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A robust website monitoring tool delivers data like page load speeds, downtime reports, and unexpected outages, allowing you to ensure your business stays online and visible at all times.
Uptrends is a renowned website monitoring tool offering features like synthetic transaction monitoring, browser monitoring, and real user monitoring. Plus, you only need to pay for the features you use thanks to a per-feature pricing structure.
Read on as we lay out the best features, pricing, ease of use, and support options of Uptrends. We’ll also compare it with a couple of its top rivals to see how it stacks up.
Uptrends: Plans and pricing
Uptrends follows a fairly different pricing structure than its peers. Instead of bundling features in different plans, it offers each feature separately. Here’s how much each feature will cost you.
|
Feature |
Price per month |
|---|---|
|
Multi-step API monitoring |
$7.96 |
|
Synthetic transaction monitoring |
$8.17 |
|
Browser monitoring |
$13.68 |
|
Uptime and availability monitoring |
$5.10 |
|
Real User Monitoring |
$8.91 |
|
Private location |
On request |
This way, you’ll only have to pay for the features you want to use. For instance, small businesses and startups may only need uptime monitoring, which costs just $5.10/month. However, this pricing structure can seem expensive if you need all the features – you’ll then have to shell out at least $43.82/month in total.
Although not the cheapest, Uptrends still delivers great value for money. Other providers offer all these features only on their high-end plans, which can cost anywhere between $50 and $250 per month. Even then, the number of checks is generally capped, which isn’t a concern with Uptrends.
What’s more, Uptrends offers as many as 15 free tools, including a DNS checker, website speed test, uptime test, and ping test. This can be mighty helpful to startups and small businesses looking for free monitoring options. In comparison, Uptime.com only offers 3 free tools.
Uptrends: Features
Uptrends’ global monitoring solution is ideal for large organizations with a worldwide presence. You can check the status of your web pages from as many as 233 locations (checkpoints). No other monitoring service offers such a large pool of servers. Besides basic HTTPS monitoring, you can also set up custom DNS monitors and SSL certificate monitoring.
One of its core features is browser monitoring – also known as full page check (FPC). This FPC monitor loads your webpages in a real browser (Chrome or Edge) to measure the website’s performance as experienced by your visitors.
This includes evaluating the scripts, third-party elements, images, and CSS components of your website. Uprends then generates a detailed waterfall chart to give you a quick overview of all running FPC checks.
If you have a business that relies on curating a flawless customer website experience, Uptrends’ transaction monitoring can come in handy. This monitor allows you to test every component of the user journey on your website, including aspects like logging in, scrolling, searching for products, shopping cart checkouts, payments, and more.
The platform also offers a handy Chrome extension for recording the transaction flow you want to monitor.
We also liked Uptrends’ prompt alerting mechanism. You can choose to receive downtime notifications on SMS, email, or phone call. The platform also allows integration with popular tools like Slack, MS Teams, and other business applications.
What makes Uptrends a complete website monitoring platform, though, is Real User Monitoring (RUM). RUM uses real user data to drill down on metrics like page load times, DOM and render duration, time to first byte, and page ready time.
All of this (and more) data is pulled into simplified charts, which then help you identify potential issues. For instance, you can use a bar chart to view page load times from various locations and browsers and identify the locations where your pages load the slowest.
Uptrends: Interface and in use
The interface is pretty data-driven – you’ll find a lot of charts and stats right at the center of your dashboard. Although we believe this to be a positive, as it’s a no-nonsense approach, some users may find it a little overwhelming.
As is the case with other apps, there’s a panel on the left-hand side, allowing you access to all Uptrends features.
Uptrends comes with several predefined dashboards but also allows you to add custom dashboards by selecting metrics and filters that are essential to measuring performance.
The platform has recently revamped its interface to integrate various monitoring modes like synthetic and RUM. There’s even a 360-degree overview dashboard, which gives you a quick one-screen snapshot of all your website metrics.
Uptrends: Support
We found the software’s customer support options ideal for business needs. Your first port of call would be to raise a support ticket on the platform. You can draft your message and even attach a file to explain your issue better.
Moreover, there’s also a live chat option at the bottom of the screen. Initially maneuvered by AI, the chatbot is quick to connect you to a human agent so that you can sort out your issues without much hassle.
Besides this, you’ll find an extensive web knowledge base and help articles on the platform, which will guide you through setting up various monitors and help you conquer the initial learning curve. However, there’s no live call support, which is admittedly a standard in the industry.
Uptrends: The competition
Although Uptrends is a complete website monitoring solution, it may not be the best choice for all businesses, especially because of its distinctive pricing structure. Here are some alternatives you can look at instead.
UptimeRobot is a more affordable option. You can get started at just $7/month and enjoy features like HTTP, port, and ping monitoring. It also comes with a nifty keyword monitoring tool that sends you alerts in case there are any content changes on a given page. However, this may be too basic for large businesses.
If you need something more advanced, you can choose Uptime.com, which offers more than 30 types of checks. The platform runs comprehensive RUM checks with as many as 1.5M data points, as well as private location checks and microtransaction checks.
Each check can also be run from multiple locations simultaneously. However, Uptime.com can be expensive, too – plans start from $20/month and go all the way up to $285/month.
Uptrends: Final verdict
Uptrends has everything a business could need – from synthetic transaction and API monitoring to detailed browser and real user monitoring. One of the best things about the platform is that you can monitor the status of your webpages from 233 global locations, which could be a game-changer for multinational businesses.
Plus, Uptrends offers a feature-wise pricing structure where you only have to pay for the features you actually use. The good news keeps coming, as there are 15 free tools, including those for global uptime testing and website speed testing, a DNS checker, etc.
The interface is also easy to use and offers a lot of visual charts to understand the available data better. Overall, Uptrends covers all the bases really well, meaning it’s splurge-worthy.
FAQs
Does Uptrends offer a free plan?
While there’s no free plan as such, Uptrends offers 15 free tools. From checking your website’s speed and global uptime to running a DNS check and ping test, there’s a lot you can do for free.
Additionally, Uptrends has a different pricing structure, seeing as it comes with feature-wise plans. For instance, you can get the uptime and availability monitoring plan for just $5.10/month. This means you only need to pay for the functions you want to use.
Why is website monitoring important?
A website monitoring tool keeps an eye on your web addresses and ensures downtimes are not left unattended. It sends you instant alerts whenever there’s an issue with any component on your website, which might have been slowing it down.
Website downtimes can lead to financial losses, after all, not to mention they can also harm your brand reputation and image. If a user finds your website isn’t working, it’s highly unlikely they’ll return. That’s why it’s important to ensure your website stays live at all times.
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