SolidPing vs Checkly

Checkly is the best answer in this market to "I want my monitoring in my repo". Checks are TypeScript, npx checkly test runs them locally, npx checkly deploy ships them from CI, and the browser checks are Playwright — not a lookalike, the real thing. Vercel, 1Password and CrowdStrike are on it. If synthetic end-to-end testing of a web app is the job, Checkly is very good at it.

The two tools overlap less than the category suggests. Checkly is a synthetic testing product that also does uptime; SolidPing is an infrastructure monitoring product that also loads pages in a browser. This page is mostly about which of those two sentences describes your problem.

Both sides here are hosted services. Checkly is hosted only, so the table compares it against SolidPing Cloud. Our self-hosted build is covered below and is the row that matters most on this particular page.

Facts below were last checked in July 2026; the canonical domain is checklyhq.com. If we've gotten a detail wrong, please open an issue.

At a glance​

Where SolidPing Cloud is the stronger choice​

Your infrastructure is not all HTTP. Checkly checks APIs and browsers. That is the list. SolidPing covers 40 check types — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse; SMTP, IMAP and POP3, plus a passive email-reception check; gRPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, SIP; SSH, RDP, FTP, SFTP; SNMP, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus; ICMP, TCP, UDP, DNS, NTP, DNSBL; SSL and domain expiry. If half your alerting is about a broker or a replica rather than an endpoint, Checkly cannot see it.

Run-based pricing punishes frequency. Browser runs are the expensive unit — $12 per thousand in overage — so a Checkly browser check every minute is a budgeting decision, not a checkbox. SolidPing prices monitors and a checks-per-minute budget, so running a check more often costs you budget you already bought rather than an invoice line.

Someone has to be woken up. Checkly has multi-level alert escalation but no on-call rotation — you bolt PagerDuty or Opsgenie onto it. SolidPing ships rotations with overrides and iCal feeds plus multi-step escalation policies on every plan, Free included.

Private locations without vendor-readable secrets. Checkly's private-location agent is a real feature, but it is a Team-plan feature and the credentials it uses are stored on Checkly's side. SolidPing's deported agent is available from the Free plan, generates its own keypair locally, and receives age-sealed credentials the server cannot decrypt — so an internal check's secrets stay unreadable even to us.

Where Checkly is the stronger choice​

Monitoring as code, done properly. Checks are TypeScript in your repo, typed, reviewed in pull requests, tested locally and deployed from CI alongside the application they watch. SolidPing's declarative YAML with sp apply is real config-as-code and it is good, but it is configuration; Checkly's is a program with an IDE and a test runner behind it.

Playwright, natively — and we have nothing like it. If your team already writes Playwright tests, Checkly runs them as monitors with no translation step: screenshots, video, visual regression, multi-step flows. SolidPing's browser check drives headless Chrome over CDP to load one URL, wait for a selector and match a keyword. It is not a script runner and it will not run your test suite. This is the single biggest difference on the page.

Terraform and Pulumi providers, first-party. Both shipped and supported.

OpenTelemetry tracing from the check itself. A failing check hands you the distributed trace of the request that failed. We expose Prometheus metrics and nothing like this.

Multistep API workflows with data passed between requests. Chained calls with shared state are a first-class construct. SolidPing's sandboxed JavaScript check can express a lot of this, but it is a lower-level tool.

26 public locations against our six, and SMS alerting we do not include.

It is the better product for testing a web application. If the question is "does the checkout flow still work in Chrome from eight regions", Checkly wins and it is not close.

The other model, on both sides​

Checkly does not self-host. The private-location agent runs a probe in your network; the checks, the results and the secrets still live with Checkly.

SolidPing self-hosts, and on this page that is the load-bearing difference. One Go binary under AGPL-3.0 against your own PostgreSQL or SQLite, with no run meter, no plan caps and SMS through your own Twilio account. For a team that cannot let check traffic or credentials leave the network at all, "we can monitor that" and "we cannot let that leave the network" are the two answers, and only one of these tools has the second one.

Which should you pick?​

They are not really substitutes, and running both is a defensible answer: Checkly for the user journeys, SolidPing for the infrastructure underneath them.

Pick Checkly if your monitoring is end-to-end tests of a web app, your team writes Playwright already, and you want the checks living in the repo next to the code.

Pick SolidPing if the things that page you are databases, queues, mail, certificates and hosts as much as they are URLs — or if the monitoring has to run inside your own network, on your own hardware, with secrets nobody else can read. The self-hosted build is free, so putting it underneath an existing Checkly setup costs an afternoon.