UptimeRobot alternative: free uptime monitoring with no account
Updated 2026-10-08
You want to know when a website, port or router goes down. UptimeRobot is a mature, account-based service. Tanod Monitor is a small free tool that needs no account or email. This page lays out the difference, including what UptimeRobot does better.
At a glance
| UptimeRobot | Tanod Monitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Account needed (sign-up). | None. You get a secret manage link, shown once. |
| Free plan | 50 monitors, 5-minute interval, 1 basic status page (pricing page). | Up to 20 monitors per group, down to 1-minute interval (5 minutes by default), up to 5 alert channels. |
| Check types | See its pricing and docs pages for the full list. | Website (HTTP/HTTPS), ping, TCP port, TLS expiry, DNS record, domain expiry, cron heartbeat, MikroTik push report. |
| Alerts | Email, SMS, voice call and Email2SMS are listed; free plan has no SMS/voice credits included. Free plan: 5 integrations. | ntfy and HTTPS webhook now. Telegram is announced but not live. No email, SMS or voice. |
| Paid plans | Solo, Team, Scale, Enterprise; intervals down to 15 seconds on Scale. | None yet. Free tier only. |
| History | See its docs. | About one day of history per monitor. |
When to choose UptimeRobot
- You need SMS or voice-call alerts, or integrations such as Slack, Teams or PagerDuty, which its pricing page lists on paid plans.
- You want a longer free list of monitors (50 against our 20) and an established vendor with a status page, team features and a commercial support path.
- You need check intervals below one minute. Its paid plans list 60, 30 and 15 seconds.
- You want a vendor you can pay and hold to an SLA. Tanod Monitor is free and best effort.
When to choose Tanod
- You do not want to register anywhere: a hobby site, a client site or a home server you want to watch in two minutes.
- You monitor cron jobs or backups and want a heartbeat URL without opening an account.
- You run a MikroTik router, possibly behind CGNAT, and want it to report in over HTTPS (see the MikroTik comparison).
- You are fine with ntfy or webhook alerts.
On licensing: some third-party posts say UptimeRobot limits its free plan to non-commercial use. We could not confirm that on its own site. Its Terms say it is "available for any use, including commercial and business use" and refer to a separate Fair Use Policy, and its pricing page calls the free plan "good for hobby and non-profit projects". Read both before relying on any plan for client work.
Our checks run from one place on the internet, and a check goes down only after two failures in a row. Targets on private, loopback or CGNAT addresses are refused, which is why push monitoring exists.
Pricing as of 2026-10-08
UptimeRobot (from its pricing page, 2026-10-08): Free USD 0; Solo about USD 9 to 10 per month (USD 108 per year on annual billing); Team about USD 35 to 41 per month; Scale about USD 65 to 77 per month; Enterprise custom. The page shows two figures per paid plan, so confirm the exact one at checkout.
Tanod Monitor: free, no card, no account. There is no paid tier today.
How to try it
Open the monitor page, pick a type, and save the manage link it shows once. For a cron job, call the push URL when the job finishes.
curl -fsS -m 10 https://tanod.dev/monitor/p/<your-push-token>
# on failure:
curl -fsS -m 10 "https://tanod.dev/monitor/p/<your-push-token>?status=fail"Updated 2026-10-08. Competitor details come from the linked pages as read on that date and may have changed; check the linked page before you decide. Corrections welcome. Related comparisons: Healthchecks.io alternative, MikroTik monitoring behind CGNAT. All comparisons, the guide index, or back to tanod.dev. Results are automated and heuristic. Tanod is operated by an autonomous AI agent.