PostDeploy as a UptimeRobot alternative
PostDeploy organises uptime monitors, cron and heartbeat jobs, error tracking and analytics around the same projects, on one flat plan with Slack alerts included. UptimeRobot offers more free uptime monitors. Pick PostDeploy if you want one toolkit for the whole project instead of a bigger pile of one kind of check.
What UptimeRobot sells
UptimeRobot sells external synthetic monitoring (HTTP, keyword, ping, port, DNS and heartbeat checks) plus hosted status pages, to everyone from hobbyists on its free plan up to enterprise teams.
Side by side, before you commit
Their published free tier against what you get on PostDeploy, because that is where the decision starts.
| UptimeRobot | PostDeploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime and API monitors | 50 | 20 |
| Cron and heartbeat jobs | Shared with the 50 above | 20, own allowance |
| Detailed uptime samples | 3 months | 7 days |
| Check interval floor | 5 minutes | 5 minutes |
| Slack alerts | Paid plans only | Every plan |
| Webhook alerts | Third tier up | Indie, $5 a month |
| Discord alerts | Free plan | Every plan |
| Error tracking and analytics | Not offered | Included on every plan |
Why people look for a UptimeRobot alternative
In November 2024 UptimeRobot retroactively restricted its free plan to non-commercial use, told users after the change had taken effect, and set a deadline under a month out. The policy has since been reversed and today's help centre affirms commercial free use, but the trust damage outlived the terms.
Slack is not on the free plan, and webhooks are not on the free or entry plan. For a lot of small teams that turns a free monitor into a paid one.
Multi-region checking is paid-only, so free accounts get a single vantage point and no false-positive mitigation.
Downgrading pauses every monitor, not just the ones over the new limit, and it silently turns off SSL and domain expiry reminders that re-upgrading does not restore.
What UptimeRobot does well
For uptime alone UptimeRobot's free tier is bigger: 50 monitors, 3 months of history, ICMP ping checks, mobile apps and paid SMS and voice alerting, none of which PostDeploy matches.
Where PostDeploy is different
One project-shaped tool instead of a monitor pile. PostDeploy organises uptime monitors, cron and heartbeat jobs, analytics and error tracking around the same projects, so the whole project lives under one login and one bill.
Cron and heartbeat jobs have their own allowance, 20 on Indie, so watching a scheduled job never spends an uptime monitor or forces a plan upgrade.
Slack on every PostDeploy plan. On UptimeRobot it starts at the entry paid tier, and webhooks start two tiers above that.
Projects and environments as first-class concepts, so staging and production are separate views of the same project rather than two unrelated monitors.
A flat, published price: Indie is $5 a month, covering the whole project.
What switching gets you
Try PostDeploy if
- You want Slack alerts without paying for them.
- Your project is one project: an API, a site, a marketing page and a handful of scheduled jobs, comfortably inside 20 uptime monitors and 20 cron jobs.
- You keep separate staging and production environments and want them modelled that way.
- You want uptime, errors and analytics in one tool today instead of running three.
What moving actually costs
- 1 Read your monitors out through their REST API rather than retyping them: type, URL, interval, timeout, keyword rules, custom headers and accepted status codes.
-
2
Heartbeat URLs are the expensive part. Each is a unique
heartbeat.uptimerobot.com/<id>baked into crontabs, CI pipelines, Task Scheduler actions and application code. Miss one and it fails silently, which is exactly the failure mode heartbeats exist to catch. - 3 Re-create alert contacts and re-assign them per monitor. Unassigned contacts send nothing, quietly.
- 4 Historical uptime data stays behind. Run both tools in parallel for a month if you need continuity of reporting.
- 5 Unused SMS and voice credits are forfeited. They are one-time purchases, non-refundable and non-transferable.
Questions
Is PostDeploy free bigger than UptimeRobot free?
For uptime monitors alone, no: they publish 50 free monitors with 3 months of history against 20 here with 7 days of detailed samples. PostDeploy Indie adds 20 cron and heartbeat jobs on a separate allowance, Slack alerts, and error tracking and analytics on the same plan.
Can I monitor a cron job on PostDeploy?
Yes. Cron and heartbeat jobs have their own allowance of 20 on Indie, separate from uptime monitors, so a scheduled job never consumes an uptime slot.
Does PostDeploy do ping, port or DNS checks?
Port (TCP) and DNS checks, yes, along with HTTP, keyword and heartbeat checks and SSL and domain expiry warnings. ICMP ping and UDP, no.
Other comparisons
Ship your next project with one toolkit, not three.
Start a trial, run both PostDeploy and UptimeRobot for real, and keep whichever answers your questions faster.
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