What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring runs automated, scripted checks against your website, APIs or user journeys from external locations on a schedule — simulating real users to detect downtime, errors and slowdowns proactively, rather than waiting for real visitors to hit the problem.

What is the difference between synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring tests proactively with simulated traffic from fixed locations; real user monitoring (RUM) passively measures the experience of actual visitors. Synthetic catches outages even at 3 a.m. with zero traffic; RUM shows what real users experience. Mature teams use both.

What is the best free synthetic monitoring tool?

Grafana Cloud's free tier includes 100,000 synthetic API test executions and 10,000 browser test executions per month — the most generous free allocation as of July 2026. Checkly's Hobby tier (10,000 API + 1,000 browser check runs) is the best free option for Playwright-based checks-as-code.

How much does synthetic monitoring cost?

As of July 2026: Checkly from $24/month (annual), Datadog Synthetics at $5 per 10,000 API test runs and $12 per 1,000 browser test runs, Pingdom from $10/month, and Site24x7 includes synthetic web transactions from its $9/month Starter plan. Free tiers exist at Grafana Cloud, Checkly and New Relic.

Best Synthetic Monitoring Tools in 2026: 7 Platforms Compared

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 seven 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

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).

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) 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.