Free uptime monitoring: the 6 best free tools in 2026

Free uptime monitoring plans vary in monitor count, check frequency, alerting, status pages and retention. Whether you call it a free uptime monitor or free downtime monitoring, the job is the same: find out a site is down before your customers tell you. This guide compares the limits that affect day-to-day use and explains when a hosted or self-hosted option is the better fit.

What a free plan should include

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 criteria determine whether a free tier is suitable for ongoing use:

• 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 temporary routing problem becomes a 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 leads on every criterion. Each option below is matched to the use case where its published limits are strongest.

247Monitor: one-minute checks with server monitoring

Best for: one-minute website checks, one monitored server and a public status page in one hosted free plan.

This is our product, so verify the limits on the linked pricing page. 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 six non-SMS integrations (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
• Six non-SMS alert integrations · 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 failure a few minutes later, it is a practical option. The free tier covers the common check types and includes a basic status page.

Better Stack: heartbeats and a custom-domain status page

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

Better Stack's free tier includes 10 monitors plus 10 heartbeat checks for the background jobs that fail silently, checked every three minutes, with a status page included. It suits teams that value those features over a one-minute check interval.

StatusCake: the widest free check locations

Best for: confirming reachability from lots of different countries.

StatusCake publishes a broad location network, which is useful when per-country reachability is a priority. 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 a widely used 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 supports 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 a strong fit.

HetrixTools: free uptime and server stats together

Best for: watching several 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, 15 server monitors and blacklist monitoring, a tidy fit if you run a few VPSes and want host metrics and reachability in one place.

Free tiers, side by side

The same six tools, reduced to the limits that affect everyday use. 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. Choose the trade-off that matches the services you need to protect.

Free server uptime monitoring

“Is the site up?” and “is the server healthy?” are different questions, and most free plans only answer the first. An external check tells you the page stopped responding; a free server uptime monitor tells you why: the disk filled up, memory ran out, or CPU pinned at 100% for an hour before anything visibly broke. If you run your own VPS or dedicated hosts, you want both, and three options on this list cover servers without a card:

• 247Monitor includes one server on the free plan via a lightweight agent (CPU, memory, disk and network), alongside the 25 external monitors, so uptime and host health sit on the same dashboard and alert rules.
• HetrixTools includes 15 server monitors free, the most generous host count here, though the website-monitoring side is shallower than a dedicated tool's.
• Uptime Kuma can watch anything you point it at, but as self-hosted software the server running it is the one host it cannot impartially monitor. Pair it with something external if the box it lives on matters.

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: an established product with a large probe network, but no permanent free plan. 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.
• A business site that needs one-minute checks → 247Monitor, with a status page and failure confirmation included.
• 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.

Method and official sources

We compared plans available to new customers at no cost, including check intervals, monitor limits, status pages and alerting. Sources last checked 24 August 2026: our 247Monitor pricing, UptimeRobot pricing, Better Stack pricing, StatusCake pricing, Uptime Kuma's official repository, HetrixTools pricing and the Freshping deprecation notice.

Frequently asked questions

Choose on check interval, failure confirmation, alerting, status-page needs and the operational cost of self-hosting. The headline monitor count is only one part of the decision.