Compare 70+ free monitoring tools — New Relic, Grafana Cloud, Datadog, Sentry, BetterStack, UptimeRobot, and more. Exact free tier limits by monitoring type. Verified July to September 2026.
Monitoring is essential infrastructure, but pricing can be brutal. Datadog is notorious for unpredictable bills — its free tier gives only 5 hosts with 1-day retention. New Relic is more generous with 100 GB/month free ingest, but complexity ramps fast. Meanwhile, Freshping shut down on March 6, 2026, displacing thousands of uptime monitors.
This page compares every free monitoring option in our index — 74 tools across APM, uptime monitoring, log management, error tracking, infrastructure monitoring, and incident management. Whether you need full-stack observability or just a simple uptime check, we have the comparison with exact free tier limits.
Recent Monitoring Pricing Changes
Sentry: Switched from performance units to spans-based metrics for error and performance monitoring Source ↗
Freshping: Freshping shut down entirely. Free accounts disabled March 6, 2026. Paid plans expire at end of term. All data delete... Source ↗
Grafana Loki: The page details a free tier of Grafana Cloud Logs offering up to 50GB of logs. The page now highlights Grafana Cloud... Source ↗
Grafana k6 Cloud: The free tier no longer offers 500 VUh. It now offers limited usage of all Grafana Cloud services, with limits of 10k... Source ↗
BetterStack: The free tier now includes 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session repla... Source ↗
Grafana Cloud: The free tier now includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention for metrics, log... Source ↗
Grafana: The free tier now includes 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 50GB profiles, 50k frontend sessions, and 500VUh of k... Source ↗
Full-stack application performance monitoring — traces, metrics, and logs in one platform. These are the "do everything" tools for teams that want unified observability.
Monitor websites, APIs, and cron jobs for availability. Simple, focused tools that alert you when something goes down. Most generous free tiers in the monitoring space.
Cron job and scheduled task monitoring — 20 monitors, 100 log entries per job, email/webhook/Slack/Telegram alerts, API access. Also free for open-source projects (Business plan)
Cron job and uptime monitoring — free Hacker plan: 5 monitors, 5-minute check frequency, email, Slack, and webhook alerts, 1 status page (50 subscribers), 12-month data retention, single user
Server and website monitoring (formerly Nixstats) — free Lite plan: 1 server monitor, 5 site monitors, 10-minute check interval, 24-hour data retention, email alerts
Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, fivenines.io reads: The page promotes a 14-day free trial and a paid plan starting at €19/month. It does not mention a permanently free tier for up to 5 servers. We are not publishing our stored fivenines.io terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Minimalist uptime monitoring with beautiful status pages. The Forever Free plan offers HTTPS, Keyword, SSL and Response-time monitorming for 10 websites or api-endpoints, and provides 2 dashboards/status pages.
Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, pingmeter.com reads: Free account is limited to accounts with 1 category and less than 5 uptime monitors. It exclude pro features such as sms/voice notification, scheduling and recovery actions. We are not publishing our stored Pingmeter.com terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Get 20 uptime monitors with 5-minute intervals and a customizable status page—even for commercial use. Enjoy unlimited, real-time notifications via email and Telegram. No credit card needed to get started.
Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, xitoring.com reads: The page offers a 14-day free trial, and then paid plans starting at $4.99/mo for Uptime + SSL. We are not publishing our stored Xitoring.com terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Error monitoring — 7,500 events/month and 1M spans/month on free plan, 1 user, unlimited projects, 7-day data retention. 14-day free trial of paid features available. Rebranded as SmartBear Insight Hub
Open-source error tracking — 1,000 events/month, unlimited projects and team members, Sentry SDK-compatible. Also includes uptime monitoring. Self-hostable for unlimited
Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, logrocket.com/pricing reads: Pricing starts at $76 / mo for 1K sessions. A free trial is available. We are not publishing our stored LogRocket terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Superseded: As of 2026-09-01, catchjs.com reads: There is a free tier with limits of 1,000 logged errors per month, 1,000 log API calls per month, performance metrics for 100 URLs, time on page for 100 URLs, and pageviews for 10,000 URLs. It includes email notifications, screenshots, click trails, and support for one domain and its subdomains. We are not publishing our stored CatchJS.com terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-09-01, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Superseded: As of 2026-09-01, whitespace.dev reads: The Personal plan is $0/month and includes unlimited recordings that are never deleted, time travel (60 second limit), public recordings, and basic privacy filters. It does not include team members or projects. We are not publishing our stored Whitespace terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-09-01, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓
Self-hosted and open-source monitoring tools. Maximum control, zero vendor lock-in — but you manage the infrastructure. Many are CNCF graduated projects.
Powerful Kubernetes monitoring based on Prometheus. Bring your own Prometheus or install the all-in-one bundle. The free tier includes up to 20 Kubernetes nodes. Alerts via Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and more. Integrations with PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, DataDog, and many other tools.
Incident management platform — free Basic plan: up to 5 users, Slack or Microsoft Teams native incident response, single-team on-call scheduling, 1 status page, essential incident automation
Advanced status page platform with monitoring. The free tier includes one public customizable status page with an SSL subdomain. Pro plan is offered to open-source projects and non-profits free of charge.
There is no startup program: instabug.com/startups no longer serves one. Checked 2026-09-02, the URL redirects to www.luciq.ai, the company's site after its rebrand to Luciq, whose navigation carries no startups or program page. The former offer was a discount on all Instabug plans for eligible startups.
New Relic's 100 GB/month is the most generous APM free tier. Axiom leads on log storage (500 GB ingest). UptimeRobot offers the most free monitors (50). Prometheus and Grafana (self-hosted) have no limits. Datadog's free tier is the most restrictive among major APM vendors. Verified July to September 2026.
Freshping Shutdown — March 6, 2026
Freshping (Freshworks) shut down on March 6, 2026, displacing thousands of free uptime monitors. If you're migrating, see our Freshping Alternatives guide for free replacement options.
Which Free Monitoring Tool Should I Use?
Need full-stack APM (traces + metrics + logs)?
New Relic (100 GB/mo, most generous) or Grafana Cloud (open-source stack, 14-day retention). Middleware.io is a newer option with 100 GB/mo and unlimited users.
Just need uptime monitoring?
UptimeRobot (50 monitors, 5-min intervals) is the established choice. BetterStack adds logs and errors. StatusCake includes SSL and domain monitoring.
Tracking application errors?
Sentry (5K errors/mo + performance tracing) is the developer favorite. Bugsnag excels at mobile. GlitchTip is Sentry-compatible and open source.
Need log management?
Axiom (500 GB/mo ingest, 30-day retention) is the most generous. Grafana Cloud with Loki gives 50 GB logs. BetterStack offers 3 GB with 3-day retention.
Monitoring Kubernetes?
Prometheus + Grafana is the standard CNCF stack. Robusta adds Kubernetes-specific troubleshooting (20 nodes free). Netdata provides real-time metrics with zero config.
Need on-call and incident management?
PagerDuty (5 users, 100 notifications/mo) is the industry standard. incident.io offers native Slack/Teams integration. PagerTree is a simpler alternative (5 users free).
Want open-source and self-hosted?
Prometheus (metrics), Jaeger (tracing), Sentry (errors, self-hosted option), and Netdata (real-time dashboards) form a comprehensive OSS monitoring stack. All CNCF projects or Apache-licensed.
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