UptimeRobot has been the default choice for uptime monitoring for years, largely because its free tier gives you an impressive 50 monitors right out of the gate. It is incredibly easy to set up: paste a URL and it starts checking every five minutes. The built-in status pages are a nice bonus that many competitors lock behind paid plans.
However, that free tier comes with limitations that eventually frustrate growing teams. Five-minute intervals leave too much room for undetected downtime, and three months of data retention makes it hard to spot long-term reliability trends. When teams start needing faster checks, more complex alerting rules, or proper incident management workflows, UptimeRobot's paid plans often feel less competitive compared to newer monitoring stacks that combine uptime checks with on-call scheduling.
