Synthetic monitoring is proactive testing: scripted checks that hit your site, APIs and critical user journeys from locations around the world, around the clock. When the checkout flow breaks at 3 a.m., a synthetic check fails within a minute — no real user required. Here are the eight best synthetic monitoring tools in 2026.
Pricing is a July 2026 snapshot, verified against vendor pages. Usage-based products especially — confirm current rates.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Free tier | Paid from | Browser checks | Checks as code | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkly | ✅ 10k API + 1k browser runs/mo | $24/mo (annual) | ✅ Playwright | ✅ | Developers / CI-CD |
| Datadog Synthetics | Trial | $5/10k API runs; $12/1k browser runs | ✅ | Partial | Datadog shops |
| Grafana Cloud | ✅ 100k API + 10k browser runs/mo | Usage-based | ✅ | ✅ (k6) | Grafana users, generous free tier |
| Pingdom | ❌ | $10/mo | ✅ transactions | ❌ | Simple UI-driven setup |
| Site24x7 | Trial | $9/mo (incl. 1 web transaction) | ✅ | ❌ | Budget all-in-one |
| New Relic Synthetics | ✅ within 100 GB tier | Ingest-based | ✅ | ✅ | New Relic users |
| Uptime Kuma | ✅ self-hosted | $0 | Basic | ❌ | Free/self-hosted basics |
| Middleware | 14-day trial (all features) | $0.30/GB usage-based | ✅ Recorder | ✅ | OpenTelemetry-native stacks |
The picks
1. Checkly — best for developers
Checkly treats monitoring as code: checks are Playwright scripts living in your repo, deployed via CLI/CI alongside your app. The free Hobby tier (10 uptime monitors, 10,000 API runs, 1,000 browser runs monthly) is genuinely usable; Starter is $24/month (annual — 50 monitors, 3,000 browser runs, 25,000 API runs) and Team $64/month (all 22 locations, private locations, 12,000 browser runs). Overages are metered ($6.50/1k browser runs on Starter). If your team writes code, start here.
2. Datadog Synthetics — best in-platform option
API tests at $5 per 10,000 runs, browser tests at $12 per 1,000 runs. The draw isn’t price — it’s correlation: a failing synthetic check links directly to the traces, logs and infrastructure metrics of the service behind it. If you’re already paying Datadog (see our pricing breakdown), adding Synthetics is a no-brainer; adopting Datadog for synthetics alone is not.
3. Grafana Cloud — most generous free allocation
100,000 API test executions and 10,000 browser test executions per month, free. Browser checks are scripted with k6. As with everything Grafana, setup is more hands-on than point-and-click competitors, but no other vendor gives away this much synthetic capacity — for many small products the free tier is simply enough.
4. Pingdom — easiest transaction checks
Pingdom’s UI-driven transaction recorder makes multi-step journey checks (login → search → purchase) accessible to non-developers — its strongest feature, from $10/month. No free plan, and costs climb with monitor counts; see how it compares to budget rivals in Pingdom vs StatusCake and UptimeRobot vs Pingdom.
5. Site24x7 — best budget bundle
The $9/month Starter plan includes a synthetic web transaction alongside uptime and server monitoring — the cheapest way to get scripted-journey checking bundled with general monitoring. Depth is limited at the entry tiers, but the value is unmatched.
6. New Relic Synthetics — free inside the platform tier
Ping, API and scripted-browser checks included within New Relic’s perpetual free tier (100 GB ingest/month). Worthwhile if New Relic is your observability platform; heavyweight if you only want checks.
7. Uptime Kuma — free self-hosted basics
Not full synthetic monitoring — no scripted browser journeys — but its HTTP, keyword and API checks with status pages cover the basics for $0, self-hosted. The right floor for homelabs and side projects (more in our free uptime monitoring guide).
8. Middleware — best for OpenTelemetry-native stacks
Middleware is a full-stack, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform where synthetic monitoring, APM, logs, RUM and infrastructure metrics all sit on the same telemetry layer instead of being separate products. Its Endpoints Observability feature automatically discovers API endpoints from real production trace traffic, and you can create a synthetic check directly from an endpoint’s detail view — so the check and the production traces behind it live in the same place, and a failing check is one click from the related trace, log or infrastructure metric.
API tests support single-step and multi-step (chained) requests with authenticated workflows, and cURL/Postman import; browser tests are built code-free with a Chrome Recorder extension and include screenshots, video, assertions and network waterfall data on failure. Protocol coverage spans HTTP, SSL, DNS, WebSocket, TCP, UDP, ICMP and gRPC, with alerting to Slack, Email, Opsgenie and PagerDuty.
There’s no capped free tier — every new account gets a 14-day free trial ($0) with unlimited data ingestion, RUM sessions, API synthetic checks and users, and 14-day data retention (browser test runs are capped at 10 during the trial). After the trial, pricing is pay-as-you-go from $0.30/GB. A good fit for teams of any size that want synthetics tightly integrated with the rest of their observability data rather than bolted on as a separate tool.
How to choose
- Decide check depth first. Uptime pings are commodity — every tool here does them. Scripted browser journeys are the differentiator: Checkly and Grafana (code-first) vs Pingdom (UI-first).
- Count your runs. Usage-based pricing (Datadog, Checkly overages) rewards low-frequency checks on few flows; flat plans (Site24x7, Pingdom) suit predictable broad coverage.
- Consider where results land. Checks that correlate with your existing observability stack (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Middleware) are worth more than isolated ones.
- Start free. Grafana Cloud’s or Checkly’s free tiers will tell you within a month whether you need more.
Synthetic monitoring covers the proactive half of availability; pair it with classic uptime monitoring for simple always-on checks, and a status page to communicate incidents when a check catches one.