A public status page gives customers one place to check service health and read incident updates. Free plans differ in monitoring, subscriber, branding and custom-domain limits. This comparison sets out those differences and identifies the best fit for common needs.
Key takeaways
- Every product in this guide offers either a hosted free plan or a free self-hosted option.
- The big divide is monitoring or not: most tools run the checks and update the page for you; Atlassian Statuspage only communicates, so you feed it from elsewhere.
- Free tiers almost always hold back the custom domain; Better Stack and self-hosted OpenStatus are the exceptions.
- Match the tool to your requirements: page plus monitoring, custom-domain support, monitor capacity or self-hosted control.
- Review paid-plan pricing before committing; vendors charge by responder, monitor, page or feature when you exceed free limits.
What a status page is
Monitoring tells you when something breaks. A status page tells everyone else. It is the public-facing half of incident communication: the page customers refresh when the app feels slow, and the one you point to instead of answering the same question fifty times.
Definition
A status page is a public web page that shows whether your services are up, posts updates as you work through an incident, and lets customers subscribe for notifications, so they hear it from you, on one link, rather than from each other.
A decent status page does four things: shows the live state of each component, keeps a history of past incidents, lets people subscribe for updates, and (ideally) updates itself from real monitoring rather than relying on a human to remember during the chaos of an outage. Here is what one looks like:
- APIOperational
- Web appOperational
- DashboardOperational
- CDN & assetsOperational
- WebhooksOperational
Past incidents
9 Jun · Elevated API latency · resolved in 22m
How we picked the best free status page tools
“Free” is doing a lot of work in this category, so we judged each tool's free plan against the criteria that matter once you are live:
- What the free page includes: components, subscribers, incident history and how much branding you get before you have to pay.
- Custom domain: whether your page can live at
status.yourdomain.comor only on the vendor's subdomain. - Monitoring included: does the tool run the checks and update the page automatically, or is the page a blank canvas you update by hand?
- Where the wall is: the first limit you hit, and how steep the jump to the next plan is.
- Polish: because a status page is a public reflection of your brand, and a clunky one undercuts the trust it is meant to build.
The 7 best free status page tools in 2026
Here is the shortlist at a glance, followed by the benefits and limits of each option. The order reflects the stated criteria, including monitoring, free-plan capacity and operational overhead.
247MonitorThat’s us
A public status page and the monitoring that drives it in the same free plan.
- Free plan
- 25 monitors · 1-min checks · 1 status page
- Monitoring
- Built in
- Custom domain
- Paid upgrade
Advantages
- A public status page on every plan with subscribers and incident updates
- Status components can reflect monitor results automatically
- Email, Slack, Discord, Teams, Telegram and webhook alerts on Free
- 25 monitors at 1-minute checks from around the world, no card required
Limitations
- Custom-domain and white-label pages are a paid feature (Business, or a £15/mo add-on on Pro)
- A smaller monitoring-location network than several established providers
- No on-call scheduling or phone-call alerts
Best for · Page + monitoring in one
Better Stack
A polished free status page with monitoring and a custom domain included.
- Free plan
- 10 monitors (+10 heartbeats) · 3-min checks · 1 status page
- Monitoring
- Built in
- Custom domain
- Free
Advantages
- Host the free page on your own domain (status.yourdomain.com)
- Monitoring is bundled, so the page reflects live check results automatically
- Monitoring and incident communication are managed in one platform
Limitations
- Paid plans bill per responder ($29–34 each), so the cost climbs with headcount
- Free checks run every 3 minutes; 30-second checks need a paid plan
- White-label status pages cost $250 per page, per month
Best for · Best free design
Instatus
A design-focused status page with monitoring included in the free Starter plan.
- Free plan
- 1 status page · 15 monitors · 2-min checks · 200 subscribers
- Monitoring
- Built in
- Custom domain
- Paid upgrade
Advantages
- A polished public status page with several themes
- The free plan now bundles a starter set of monitors with 2-minute checks
- Five team members and two on-call members are included
Limitations
- A custom domain is a paid upgrade; free pages live on an instatus.com subdomain
- Subscriber and monitor counts are modest on the free tier
- Fewer deep monitoring features than the monitoring-first tools
Best for · Speed and polish
UptimeRobot
A high monitor limit and a basic public status page, with five-minute checks on Free.
- Free plan
- 50 monitors · 5-min checks · 1 basic status page
- Monitoring
- Built in
- Custom domain
- Paid upgrade
Advantages
- 50 free monitors, the highest hosted monitor limit in this comparison
- Monitoring and a public status page bundled together, no card required
- Monitoring and a public status page are managed together
Limitations
- Free checks are every 5 minutes; faster intervals are a steep step up in price
- The free status page is basic; custom domain and branding are paid
- No real-browser or transaction journeys at any tier
Best for · Most free monitors
Atlassian Statuspage
A dedicated incident-communication product; monitoring must come from another service.
