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Best Free Monitoring Tools in 2026

Data compiled by Toolradar Updated How we rate

The 15 best free monitoring tools we track: 3 completely free and 12 with a free plan alongside paid tiers. Ordered by Toolradar's ranking score (review volume and rating on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and other sites, plus media mentions), not by vendor pitches; every rating shows its date.

Key Takeaways
  • Hookdeck is our free pick for monitoring in 2026. SolarWinds is our overall pick.
  • We screened 140 monitoring tools with a free plan to build this list.
  • 15 tools offer free plans.
Publications that cover the tools tracked here
  • TechCrunch
  • Bloomberg
  • The Information
  • Fortune
  • The Verge
  • 140 free tools screened
  • 3 100% free
  • 12 free plan + paid

Top 5 free monitoring tools at a glance

Top 5 free monitoring tools: free plan type, user rating and best use, as of October 2026
Tool Type Rating Best for
Hookdeck Free plan 4.5 (2,271) as of Oct 2026
Reliable event infrastructure for webhooks and external event streams.
UptimeRobot Free plan 4.6 (1,535) as of Sep 2026
Monitor your websites, APIs, and servers from multiple locations
New Relic Free plan 4.4 (783) as of Sep 2026
Full-stack observability with 50+ monitoring capabilities
Datadog Free plan 4.4 (726) as of Aug 2026
Cloud monitoring, security, and AI investigations for DevOps
Freshping Free plan 4.6 (993) as of Sep 2026
Free website uptime monitoring

Ratings from G2, Capterra, and other public review sites. Each cell shows the snapshot date so a cited number is never an undated one.

Toolradar data

The monitoring tools market in numbers

Toolradar data: Toolradar tracks 216 monitoring tools as of October 28, 2026. 65% of the monitoring tools on Toolradar are free, freemium or open source. The median cheapest paid plan for monitoring tools is $19/mo, across the 55 that publish a price. Toolradar re-checked the pricing of 81% of monitoring tools in the last 90 days. Toolradar aggregates 23,408 public user reviews (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and other review sites) across 126 rated monitoring tools. The most cross-shopped monitoring tool is Datadog, listed as an alternative to 135 other tools on Toolradar. The most compared monitoring tool on Toolradar over the last 90 days is Datadog, with 625 side-by-side comparisons. Computed from the Toolradar catalog and on-site activity.

  • 216 monitoring tools tracked
  • 65% are free, freemium or open source
  • $19/mo median cheapest paid plan, across the 55 monitoring tools that publish one
  • 81% of prices re-checked in the last 90 days
  • 23,408 public user reviews aggregated across 126 rated tools
Most cross-shopped monitoring tools on Toolradar, as of October 2026 Listed as an alternative to the most other tools on Toolradar
Rank Tool Listed as an alternative to
1 Datadog 135 tools
2 New Relic 81 tools
3 Dynatrace 73 tools
Most compared monitoring tools on Toolradar, last 90 days to October 2026 Side-by-side comparisons by visitors, last 90 days
Rank Tool Comparisons
1 Datadog 625
2 Grafana 468
3 Prometheus 339

Source and method: live monitoring tools statistics · Toolradar Research report

The 15 best free monitoring tools

Order: Toolradar ranking score, which is the public review volume times the average rating on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and other review sites, plus media mentions (recent ones count more). Paid placements are labelled and never change the score. How we rank.

Hookdeck logo
1.

Hookdeck

Free plan

Reliable event infrastructure for webhooks and external event streams.

4.5/5 across G2 and Capterra · 2,271 ratings, Oct 2026

This platform provides robust event infrastructure designed to manage the full lifecycle of external events, from ingestion to delivery and observability. It ensures that every event, whether from third-party webhooks or outbound event streams, is received, processed, and monitored reliably at scale, offering complete visibility and control. It's built for engineering teams dealing with event-driven systems, offering features like built-in event queueing to handle traffic spikes and destination failures, automatic issue management with event replay capabilities, and flexible routing and transformation of events. The platform integrates seamlessly with any tech stack, supporting various backends and allowing declarative infrastructure definition through API or Terraform. The core value proposition is to eliminate the headaches associated with managing webhooks and external events, such as missed events, retries, and debugging. By providing a scalable, secure, and compliant solution, it allows developers to focus on building their applications rather than on the complexities of event infrastructure, ensuring peace of mind even with high volumes of event data.

UptimeRobot logo
2.

UptimeRobot

Free plan

Monitor your websites, APIs, and servers from multiple locations

4.6/5 across SourceForge, Trustpilot, G2 and more · 1,535 ratings, Sep 2026

UptimeRobot is an uptime monitoring service used by millions of accounts. You watch HTTP(S) pages and endpoints, keywords, ping, ports, cron jobs, APIs, UDP, SSL, domains, and DNS from multiple locations. When something breaks you get real-time alerts on web and mobile, and you can publish public status pages. The free plan includes 50 monitors. Paid Solo, Team, and Scale plans add faster check intervals, more monitors, seats, and status-page options. Annual billing is advertised at a discount off monthly.

