saysOK vs Pingdom
Pingdom, from SolarWinds, sells uptime, page speed and transaction checks in tiers, with unlimited users. saysOK costs less for the same number of monitors and adds what happens after a check fails: on-call, incidents and post-mortems.
- Incident
- INC-2841
- Affected
- Acme shop
- 02:14:07 Slack · #client-alerts sent
- 02:14:08 Phone call · Maya, on call this week answered
- 02:15:31 Acknowledged by Maya
Side by side
saysOK's column is what its plans include today. Pingdom's is what its pricing page said on Oct 21, 2026; check there for current figures. Its page showed euros; dollar figures are approximate, at the European Central Bank's reference rate of 1.1215 dollars to the euro on Oct 20, 2026.
| What is compared | saysOK | Pingdom |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ||
| Paid plans | $19 or $79 a monthPro or Team, flat per workspace | From about $18 a month€16 as its page showed; 10 uptime and 1 advanced check, 50 SMS; about $16 (€14.33) a month billed yearly |
| People included | 5 or 10 seatsPro or Team; $4 a month per extra seat on Team | Unlimited users |
| Free plan | 10 monitors5 min interval, 1 status page | 30-day free trialIts pages describe no free plan |
| Monitoring | ||
| Uptime checks | 50 or 250Pro or Team | 10 to 30,000, in tiers25 for about $37 (€33), 50 for about $74 (€66), 100 for about $135 (€120) a month |
| Fastest check | 30 sec or 15 secPro or Team, up to 3 million or 15 million checks a month | Not statedIts pricing page does not say |
| Transaction or browser checks | On TeamSteps in a list: go to, fill, click, wait, expect text or URL, screenshot | 1 to 2,500 advanced checksIncluded in each tier: 1 with the smallest, 10 with 50 uptime checks |
| Checked from | Several regionsA failure must be seen from a second region before anyone is paged, unless you change it | 100+ locationsAs its home page states |
| Page speed and real user monitoring | Not offered | OfferedReal user monitoring is a separate product, from about $18 (€16) a month |
| Alerts and incidents | ||
| SMS and voice call alerts | 50 messages and 20 calls a monthSMS or WhatsApp, on Pro. Team: 500 and 100 | 50 to 1,500 SMS a monthBy tier; its pages describe email and SMS alerts |
| On-call and escalation | Included | Not describedIts pages name integrations with PagerDuty, Opsgenie and Slack |
| Incidents and post-mortems | Included | Not described |
| Status pages | 3 or unlimitedPro or Team, each on your own domain | Public status pages and reports |
| Maintenance windows | Included | Included |
Which plan you would need
Set how many monitors you run. Pingdom's page showed euros; its prices are shown here in dollars at the rate below, so they are approximate. Its page does not state how often each is checked. Pingdom's figures are its listed monthly prices from Oct 21, 2026, at 1.1215 dollars to the euro (European Central Bank, Oct 20, 2026); tax is left out of both.
Pingdom, 50 uptime checks, about $74 a month; saysOK Pro, $19 a month.
What happens at 02:14 with saysOK.
One night at a made-up product, step by step: what saysOK does on its own, what your team sees, and what your customers read.
- Your teamThe check from Frankfurt gets HTTP 503From api.acme.example/health. One region only, so nobody is paged yet.02:14:00
- Your teamVirginia sees it too: incident openedSEV-1. Maya, primary on call, gets a push notification and the Slack message at once.02:14:07Your status page“We are investigating an issue affecting API.”Nobody typed it: the page and its subscribers are updated from the incident.
- Your teamMaya acknowledgesFrom the Slack message. The secondary on call is never woken.02:16:30
- Your teamChecks pass from every region: resolvedThe incident resolves itself, and the Slack message says so.02:29:50Your status page“This incident has been resolved.”API is operational again, and subscribers are told.
- Your teamThe post-mortem is writtenStarted from the incident's timeline.09:30:00Your status pageThe post-mortem goes on the pageUnder the incident, for customers to read.
- Down for
- 15 min 50 s
- Customers told
- at 02:14
- Status updates typed
- none
Which one fits
Neither is right for everyone. This is how we would choose.
Choose Pingdom if
- You want page speed and real user monitoring from the same vendor as your uptime checks.
- You need checks from many more locations than saysOK runs.
- Your team is large, and you would rather not count seats: Pingdom lists unlimited users.
Choose saysOK if
- You want on-call schedules, escalation and post-mortems in the same tool, not through another service.
- For 50 monitors, Pro is $19 a month; Pingdom's 50-check tier is about $74 (€66).
- You want seats, status pages and phone alerts in one flat price.
What saysOK includes
Part of the product, not sold as an add-on.
On-call, with a next person if nobody answers
A schedule says who is primary and who is secondary each day. An alert rule pages them in steps: when an alert is not acknowledged in time, the next person is paged.
- at once Slack · #alerts
- +5 min Primary on-call, if not acknowledged
- +10 min Secondary on-call, if still not acknowledged
Every incident keeps its record
A timeline of what was detected, who acknowledged and when it was resolved, with a severity from SEV-1 to SEV-4. Write the post-mortem from it and publish it to your status page.
- 02:14:07Detected: Acme shop is down
- 02:14:08Maya paged by phone call
- 02:15:31Acknowledged by Maya
- 02:31:10Resolved: checks passing again
Cron jobs and backups, next to the uptime checks
A heartbeat monitor expects a ping from each scheduled job and alerts when one does not arrive, so a backup that silently stopped is found the same day.
# crontab: report in when the backup has run
0 3 * * * backup.sh && curl -fsS https://saysok.com/api/heartbeats/YOUR_TOKEN/pingAn API, and a way in for AI assistants
Monitors, incidents and heartbeats are reachable over a public REST API. The MCP endpoint lets assistants such as Claude Code and Cursor work with them too.
curl https://api.saysok.com/v1/monitors \ -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
claude mcp add --transport http saysok https://api.saysok.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
Try it on your own sites.
The free plan covers 10 monitors and one status page. Move to Pro or Team when you need faster checks or seats for a team.