- Free plan
- 100 subscribers · 25 components · 2 team members
- Monitoring
- Status page only
- Custom domain
- Paid upgrade
Advantages
- Incident templates, components, metrics and subscriber notifications
- 100 subscribers and 25 components on the free plan
- Email, Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications on Free
Limitations
- No monitoring at all: you update it by hand, or wire up a separate tool via the API
- No custom domain on free; paid plans jump to $29, then $99, then $399 a month
- Monitoring and paid status-page features are separate costs
Best for · Enterprise polish
Cronitor
Built for the cron jobs and background tasks that fail silently, with a basic status page tucked into its small free tier.
- Free plan
- 5 monitors · 5-min checks · 1 basic status page
- Monitoring
- Built in
- Custom domain
- Paid upgrade
Advantages
- Excellent at scheduled-job and heartbeat monitoring (its core strength)
- A status page is included even on the free Hacker plan
- Developer-friendly, with a clean API and CLI
Limitations
- Only 5 monitors on free, at 5-minute checks
- Status pages are basic; branding and private pages are paid
- Paid pricing is per-monitor ($2) and per-user ($5), which adds up quickly
Best for · Cron & background jobs
OpenStatus
Open-source and self-hostable: run a status page on your own infrastructure for nothing but the server it sits on.
- Free plan
- Self-host: free & unlimited · Cloud free: 1 monitor, 1 page
- Monitoring
- Built in
- Custom domain
- Self-host
Advantages
- Open-source software that you can run on your own infrastructure
- Built-in monitoring and status pages
- A hosted plan is available if you do not want to operate it yourself
Limitations
- Self-hosting means you run, patch and back it up
- The hosted free tier is tiny: one monitor, one page, 10-minute checks
- Less hand-holding than the commercial products
Best for · Self-hosters & OSS fans
Prefer to self-host? The open-source route
If you would rather own the whole thing (your data, your domain, no plan to outgrow), an open-source status page runs on your own infrastructure for the price of the server it sits on. OpenStatus (above) is the most modern pick and the one we would start with. Beyond it, the long-standing options are Cachet, Statping-ng and Gatus for a self-contained service, or Upptime, which cleverly runs entirely on GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages.
Which free status page tool should you pick?
There is no single winner; the right choice depends on what you already run. A quick decision guide:
- You want a status page and the monitoring behind it, free, in one place: start with 247Monitor. The page updates from your checks, with six non-SMS alert integrations on the free plan.
- You prioritise status-page design: compare Instatus and Better Stack. Better Stack includes a custom domain on Free.
- You are watching a pile of side projects: UptimeRobot offers 50 free monitors if five-minute checks meet your requirements.
- You are an enterprise that already monitors elsewhere: Atlassian Statuspage is the incumbent for a reason, as long as you are happy to feed it.
- You want to own every byte: self-host OpenStatus.
Whichever you choose, the gap that matters most is whether your page tells the truth without you. A page you have to update by hand is a page that stays green through the first twenty minutes of an outage, because the person who would flip it is busy fixing the outage. That is the whole case for a tool that monitors and publishes in one loop.
Method and official sources
We compared the free plan available to a new customer, using the published limits for monitors, check interval, status pages, subscribers and domains. Sources last checked 24 August 2026: our 247Monitor pricing, Better Stack pricing, Instatus pricing, UptimeRobot pricing, Atlassian Statuspage pricing, Cronitor pricing and openstatus pricing.
Frequently asked questions
What is a status page?
A status page is a public web page that shows whether your services are up, posts updates while you work through an incident, and lets customers subscribe for notifications. It exists so people hear about problems from you, on one link, instead of from each other on social media.
Are free status page tools good enough for a real business?
For most small and mid-size sites, yes. A free plan from any tool on this list gives you a credible public page, subscriber notifications and incident history. You typically outgrow the free tier for one of three reasons: you want a custom domain, you need more subscribers, or you want the page to update automatically from real monitoring rather than by hand.
What is the best free status page tool?
It depends on what you already have. 247Monitor combines monitoring, a status page and six non-SMS alert integrations on its free plan. Better Stack includes a custom domain on Free. Atlassian Statuspage suits teams that already monitor elsewhere, while openstatus can be self-hosted for full control.
Can I use a custom domain on a free status page?
Sometimes. Better Stack lets you host its free page on a subdomain of your own domain (status.yourdomain.com), and self-hosting OpenStatus lets you use any domain you like. Most others (Instatus, UptimeRobot, Atlassian Statuspage and 247Monitor) keep custom domains and white-labelling on paid plans, so a free page lives on the vendor's subdomain.
Do I need a separate monitoring tool to run a status page?
With Atlassian Statuspage, yes: it only communicates, so you either update it manually or connect a monitoring tool to it via the API. The monitoring-first tools here (247Monitor, Better Stack, UptimeRobot, Instatus, Cronitor and OpenStatus) run the checks themselves and update the page for you, which is far less work during an actual incident.
Choose a free status page by the limits you will use in practice: monitoring interval, subscriber capacity, custom domain, alerting and whether you are prepared to self-host. For paid-plan detail, review the sourced product comparisons.