New Relic logo
3.

New Relic

Free plan

Full-stack observability with 50+ monitoring capabilities

4.4/5 across G2 and Capterra · 783 ratings, Sep 2026

New Relic is a full-stack observability platform offering 50+ monitoring capabilities in one platform with usage-based pricing and 100 GB of free monthly data ingest.

Datadog logo
4.

Datadog

Free plan

Cloud monitoring, security, and AI investigations for DevOps

4.4/5 on G2 · 726 ratings, Aug 2026

Datadog is a cloud monitoring and security platform providing infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and AI-powered investigations for DevOps and security teams.

Freshping logo
5.

Freshping

Free plan

Free website uptime monitoring

4.6/5 on G2 · 993 ratings, Sep 2026

Freshping monitors website uptime for free. Check if your sites are up from multiple locations, get alerts when they're not-basic uptime monitoring without cost. The free tier monitors multiple sites. Alerts work reliably. Status pages are included. Anyone needing simple uptime monitoring without budget uses Freshping for free, reliable checks.

Spiceworks logo
6.

Spiceworks

100% free

Free IT help desk and network monitor

4.3/5 across SourceForge, G2 and Capterra · 964 ratings, Sep 2026

Spiceworks provides free IT help desk software and network monitoring tools. Includes ticket management, inventory tracking, and a community of IT pros.

Datadog MCP Server logo
7.

Datadog MCP Server

100% free

Datadog MCP Server bridges your Datadog observability platform with AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol.

4.4/5 on G2 · 699 ratings, May 2026

Datadog MCP Server bridges your Datadog observability platform with AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol. It gives LLMs like Claude structured access to metrics, logs, monitors, SLOs, service definitions, CI/CD pipelines, and team information, enabling natural language queries against your monitoring infrastructure. The server provides 12 core tools: listing and querying metrics with flexible aggregation and grouping, fetching service logs filtered by environment and time range, managing monitors and SLOs, retrieving service definitions with ownership metadata, listing CI pipelines with fingerprint extraction for Terraform, and viewing teams with member details. Each tool supports multiple output formats and filtering options. Available as an open-source npm package, the server connects to the Datadog API using your API and application keys. Datadog also offers official MCP Server documentation and LLM Observability features that trace MCP client calls with structured metadata about invoked tools, parameters, and responses. The server works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients, making it straightforward to investigate incidents, analyze metrics, or review service health through conversational AI.

Uptime Kuma logo
8.

Uptime Kuma

100% free

Self-hosted uptime monitoring with beautiful status pages

4.6/5 on G2 · 348 ratings, Jun 2026

Uptime Kuma monitors uptime with self-hosted simplicity. Beautiful status pages and monitoring-uptime awareness without SaaS. The self-hosting is free. The interface is polished. The features are complete. Users wanting self-hosted uptime monitoring use Uptime Kuma for free monitoring.

PRTG logo
9.

PRTG

Free plan

All-in-One Network Monitoring Software to stay ahead of IT infrastructure issues.

4.7/5 across G2 and Capterra · 372 ratings, Sep 2026

PRTG Network Monitor is a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution designed to monitor all systems, devices, traffic, and applications within an IT infrastructure. It provides world-class infrastructure monitoring functionality suitable for businesses of all sizes, from SMBs to large enterprises. PRTG helps users know what's up and what's not across their entire network, including databases, applications, cloud services, servers, and local area networks (LANs), utilizing various monitoring methods like SNMP. The software offers multiple user interfaces, including web, desktop, and mobile apps (iOS and Android), for flexible monitoring and management. Users can visualize their network with real-time maps and custom dashboards, and receive alerts and notifications via email, push, or HTTP requests when issues arise or thresholds are exceeded. PRTG is highly flexible and customizable, allowing users to extend its functionality with HTTP API or custom sensors, ensuring it fits diverse monitoring needs and budgets.

Better Stack logo
10.

Better Stack

Free plan

Unified observability for uptime, incidents, and logs

4.7/5 across Trustpilot and G2 · 344 ratings, Sep 2026

Better Stack combines uptime monitoring, incident management, and log management into one unified observability platform. Monitor websites, APIs, and servers with checks from multiple global locations. Get instant alerts via Slack, email, SMS, or phone calls when issues occur. Create beautiful public status pages to keep customers informed. Powerful log search helps you debug issues faster. From startups to enterprises, Better Stack scales with your needs.

Checkmk logo
11.

Checkmk

Free plan

Comprehensive IT monitoring platform for cloud, hybrid, and data center infrastructures.

