Pricing depends on the number of monitoring steps for all scenarios within a single account.
9. Uptrends
With Uptrends synthetic monitoring tool, organizations can now run automated tests to check the performance of any website. With web browser evaluation, this tool enables simulating any user actions.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of the Uptrends tool:
- Concurrent monitoring of three or more locations.
- Detailed performance data after page testing
- Waterfall reports to identify the cause of slowdowns.
- Bandwidth throttling to check website performance in slow networks.
This tool is currently being used by companies like Microsoft and Vimeo.
Benefits
Uptrends facilitates 225 checkpoint servers to optimize website performance and is an ideal solution for small to medium enterprises.
Uptrends – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Effective downtime monitoringGlobal checkpointsCost effective | Lack of support for recording scenarios in iframes.Custom alert option only on email |
Uptrends – Pricing
Uptrends has 3 plans – ranging from $15.47 per month to $51.58 a month.
10. SolarWinds
SolarWinds is one of the best synthetic monitoring tools to install on internal servers and execute on-premises. This tool can perform continuous checks for availability on all websites.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of the SolarWinds tool:
- Support for both synthetic and real user monitoring
- Live response graphs
- High frequency of 5 minutes for uptime monitoring
- Root cause analysis tool for fixing performance issues.
As an on-premises website monitoring tool, SolarWinds monitors the website’s uptime and response time.
Benefits
Here are some of the main benefits of SolarWinds:
- Continuous website checks for availability – thus minimizing downtime
- No transactional charges, which ensures that you can run the monitoring tests as often as you like
- Monitoring frequency of 5 minutes, with timely alerts and status reports for any failed connection
SolarWinds – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Uptime monitoringNetwork device monitoringInventory management | Custom reporting is not easyLimited out-of-the-box templates |
SolarWinds– Pricing
SolarWinds is available with a 30-day free trial.
11. Site24x7
Site24x7 offers synthetic monitoring services from over 110 global data centers. Its services include Ping tests and browser synthetics that provide information about the uptime and response time.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of Site24x7:
- Website checks include monitoring of SSL certificates, DNS, and domain expiry
- Website defacement monitor to check websites for any errors
- 110 test launch locations
Among its major features, Site24x7 services are compatible with Selenium test cases for browser testing.
Benefits
Here are some of the main benefits of Site24x7:
- Ping-based tests provide accurate uptime and response time
- Response time monitoring includes metrics on DNS fetches, connection, and first-byte arrival.
Site24x7 – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Holistic tool for monitoring networks and real users.Over 110 testing locations for global reachFreeware version for testing | Detailed platform that takes time to learn and master |
Site24x7 – Pricing
Comes with a 30-day free trial plan and has 4 plans – namely Starter, Pro, Classic, and Enterprise.
We talk about Site24x7 alternatives in another article where we share 2 of our favorite picks.
12. SmartBear AlertSite
SmartBear AlertSite is a synthetic monitoring tool for websites, web apps, and APIs. It provides an intuitive user interface and a unified view on API performance.
Main Features
Here are some of the main features of the SmartBear AlertSite tool:
- Reusability of Selenium scripts for creating new monitors
- DejaClick point-and-click web recorder for adding new monitors without coding
- The facility to add new API monitors using API Endpoint URL and OpenAPI specifications
With over 350 global nodes, SmartBear AlertSite can easily be integrated with DevOps tool stacks.
Benefits
Here are some of the main benefits of SmartBear AlertSite:
- Ideal for creating a variety of Web and API monitors
- Effective monitoring of UI and API layers for their functionality, availability, and performance
SmartBear AlertSite – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Effective for website and API monitoringIdeal for front page monitoringUser-friendly UI | Complicated tool for creating alertsHigh number of false positive alerts |
SmartBear AlertSite – Pricing
SmartBear AlertSite is available for a free trial – along with paid plans for internal and external monitoring and hybrid deployments.
Conclusion
In summary, synthetic monitoring tools are necessary for monitoring application (or website) performance and availability. Depending on your monitoring requirements, you can choose from any of these 12 synthetic monitoring tools.
As it stands, with appNeura, enterprises can easily simulate the user experience in the production and development environment. So, if you’re looking for a synthetic monitoring, get in touch with our experts today for a free demo.