If your team spends more time updating broken monitoring scripts than fixing actual bugs, your observability stack has become a liability.

Introduction

Checkly is an absolute powerhouse. By combining Playwright with synthetic monitoring, it allows engineers to write actual Node.js code to spin up headless browsers, click buttons, and simulate complex user journeys. If you need to verify that a specific CSS animation renders correctly during a checkout flow, Checkly is the gold standard.

But what if you don't need to test the UI?

A massive percentage of modern infrastructure relies on headless APIs, edge functions, and microservices. To monitor these, teams often default to Checkly—only to realize they are paying premium prices for heavy browser compute time and spending hours maintaining fragile Playwright scripts just to verify if an endpoint is alive and fast.

If you are tired of writing code just to monitor your infrastructure, here are the top 4 Checkly alternatives in 2026.

1. Clovos (Best for Zero-Code Deep Telemetry)

• The Pitch: Millisecond-level network visibility and edge API monitoring without writing a single line of script.
• Pricing: Built for indie hackers, lean teams, and API-first startups.

If you want the depth of a premium observability tool but refuse to maintain complex E2E scripts, Clovos is the perfect alternative. Instead of spinning up bulky headless browsers, Clovos uses a highly optimized, lightweight engine to test your endpoints from multiple global edge nodes every 60 seconds.

Where Clovos beats Checkly:

• Zero Maintenance: No Playwright scripts to write, update, or debug. You paste your URL, and Clovos instantly starts tracking it.
• Network-Layer Telemetry: Checkly tells you if the page loaded. Clovos breaks down the exact network lifecycle: DNS resolution time, TLS negotiation, and TTFB (Time to First Byte).
• Embed Anywhere Ecosystem: Checkly's status pages are standard subdomains. Clovos lets you drop live status iframes directly into your Next.js app, Notion docs, Webflow, Framer, or Slnk.
• Dynamic OG Images & WhatsApp: Share your status page on social media to generate a real-time visual preview of your system's health. Plus, get instant alerts via WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, or Webhooks.

2. Better Stack (Best for Heavy Incident Routing)

• The Pitch: Beautiful status pages attached to enterprise-grade on-call scheduling.
• Pricing: Scales with team size and incident management needs.

If your issue with Checkly isn't the monitoring, but rather how it handles paging engineers at 3 AM, Better Stack is the move. They focus less on how the monitor executes and more on who gets called when it fails. If you need a complex escalation matrix (e.g., "Page the on-call engineer, wait 5 minutes, then call the CTO"), Better Stack is the premium choice.

3. Postman / Datadog (Best for Internal QA & APM)

• The Pitch: The enterprise heavyweights.
• Pricing: Expensive and complex.

If Checkly isn't deep enough, you might need a full Application Performance Monitoring (APM) suite. Datadog can trace a request from the synthetic check all the way down to the exact SQL query that slowed it down. Postman offers great API monitoring, but it is heavily tied to their API design ecosystem. Both require massive budgets and dedicated DevOps teams to manage.

4. UptimeRobot (Best for the "Dumb Ping")

• The Pitch: The absolute basics.
• Pricing: Generous free tier.

If you looked at Checkly and realized you literally just need a system to ping your homepage every 5 minutes to make sure the server didn't crash, UptimeRobot is the classic fallback. You lose all the deep DNS/TLS telemetry and 60-second intervals of tools like Clovos, but it is the easiest way to get a basic HTTP 200 check running for a hobby project.

Head-to-Head: Checkly vs. Clovos

Conclusion

Code-based synthetic testing is an incredible capability, but it is a heavy, expensive tool for a job that often requires speed and simplicity.

If you are monitoring APIs, edge functions, or infrastructure, you don't need to simulate a user clicking a mouse. You need to know if your DNS is resolving quickly, if your TLS handshake is secure, and if your Time-to-First-Byte is spiking across the globe.

Ready to stop maintaining monitoring scripts? Create a free Clovos account and get your first zero-code edge monitors tracking deep telemetry in under 10 seconds.