Making the switch to Checkly
A quick guide to help you evaluate Checkly against the hundreds of other monitoring solutions in the market.
What monitoring solution are you currently using?
What is Checkly?
Checkly helps thousands of software teams improve their application reliability with a platform built for engineers to take control of their testing, monitoring, and incident management.
Create and reuse tests using Playwright or OpenAPI, run them locally or in CI/CD, then deploy them to our global infrastructure to monitor your applications and services at high-frequency 24/7.
If anything fails or degrades, you and your teams will be alerted instantly and your status page updated.
Why teams switch to Checkly
Traditional monitoring tools create three critical problems that hold engineering teams back:
1. Not built for AI and the modern development workflow
Traditional monitoring tools were designed for a different era. They use clunky UIs, require manual configuration through web interfaces, and don't integrate with your code or CI/CD pipelines. AI is tacked on as widgets and not built for an actual workflow.
2. Expensive and complex to scale
As your team and infrastructure grow, so to will your monitoring and observability bill. On top of your billing, manually managing hundreds of monitors becomes unsustainable and expensive. Legacy tools make it painful to replicate, version, and manage monitoring at scale.
3. Too many false positives and not enough signal
When monitoring tools are disconnected from everyday work and siloed in operations, development teams don't use them. Developers ignore alerts that they don't understand, monitors fall out of sync with code, and reliability becomes an afterthought instead of a safeguard.
Benefits of Checkly
How Checkly Improves Reliability
Built for engineering teams
Checkly is designed from the ground up for modern development teams. Define monitors as code, store them in Git, deploy through CI/CD, and integrate with your existing workflows seamlessly. You can use Checkly to test, monitor, and alert on your applications and services.
“
We were constantly pushing new code to production and our monitors would be alerting us on old code or the new code broke production without us knowing.
Optimized for engagement
When monitoring lives alongside your code, developers actually use it. Teams using Checkly see:
- •4.5x increase in active monitoring users
- •2x faster issue detection
“
Before Checkly, I hated logging into Datadog and seeing hundreds of alerts and datapoints that I didn't understand or know how to fix. Now, when something breaks, I can fix it immediately and get back to work.”
3. Scales with your company
Monitoring as Code means you can template, reuse, and scale your monitoring effortlessly. Whether you have 10 checks or 10,000, managing them is just as simple.
Deeply integrated modern capabilities
Go beyond simple uptime checks. Run complex browser tests, validate API workflows, integrate with OpenTelemetry traces, and get AI-powered insights into failures.
“
Switching to Checkly was one of the best decisions we made. Having our monitors in code alongside our infrastructure means they never fall out of sync.”
— Engineering Team, Vercel
The migration process
Here's a proven five-step process for successfully migrating to Checkly:
Create your Checkly account
Start with the free tier or a trial on a paid plan. Optionally install the Checkly CLI in a demo project to see Monitoring as Code in action.
Instrument your “golden paths”
Add a handful of critical uptime checks (core URLs, login, APIs). Build 2–5 Playwright checks for your most important browser flows (signup, checkout, SSO, key dashboards).
Run a pilot alongside your current tool
Run Checkly in parallel for 4–6 weeks. Compare signal quality, time-to-detect, developer adoption, and cost.
Codify your monitoring model
Move monitors and alert policies into code (Checkly CLI, Terraform, or Pulumi). Standardize naming, labels, alert rules, and environments across teams.
Switch fully and decommission legacy monitors
Migrate remaining checks and status communication into Checkly. Turn off overlapping monitors in your previous tools to avoid double-paging and double-billing.
Pitching Checkly
Need to pitch Checkly to your bosses?
Here are the key points to help you get stakeholder buy-in:
"We're going to save a boatload of money"
Teams typically save 30-50% on monitoring costs with Checkly's transparent, usage-based pricing. No hidden fees, no per-seat charges, no overage surprises.
"We'll catch and fix issues faster than our customers can report them"
Catch issues 2x faster with intelligent alerting and detailed error diagnostics. Multi-step checks catch complex failures that simple uptime monitors miss.
"We can actually monitor the things that earn us money"
Built on modern technologies and designed for modern workflows. Regular updates, active development, and a roadmap aligned with how teams actually work.
"Our developers can share and reuse tests and monitors"
Monitoring as Code means developers spend less time clicking through UIs and more time writing code. Deploy monitors as part of your release process, not as an afterthought.
Frequently asked questions
Checkly offers transparent, usage-based pricing starting at $0.001 per check run. Most teams save 30-50% compared to legacy monitoring tools while gaining significantly more capabilities. We offer volume discounts for larger teams and custom pricing for enterprise needs.
Yes. Checkly integrates with Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Datadog, Grafana, and dozens of other tools through webhooks and native integrations. We also support OpenTelemetry for trace-based monitoring.
Most teams complete their migration in 2-4 weeks. Simple migrations with basic HTTP checks can be done in days using our CLI import tools. Complex migrations with custom scripts receive dedicated migration support.
This is our recommended approach. Run a pilot with Checkly alongside your existing monitoring to validate parity and build team confidence. We support parallel runs indefinitely until you're ready to fully switch.
Yes. All paid plans include migration support. Enterprise customers get dedicated migration assistance, custom import scripts, and a designated customer success manager to ensure a smooth transition.
Checkly is SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, and supports SSO/SAML for enterprise customers. We offer private locations for running checks within your own infrastructure and never store sensitive data from your applications.
Helpful resources
Ready to make the switch?
Our team will guide you through every step of the migration process.