--- title: "Checkly alternative without synthetics | Logdash" description: "HTTP checks with status code and response time, Telegram and webhook alerts, no Playwright suite to keep green. Plus where Checkly is worth the extra work." url: https://logdash.io/alternatives/checkly --- # Checkly alternative for teams that do not need browser synthetics Logdash checks whether your API answers and how fast, with no browser and no test code to maintain, which is all that most Checkly accounts were actually doing. Checkly is a synthetics product. You write Playwright, it runs in hosted runners on a schedule, and you find out the checkout flow broke before a customer does. That is real value, and nothing on this page replaces it. A signup form can break in a way that still returns 200 on every request, and only a browser catches that. The trouble is that plenty of Checkly accounts are not doing that. They are hitting /health, hitting /api/v1, and sending an email when one of them stops answering. For that you are carrying a browser test suite. A selector changes, two checks go red, and someone spends an afternoon working out whether the alert was real. That is a tax on monitoring you did not need in the first place. Logdash does not do browser synthetics at all. It will not click a button, fill a form or run your specs, and there is no roadmap where it does. It hits a URL on a schedule, records the status code and the response time, keeps 90 days of hourly history and messages you when that changes. If your monitoring-as-code repo is really four HTTP checks written in TypeScript, this is the smaller version of it. There is also a push monitor for the jobs that have no URL at all, so the queue worker ends up in the same list as the API. ## A health endpoint worth checking health.ts ```typescript // Return 200 only when the things you depend on are actually up. app.get('/health', async (_req, res) => { try { await db.query('select 1'); await redis.ping(); res.status(200).json({ status: 'ok' }); } catch { res.status(503).json({ status: 'degraded' }); } }); ``` 1. **Ship the endpoint** Deploy /health and confirm it returns 503 when the database is down, not a 200 with a sad message in the body. 2. **Point a monitor at it** Add a monitor in Logdash, paste the URL, and it starts recording status codes and response times on your plan interval. 3. **Attach Telegram** Connect a Telegram channel. The next check that does not come back 200 sends the alert to Telegram, and the response time chart shows whether it was already sliding. ### Logdash vs Checkly | Feature | Logdash | Checkly | | ---------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | | Browser synthetics | Not built. No browser, no Playwright, ever. | Playwright checks in hosted runners | | Assertions on the response | Status code and response time only | Assertions on body, headers and timing | | Monitoring as code | Dashboard. No CLI, no Terraform provider. | CLI and Terraform provider, checks live in your repo | | What you maintain | A URL, nothing else | A test suite that has to stay green | | Logs and metrics from your own app | Eight SDKs into the same dashboard | Not what the product is for | | Public status page | Public dashboard, custom domain on Pro | Public status pages | | Open source | AGPL-3.0, full source on GitHub | Commercial SaaS, the CLI is open source | ### When Checkly is the better pick - You need to know that a real login, checkout or signup still works end to end. Logdash cannot tell you that, because it never opens a browser. - Your checks belong in version control and in CI. Checkly has a CLI and a Terraform provider. Logdash has a dashboard. - A 200 is not enough. An empty products array behind a healthy status code is still a bad day, and only an assertion catches it. - You already have Playwright specs that work. Hosting them somewhere is a smaller decision than deciding you no longer need them. ## What migrating means here If your Checkly account is API checks on a handful of URLs, this is an afternoon: one monitor per URL, paste the URL, attach Telegram. If it is browser checks, do not migrate them, because there is nowhere for them to land. The split most teams settle on is Playwright for the two or three flows that make money and a plain HTTP monitor for everything else, and the second half should not cost what the first half costs. Before you cancel anything, look at which Checkly checks actually paged you in the last quarter. Usually it is the health endpoints, and the browser suite has been failing on selectors. ### Is there an open source Checkly alternative? Logdash is AGPL-3.0 licensed with the source on GitHub, but it is a different shape: HTTP monitoring, logs and metrics, no browser synthetics. If you want open source Playwright synthetics specifically, you are looking at running Playwright on your own CI, not at Logdash. ### Does Logdash run Playwright tests? No. It makes an HTTP request and records the status code and the response time. There is no browser and no test runner anywhere in it. ### Can I self-host Logdash? Not in production yet. It runs locally for development and a supported production install is open work on GitHub, so the hosted version is the real option today. ### Can Logdash monitor cron jobs as well? Yes, on Pro, with a push monitor that goes down on the first 15-second window without a ping. A worker pings from its loop. A scheduled job touches a stamp file and a heartbeat pings while it is fresh, because one ping per run would read as down between runs. ## Keep reading [All alternatives](https://logdash.io/alternatives): One page per tool, each with the setup, the comparison and the case for staying where you are. [StatusCake alternative for free uptime monitoring](https://logdash.io/alternatives/statuscake): The Logdash free plan gives you five HTTP monitors checked every five minutes, Telegram and webhook alerts and a public status page, and it says plainly which parts are paid. [Site24x7 alternative for when you only wanted a few HTTP checks](https://logdash.io/alternatives/site24x7): Site24x7 is a full IT operations suite with dozens of monitor types and a licence to match, while Logdash does HTTP checks, cron heartbeats, logs and metrics, and takes about five minutes to stand up. [Freshping alternative for teams left without a monitor](https://logdash.io/alternatives/freshping): Freshworks disabled Freshping free accounts on 6 March 2026 and deleted the data after 4 June 2026, so the migration is not optional, and Logdash covers the same HTTP checks, public status page and alerts on a free plan. [Uptime monitoring](https://logdash.io/features/monitoring): HTTP checks as often as every 15 seconds. When one fails, Telegram tells you before your users do.