Best free uptime monitoring tools (2026)

You can absolutely monitor a real website for £0. The catch is that “free” means wildly different things from one tool to the next — 25 monitors here, 50 there; checks every minute or every five; a status page included or sold separately. This guide ranks the free uptime monitoring tools worth your time in 2026, says plainly what each free plan includes, and — more usefully — where the limit bites.

What “free” should actually get you

Before the list, the criteria. The headline number on a free plan is almost always the monitor count, because it's the easiest thing to make sound generous. But a free plan is only as good as its weakest limit, and the interesting limits are the ones nobody puts in the big font. Six things decide whether a free tier is genuinely useful or just a demo:

• How many monitors — enough to cover your site, its API, your SSL certificate and a background job or two? Most sites need five to fifteen, not fifty.
• How often it checks — the single most important number. A one-minute check catches an outage five times faster than a five-minute one. Most free plans quietly sit at five minutes.
• Whether you get a status page — the public page that turns “is it just me?” tickets into a single link. Some tools include one free; others charge for it separately.
• Which alert channels — email is table stakes. Can it reach you on Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram or a webhook, or is the free tier email-only?
• How long it keeps history — a month of data is fine for spotting trends; a few days isn't. Retention is usually the first thing trimmed on a free plan.
• Whether failures are confirmed — does it re-check from a second location before paging you? Without that, a single grumpy router becomes a 3am false alarm.

Here's roughly what a real free setup looks like once it's running — a handful of monitors, each watching a different surface. Every site shown below is invented:

The best free uptime monitoring tools

No single free plan wins every row, so we've framed each pick around what it's genuinely best at — and been honest about the trade-off that comes with it.

247Monitor — the most usable free plan

Best for: a real, fast, alert-everywhere setup with a status page, for £0.

We'll declare the interest up front — this is our blog. But the free plan earns its place on the criteria above, not the monitor count. It checks every minute (five times faster than the typical free tier), confirms failures from a second region before it pages you, includes a public status page, and unlocks all six alert channels — email, Slack, Discord, Teams, Telegram and webhooks — with no card and no expiry.

• 25 monitors at 1-minute checks, from around the world
• Eight monitor types free: HTTP, keyword, ping, port, SSL, domain expiry, DNS and heartbeat
• 1 public status page · 100 subscribers
• All six alert channels · 30 days of result history

UptimeRobot — the most free monitors

Best for: watching a big pile of low-stakes sites where five-minute checks are fine.

UptimeRobot is the tool most people try first, and its 50 free monitors are the reason. If you're keeping an eye on a dozen hobby projects and don't mind hearing about a blip a few minutes late, it's genuinely hard to argue with. The free tier covers the common check types and includes a basic status page.

Better Stack — the best free heartbeats (and the nicest UI)

Best for: a polished free dashboard with cron/heartbeat coverage baked in.

Better Stack is arguably the best-looking product in this list, and its free tier is thoughtfully shaped: 10 monitors plus 10 heartbeat checks for the background jobs that fail silently, checked every three minutes, with a status page included. If design and built-in heartbeats matter to you, start here.

StatusCake — the widest free check locations

Best for: confirming reachability from lots of different countries.

StatusCake checks from an impressively long list of locations, which is its real edge if per-country reachability is what you care about. The free plan gives you 10 monitors at five-minute checks and covers the standard check types.

Uptime Kuma — the best self-hosted, open-source option

Best for: developers who want unlimited everything and total control, and don't mind running a server.

Uptime Kuma is the standout free-and-open-source choice. There's no plan and no monitor limit — you run it yourself (a single Docker command will do), and it's genuinely capable: 20-second checks, unlimited monitors, status pages, and an enormous list of 90+ notification services. For a home lab or a cost-conscious team that's comfortable with a little ops, it's excellent.

HetrixTools — free uptime and server stats together

Best for: watching a couple of servers' CPU and RAM alongside their uptime, free.

HetrixTools rolls uptime monitoring together with server resource monitoring and blacklist checks. The free tier includes 15 uptime monitors at one-minute checks plus blacklist monitoring — a tidy fit if you run a VPS or two and want host metrics and reachability in one place.

Free tiers, side by side

The same six tools, reduced to the limits that actually decide things. Read down the check interval column first — it's the one that determines how quickly you find out something broke.

The pattern is the clearest argument in the article: the free plans with the biggest monitor counts tend to check the slowest, and the ones that check fastest either cap the monitors or ask you to host them yourself. Pick the corner of that trade-off that matches what you're actually protecting.

The famous names with no free tier

A quick word on the tools you'll see recommended elsewhere that don't belong on a “free” list, so you don't lose an afternoon discovering it the hard way:

• Pingdom — the household name, and a genuinely vast probe network, but there's no free plan at all: just a 30-day trial, after which the entry bundle starts around $18/month. Its fastest interval is also one minute on every plan. More in the Pingdom comparison.
• Freshping — once a generous free favourite, now a cautionary tale: Freshworks discontinued it entirely in March 2026. Worth remembering when you weigh a free plan from a vendor that has no obvious reason to keep it running.
• Datadog, New Relic and the big observability suites — they offer synthetic checks, but as one paid module of a much larger platform. Powerful if you already live there; overkill (and not free) if you just want to know your site is up.

How to choose the right free tool

Skip the feature-matrix paralysis. Match the tool to the situation:

• A dozen low-stakes sites, five minutes is fine → UptimeRobot, for the 50-monitor headroom.
• One real site you actually care about → 247Monitor — one-minute checks, a status page, every alert channel and second-region confirmation, free.
• You're happy running a server → Uptime Kuma, for unlimited monitors and total control.
• You want host CPU/RAM next to uptime → 247Monitor, whose free plan now includes one server via a lightweight agent (CPU, memory, disk and network); or HetrixTools if you need several free hosts plus blacklist checks.

And know when you've outgrown free. The usual triggers are 30-second checks on a revenue-critical path, a real-browser journey that logs in and checks out, longer history for reporting, or more seats for the team. When you hit them, the jump is small: our Starter plan is £9, and the comparison pages lay out how the paid tiers stack up against the same names above.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line: free uptime monitoring is real and worth setting up today — just choose on the limits that matter, not the biggest number on the page. If you want the fast-checks-status-page-every- alert-channel version without reaching for a card, our free plan is built exactly for that. Start monitoring free →