4.7/5 across TrustRadius, G2 and Capterra · 344 ratings, Sep 2026

Checkmk is an IT monitoring platform designed to provide a complete view of an entire IT infrastructure, including public cloud providers, data centers, servers, networks, containers, and applications. It helps ITOps and DevOps teams run IT at peak performance by offering scalable, automated, and extensible monitoring capabilities. The platform features a High Performance Core that can scale to millions of monitored services with a small footprint, and includes a REST API for automation and host auto-registration. Checkmk offers an extensive library of over 2,000 vendor-maintained plug-ins for automated acquisition of health statuses and metrics. It provides out-of-the-box health assessment with pre-defined thresholds, time-series analysis, historical stats for forecasting, and granular alerting with integrations for third-party tools like ServiceNow and Jira. The platform also includes built-in and custom dashboards, Business Intelligence for process visibility, and custom self-healing actions, ensuring high availability and minimizing mean time to resolution.

Rollbar logo
12.

Rollbar

Free plan

Real-time error tracking and debugging

4.5/5 across G2 and Capterra · 435 ratings, Sep 2026

Rollbar monitors errors across stack and platforms. Error tracking with real-time alerting-catch problems before users report them. The grouping is intelligent. The real-time helps. The platform coverage is broad. Development teams monitoring production use Rollbar for comprehensive error tracking.

Sentry logo
13.

Sentry

Free plan

Application monitoring & error tracking

4.6/5 across G2 and Capterra · 297 ratings, Sep 2026

Sentry is an application monitoring platform providing error tracking, performance tracing, session replay, and uptime monitoring with event-based pricing for development teams of all sizes.

Zabbix logo
14.

Zabbix

Free plan

The universal, open-source observability solution for IT & OT infrastructure.

4.5/5 across G2 and Capterra · 320 ratings, Sep 2026

Zabbix is an enterprise-class, open-source observability solution designed to monitor virtually everything across IT and OT environments, including cloud services, networks, applications, databases, IoT devices, and more. It provides real-time insights and comprehensive visibility into infrastructure performance and health. This solution is ideal for businesses of all sizes, from small organizations to Fortune 500 companies and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), seeking a robust, scalable, and cost-effective monitoring platform. It caters to various industries such as banking, healthcare, aerospace, retail, and government, offering deep observability tailored to specific infrastructure needs. Zabbix helps organizations reduce downtime, improve reliability, and ensure consistent, high-quality services by providing flexible metric collection, problem detection, and advanced data visualization capabilities. Zabbix offers deployment flexibility, allowing users to deploy it on-premise for full control, utilize a fully-managed SaaS platform with Zabbix Cloud, or integrate it with third-party cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Its open-source nature ensures a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with no license fees, while professional services and 24/7 support are available to ensure successful implementation and ongoing operations.

Grafana logo
15.

Grafana

Free plan

Observability and visualization platform

4.5/5 across G2 and Capterra · 275 ratings, Sep 2026

Grafana Cloud is an end-to-end observability platform built on open source standards, offering metrics, logs, traces, and visualization with usage-based pricing and flexible deployment options.

Related

Why choose free monitoring tools?

Free monitoring tools are an excellent way to get started without financial commitment. Whether you're a startup, freelancer, or small business, these tools offer essential features at no cost.

What to look for in free monitoring tools

  • Feature limitations: Understand what's included in the free tier vs paid plans
  • Usage limits: Check for restrictions on users, storage, or API calls
  • Data ownership: Ensure you own your data and can export it
  • Support: Free tiers often have community-only support
  • Upgrade path: Consider future needs if you outgrow the free tier

Free vs Freemium: what's the difference?

100% free 100% free, no payment ever

Completely free with no paid upgrades available. Best for simple, focused workflows that don't require advanced features.

Free plan Free tier + paid upgrades

Generous free tier with optional paid plans that unlock advanced features, higher limits, or team collaboration.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free monitoring tool in 2026?

Hookdeck is our free monitoring pick in 2026. On the full category ranking, SolarWinds is our overall monitoring pick. Hookdeck offers a free plan alongside paid plans: Reliable event infrastructure for webhooks and external event streams.

Is Hookdeck really free forever?

Hookdeck uses a freemium model: there is a permanent free tier you can use without a credit card, plus optional paid plans that unlock higher usage limits and advanced features. The free tier itself does not expire.

What does the free tier of monitoring tools typically include?

Free monitoring tools typically include the core workflow features needed to evaluate the product. Paid plans usually unlock higher usage limits, team collaboration, advanced analytics, integrations, and priority support. The specific cap differs per tool.

When should I upgrade from a free monitoring tool?

Upgrade when you hit one of the free tier ceilings: usage quota (output count, storage, contacts, projects), team size, or a paid-only feature your workflow depends on.

Are there monitoring tools that are 100% free, not just freemium?

Yes. We found 3 completely free monitoring tools (no paid upgrade path) and 12 tools with a permanent free tier alongside paid plans. Spiceworks, Datadog MCP Server, Uptime Kuma are 100% free.

Are free monitoring tools good enough for business use?

Yes, for most startups, freelancers, and small teams. Hookdeck and UptimeRobot both offer free tiers robust enough for production workflows. Larger teams typically upgrade when they need SSO, audit logs, advanced permissions, or usage past the free quota.

Last updated: October 27, 2026

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