Making the switch from Uptime.com to Checkly
A quick guide to help you evaluate Checkly as a modern alternative to Uptime.com.
import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test' // Your existing Playwright test, now a monitor. No rewrite. test('checkout flow', async ({ page }) => { await page.goto('https://acme.com') await expect(page.getByText('Order confirmed')).toBeVisible() })
What is Uptime?
Uptime.com provides straightforward uptime monitoring and basic status pages. It's a simple solution focused on alerting teams when websites go down.
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 team are alerted instantly and your status page is updated.
Why teams switch
Uptime.com often presents three critical challenges that hold engineering teams back:
Limited to basic availability checks
Uptime.com excels at answering "is it up?" but struggles with "does it work correctly?" You can't test complex user flows, authenticated sessions, or multi-step transactions. As applications become more sophisticated, simple pings miss critical user-facing failures.
No integration with development workflows
Uptime.com requires manual configuration through their web UI. There's no way to define monitors as code, version them in Git, or deploy them through CI/CD. Monitoring stays siloed from development, making it hard to keep checks synchronized with code changes.
Scales poorly with team growth
Managing monitors in Uptime.com becomes unwieldy as your infrastructure grows. Replicating checks across environments, maintaining consistent alert policies, or templatizing common patterns requires manual work. What works for 10 checks becomes painful at 100.
How Checkly improves reliability
Built for how modern product and platform teams actually ship
Most monitoring tools grew up around infrastructure dashboards or generic uptime checks. Checkly is built around applications and user journeys first.
- Model reliability as checks (browser, API, cron, TCP) that mirror real behaviour.
- Validate flows like sign-up, checkout, SSO, or critical APIs from multiple regions.
- Treat your monitoring setup as a first-class part of the application, not an afterthought.
Optimized for developer experience and Monitoring as Code
Checkly leans into the workflows developers already use: JS/TS, Playwright, CI/CD, and Git.
- Checkly CLI: define checks, alert policies, and environments as code.
- Playwright Check Suites: reuse your existing Playwright tests as production monitors.
- Terraform & Pulumi providers: manage monitors like you manage infrastructure.
Monitoring as Code means you:
- Version control every monitor and alert.
- Review changes with pull requests.
- Roll forward and back safely.
- Scale your monitoring footprint programmatically as you add services.
Scales with your systems and your org
As companies grow, DIY scripts and UI-driven configs start to fall over. Checkly is built to scale from a single product team to large, multi-service organizations.
- Global public locations plus private locations for internal services.
- Environments, projects, and code-based configuration for multi-team setups.
- Enterprise plans with SLAs, SSO/SAML, long retention, and dedicated support.
You keep your monitoring model clean and maintainable even as you add more services, regions, and teams.
One workflow to detect, communicate, and resolve
Checkly stitches together what most stacks treat as separate tools.
- Detect issues proactively with high-frequency uptime checks and Playwright synthetics.
- Communicate clearly with status pages and routed alerts (Slack, SMS, webhooks, Opsgenie).
- Resolve faster with Checkly Traces and deep error context.
Instead of jumping between 3-5 tools, teams stay in one workflow from detection through to resolution.
The migration process
Here's a proven five-step process for migrating to Checkly.
- 1
Create your Checkly account
Start with the free tier or a paid trial. Install the Checkly CLI in a demo project to see Monitoring as Code in action.
- 2
Instrument your golden paths
Add a handful of critical uptime checks (core URLs, login, APIs) and build 2-5 Playwright checks for your most important browser flows: signup, checkout, SSO, key dashboards.
- 3
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.
- 4
Codify your monitoring model
Move monitors and alert policies into code with the Checkly CLI, Terraform, or Pulumi. Standardize naming, labels, alert rules, and environments across teams.
- 5
Switch fully and decommission legacy monitors
Migrate remaining checks and status communication into Checkly. Turn off overlapping monitors to avoid double-paging and double-billing.
Need to pitch Checkly to your team?
Here are the talking points to help you get stakeholder buy-in.
“We’ll catch and fix issues before our customers 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 finally monitor the things that earn us money”
Validate real user journeys like signup, checkout, and SSO from multiple regions, not just whether an endpoint returns 200.
“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. Ship monitors as part of your release process, not as an afterthought.
“We’ll cut our monitoring bill”
Teams typically save 30-50% on monitoring costs with Checkly’s transparent, usage-based pricing.
Frequently asked questions
Helpful resources
Ready to make the switch?
Our team will guide you through every step of the migration.
