Checkly review

Checkly is a managed SaaS platform for synthetic monitoring, not a self-hosted monitoring server. It schedules browser and API checks from public cloud locations, records results, and sends alerts when availability, correctness, or performance checks fail. In a software stack, it sits outside the application: monitors exercise deployed endpoints and user flows, while teams define and deploy those monitors through code.

Browser checks use Microsoft Playwright across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. API checks assert status codes, headers, response payloads, and latency; multi-step checks can chain requests and pass variables between them. The platform also supports heartbeat monitors for cron jobs and background workers, status pages, and OpenTelemetry trace correlation for failures. For private networks, a containerized Checkly Agent runs on local Docker or Kubernetes infrastructure and connects using outbound-only connections. The central service remains managed SaaS.

The main code-first integration is Monitoring as Code: define monitors in TypeScript or JavaScript, keep them in an application repository, and deploy them with the Checkly CLI. The CLI is open source under Apache 2.0. Checkly also lists a Go SDK and official Terraform and Pulumi providers. Browser checks use Playwright; API checks can include setup and teardown scripts, chained requests, and variables passed between steps.

The platform integrates with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Vercel, and Jenkins workflows. Alert channels include Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, Opsgenie, email, SMS, phone calls, and custom webhooks. OpenTelemetry connects check failures to backend traces, and an MCP server supports AI coding assistants. Checkly's published materials do not establish a specific management API protocol or SDK coverage across languages; confirm those details and current examples in the vendor's documentation before building a custom integration.

The free Hobby plan costs $0 per month and includes one user, 10 uptime monitors, 10,000 API runs, and 1,000 browser runs per month. It includes six public locations, with a maximum of three per check, and does not permit overages. A 14-day free trial is also listed.

Starter costs $29 monthly or $24 per month billed annually; it includes three users, 25,000 API runs, and 3,000 browser runs. Team costs $80 monthly or $64 per month billed annually, with 10 users, 100,000 API runs, 12,000 browser runs, all 22 public locations, and private locations. Starter overages cost $2.60 per 10,000 API runs and $6.50 per 1,000 browser runs; Team rates are $2.50 and $6.25, respectively. Prepaid extra runs are listed at $1.80 per 10,000 API runs and $4 per 1,000 browser runs. Extra uptime monitors cost $8 per block of 25, or $10 monthly on monthly billing. Communicate and Resolve are additional paid plans on Starter and Team. Enterprise pricing is custom.

Checkly's central platform, dashboard, and backend are proprietary SaaS. The Checkly CLI is Apache 2.0, and the vendor also lists an open-source Go SDK and Terraform provider. You can run check execution inside private infrastructure with the Checkly Agent container on Docker or Kubernetes, but that does not self-host the control plane or replace the hosted service.

Monitoring as Code keeps monitor definitions in TypeScript or JavaScript repositories, which gives teams source-controlled definitions to work from if they migrate. It does not make Checkly's scheduling, results history, alerting, status pages, or trace correlation portable by itself. The vendor does not publish data export or migration details here; ask about exporting historical results, monitor configuration, and status-page data before depending on the platform long term.

Checkly's plan limits make run volume and browser-check frequency key production cost inputs. Hobby blocks overages, while Starter and Team list per-run overage rates. Team and Enterprise include private locations; for private-network checks, teams must operate the Checkly Agent on Docker or Kubernetes. The vendor lists an Enterprise 99.9% uptime SLA, but the other plans do not list an SLA in the published pricing details.

Before rollout, confirm the rate limits for any integrations you depend on, retention requirements, security and compliance terms, and how results can be exported. The listed raw retention ranges from seven days on Hobby and Starter to 30 days on Team and 180 days on Enterprise. One Reddit thread asks for a self-hosted option and describes wanting more involved Playwright tests with historical pass and failure tracking. That is a useful signal about deployment preferences, not a broad reliability assessment.