SolidPing vs Pingdom
Pingdom has been the default answer to "is my site up" since 2007. It has 100+ probe locations, real-Chrome transaction monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and the kind of enterprise reporting that gets a monitoring purchase through procurement. If those are what you are buying, it is a serious product and this page will say so.
Both sides here are hosted services. Pingdom is hosted only, so the table compares it against SolidPing Cloud — our plans, our six regions, our caps. The free self-hosted build is a different answer and gets its own section.
It is worth reading if you have hit the two things people actually leave Pingdom over: there is no free tier, and the price climbs quickly with the number of checks — $10/mo buys ten of them. Pingdom has also been a SolarWinds product since 2014, and SolarWinds itself was taken private in 2025; if the roadmap's direction matters to you, that is a fact worth weighing.
Prices below were last checked in July 2026 and Pingdom gates the current figures behind a calculator, so treat them as the shape of the ladder rather than today's quote. If we've gotten a detail wrong, please open an issue.
At a glance
| SolidPing Cloud | Pingdom | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Hosted — the same AGPL-3.0 build also self-hosts, free | Hosted only |
| Owner | Independent | SolarWinds (private equity, since 2025) |
| Free tier | 100 monitors, 10 checks/min, 5 seats | None — 30-day trial |
| Entry paid | €5/mo — 1,000 monitors, 20 checks/min | ~$10/mo — 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check |
| 100 monitors | €5/mo (Starter covers 1,000) | ~$50–60/mo, before advanced checks |
| Ladder | €0 → €5 → €15 → €45 | Per-check, climbing continuously |
| Minimum interval | 10 s on every plan, spent from your checks/minute budget | 1 minute |
| Probe network | 6 shared regions — Gravelines, Paris, Lauterbourg (FR), Nuremberg (DE), Kansas City (US), Tokyo (JP) | 100+ probe servers, 5 regions |
| Check types | 40 | HTTP, TCP, UDP, ping, DNS, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, transaction, page speed |
| Transaction / browser | Headless Chrome over CDP — load, wait for a selector, match a keyword; plus sandboxed JS | Real-Chrome scripted transaction monitoring, metered as "advanced checks" |
| Page speed & RUM | No | Yes — both, RUM billed as a separate product line |
| Databases, queues, SNMP, SSH | Yes | No |
| Private-network probing | Deported agents you run: 1 on Free, 2 / 3 / 5 on paid — the server cannot decrypt their credentials | Private probes exist, but secrets are not permitted on them |
| On-call & escalation | Rotations, overrides, iCal feeds, multi-step escalation, on every plan | Alerting and integrations; paging via PagerDuty / Opsgenie |
| Notification channels | 15 on hosted plans — SMS, voice and WhatsApp are not included | Email, SMS and integrations |
| Config as code | YAML export / import / apply, REST API, sp CLI | REST API 3.1 |
| Data location | Our infrastructure, in France | SolarWinds' infrastructure |
Where SolidPing Cloud is the stronger choice
Cost, and it is not close. Pingdom prices per check, so monitoring grows into a budget line: ten checks at $10/mo, 150 at $63, 300 at $120, and advanced checks metered on top. SolidPing Cloud is €5 for a thousand monitors and €45 for five thousand, with every feature on every plan. For most teams below enterprise scale this is a one-order-of-magnitude difference, not a haggle.
There is a free tier at all. Pingdom gives you 30 days and then a bill. SolidPing's free plan is 100 monitors with on-call and status pages included, and no card.
You need to watch things that are not websites. Pingdom covers the web and mail protocols. SolidPing covers 40 check types — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse; gRPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, SIP; SSH, RDP, FTP, SFTP; SNMP, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus; a passive email-reception check alongside SMTP, IMAP and POP3; NTP, DNSBL; WebSocket; game servers.
Someone has to be woken up, without a second subscription. Pingdom alerts; paging rotations are what you buy PagerDuty or Opsgenie for. SolidPing ships on-call schedules, overrides, iCal feeds and multi-step escalation on every plan, Free included.
Secrets on private probes. Pingdom's private-probe arrangement does not permit credentials on them, which rules out exactly the internal checks people want private probes for. SolidPing's deported agents generate their own keypair and receive age-sealed credentials the server cannot decrypt — so an internal database check runs where it has to, with credentials nobody else can read. That is available from the Free plan up, one agent to five.
Ten-second checks. Pingdom's floor is a minute. Ours is ten seconds on every plan.
Where Pingdom is the stronger choice
The probe network. 100+ probe servers across five regions, running since 2007. Ours is six regions, four of them European. If "is it slow from Brazil, right now, without me deploying anything" is the question, Pingdom answers it and we do not.
Real User Monitoring. Pingdom collects performance from actual visitors via a JS snippet, with geography, browser and device breakdowns. SolidPing is synthetic monitoring only — we have no RUM and none planned.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals. Waterfalls, element-level analysis, optimisation recommendations. We do not do this either.
Transaction monitoring in a real Chrome. Multi-step scripted user flows — cart, login, checkout — is a first-class Pingdom product with years of tuning. SolidPing's browser check loads one page and asserts on it; it is not a script runner, and our sandboxed JavaScript check is a lower-level tool that runs without a browser at all. This is their home turf and we are not on it.
SMS is included. Ours is not, on any hosted plan. If paging by text is part of the requirement, that is a straightforward loss for SolidPing Cloud.
Enterprise procurement. SLAs, dedicated support, a vendor with a legal department and an account manager. If the purchase has to survive a vendor-risk review, a SolarWinds contract clears it in a way a small hosted plan does not.
Maturity. Nineteen years of running this. SolidPing is much younger.
The other model, on both sides
Pingdom does not self-host — private probes aside, the control plane is theirs and the data lives with SolarWinds.
SolidPing self-hosts, free and uncapped. One Go binary, AGPL-3.0, your own PostgreSQL or SQLite, your own retention policy, as many monitors and probe locations as you care to deploy — and SMS and voice working through your own Twilio account. If the per-check bill is the reason you are reading this page, that is the version that removes the meter entirely; what it adds is a machine to run and a pager to hold.
Which should you pick?
Stay on Pingdom if you are buying RUM, page-speed analysis or scripted transaction monitoring, if global probe density is a hard requirement, or if the procurement path only accepts an established vendor. Those are real things and we do not have all of them.
Look at SolidPing when what you actually need is uptime and protocol checks with proper alerting, and the per-check bill has stopped making sense — or when the list of things to watch has grown past what Pingdom can see. Start free on the hosted plan, or put the self-hosted build next to Pingdom for a fortnight and compare the two alert streams before deciding anything.