A website can become unavailable for a countless number of reasons.

Sooner or later this happens to almost every site.

And this is when an uptime monitoring application can save you from the heavy losses, that could come from undetected errors.

These tools keep track of your web pages availability and notify you if some of them aren't working properly.

In many cases the data these applications collect can also help you to optimize your site.

Since most of the monitoring tools have a free version, and the sooner you are notified about the errors on your site, the faster you can start correcting them, you should definitely connect at least one of these applications to your site if you haven't done it already.

In this post, we are going to compare the features of WebyMon, our monitoring software to two of the most popular applications in this field; Uptime robot, and Pingdom.

We are going to go through the strength and weaknesses of each application and try to help you to find out, which one could be the best solution for your business.

Pingdom and Uptime Robot

Pingdom was developed in Sweden and launched almost 10 years ago. Since then the number of its users grew to 700.000.

It monitors the availability, speed and other characteristics of websites with 60 different servers, that are located in Europe and in the United States.

The large number of its servers in different locations could be extremely useful if plan to monitor an international site.

Another important advantage of Pingdom is that it is capable of measuring very complex processes. For example, you can keep track of the user journeys, or the different steps that are required to display the contents of your website in a browser.

The biggest disadvantage of Pingdom is that it doesn't have a free version, and after a two-week long trial period you will need to pay a relatively high subscription fee, if you'd like to use more than one of its advanced features, or make their report available for many users.

The other big player in the website monitoring business is Uptime Robot.

Uptime robot used to be a free application, and even though it has a paid version now, many of its important features are still available without paying a subscription fee.

This application monitors your website's availability with an appropriate frequency, and you can check several pages with it easily.

The biggest disadvantage is that it only measures the uptime, and it doesn't provide detailed information about other characteristics of your website's performance.

Uptime Robot is able to notify you about your website's errors with SMS messages too, but if you'd like to make sure that you will receive those messages, or you'd like to analyze data which was recorded more than two months ago, you should choose its paid plan.

Multi-user accounts are currently not supported by Uptime Robot, but according to one of the blog post on the site, they are planning to add this feature in the near future.

WebyMon

While developing Webymon our goal was to create an application that allows you to monitor a very large number of URLs simultaneously.

Although we measure the websites' performance from only one location, which is in Germany, you can keep track of every important subpage on your site and on your competitors' sites with our software - for a very reasonable price.

We believe that the ability to monitor many subpages is crucial because it often happens, that while the main page of a site is working properly, many of its critical functions are not.

And an error that makes your visitors unable to subscribe to your newsletter, or buy an item on your site could cause just as many losses, as one, which makes a whole site unavailable.

While Pingdom and Uptime Robot allows to set up different kind of checks, we only offer one type of monitoring service. But this one besides the availability of the monitored pages, also informs you about their download speed and the tracked pages, your servers' performance in each step that is needed to display them.

WebyMon’s free version allows you to monitor two domains, and collect information about the home page and one subpage on each domain. You can use this version as long as you'd like.

Our paid packages let you monitor a much larger number of pages on your site or on the websites of your competitors.

Our subscription fees start at 3 dollars per month - and the cheapest package allows you to monitor three times as many URLs, as you can keep track of with the free version.

Adding new users to your Webymon projects is free of charge, and we also allow you to examine data that was collected more than a year ago, without any restrictions.

Our diagrams and charts that can help you with competitor analysis are also available in any of our packages, including the free one.

Of course, there are areas, where further development is needed. We are not able to send SMS messages yet, and we also can't provide region specific measurements.

With that said, if you'd like to monitor many subpages, you need detailed reports about your site's performance, and you would like to compare your website values to its competitor's similar values easily, you have several reasons to try our software first...