IT Watch vs. TrackSSL
TrackSSL is a focused tool with a clear scope: it watches SSL certificates, alerts before they expire, and — the part people underrate — tells you when a certificate changes. It is not trying to be a platform, and that restraint is a feature.
Every TrackSSL price and feature below was read from trackssl.com/pricing on 9 September 2026. If you find one out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
The question is whether certificates are the whole problem. For most people looking after websites they are one of five or six recurring deadlines, and the others break a site just as thoroughly: a domain lapsing, a nameserver moving, an SPF record quietly exceeding its lookup budget, a blocklist listing. IT Watch is the same discipline applied to all of them, on the same alert ladder, in one calendar.
Certificate monitoring with change detection, private and internal certificate monitoring on higher tiers, per-plan user accounts, and Slack, Teams, webhook and API integrations.
Domain expiry, uptime, DNS drift, email authentication, Certificate Transparency, blocklist reputation and WordPress health, on the same ladder — at $9/month against their $19, and $29 where they are $39.
Feature comparison
What it costs at 10, 25 and 50 sites
TrackSSL bills per certificate: 2 free, 20 on Starter at $19/month, 80 on Growth at $39, 200 on Complete at $79, 500 on Scale at $149. One site with one certificate is one certificate — a site with a separate certificate on a mail or admin host counts twice there and still counts as one site here. Totals are our arithmetic over their published plan sizes.
What TrackSSL gets right
Certificate change monitoring is the part worth naming, because it is not obvious and most tools skip it. Knowing that the certificate being served today is not the one that was being served yesterday catches things an expiry countdown never will: a misconfigured deploy that reverted to a default certificate, a CDN swapping in its own, a host you did not know was in the path.
It also monitors private and internal certificates on its higher tiers, reached through an agent rather than the public internet. We do not do that and have no route to it — every IT Watch check is a capped, SSRF-guarded request to a publicly resolvable address. If your certificates live inside a network, that is a real reason to choose them and it is not a close call.
Certificates are one deadline out of six
Here is the argument for the wider scope, in the order things actually go wrong for the people we talk to.
A domain lapses. This is worse than a certificate expiring and it is far less visible: renewal notices go to a registrant address nobody reads, a card on file expires, and the domain enters a grace period during which the site is already off. After that comes redemption, where getting it back costs a three-figure fee, and after that it is simply gone. There is no browser warning that gives you a week of notice.
DNS drifts. A record changes — a nameserver, an A record, an MX — and either nobody meant it or somebody did and did not say. We baseline every record set on first check and alert on the difference.
Email authentication decays. SPF records grow includes until they cross the ten-lookup limit that voids them entirely. DMARC policies get raised to reject by somebody following a hardening guide, and mail from the invoicing tool stops arriving weeks before anyone connects the two events.
A certificate appears that you did not order. Certificate Transparency logs make this public the day it happens.
The site gets listed. A blocklist entry or a Safe Browsing flag stops mail and puts an interstitial in front of visitors while the server answers every request perfectly.
And the site itself rots — on Agency and above we read the WordPress core and plugin versions a site publishes and match them against known CVEs.
One ladder for all of it
The value of putting these in one product is not the feature count, it is that they share an alert ladder and a single timeline. Every deadline — certificate, domain, whatever else carries a date — fires at 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 days, once each, and resolves itself when the underlying thing is fixed.
The alternative is three tools with three notification schemes and three inboxes to mute independently, which is how a real warning gets filtered alongside two routine ones.
The price comparison
TrackSSL counts certificates; we count sites, and a site includes every check type at every tier. Their entry paid plan is $19 a month for 20 certificates. Ours is $9 for 25 sites, with domain, DNS, uptime, email authentication, Certificate Transparency and reputation checks on every one of them.
At the scale where an agency starts needing client-facing output, the gap widens rather than narrows: fifty sites is $39 a month there for certificates alone, and $29 here with client workspaces, free read-only client logins and a monthly PDF report per client.
Two different ways to notice a certificate changed
TrackSSL and IT Watch both tell you when the certificate picture changes, and it is worth being precise about the difference because neither approach dominates the other.
TrackSSL reads the certificate being served. If the certificate on your load balancer is replaced, it sees the new one on its next check. That catches a bad deploy, a CDN substituting its own certificate, or a host in the path you did not know about — all real, all invisible to a pure expiry countdown.
We read the Certificate Transparency logs, which record issuance rather than deployment. That catches a certificate that exists for your domain and is being served somewhere else entirely — a subdomain a contractor pointed at their own host, a staging environment nobody decommissioned, an issuer you have never used. It does not, on its own, tell you that the certificate on your own server was swapped for another valid one from the same issuer.
The naive version of ours is unusable, incidentally, and it is worth saying so: alerting on every new certificate means several alerts a day on any busy domain, because Let's Encrypt renews every sixty days and every subdomain is its own stream. We fingerprint the set of issuers and covered names, establish a baseline silently on the first check, and alert only when that surface changes.
What the free tiers are each for
Their free tier is two certificates. Ours is one site with every check type on it — certificate, domain, uptime, DNS, email authentication, Certificate Transparency and reputation — at daily intervals.
These are not really competing offers. Two certificates is a way to watch your own domain and your own mail host. One site with seven checks is a way to find out what a full picture of one site looks like before deciding whether you want it for forty. If you are evaluating, the useful test is to point each at the same domain and see which one tells you something you did not already know.
When to choose TrackSSL instead
Written by us, about a competitor, on our own site — so read it with that in mind. Every item is something we would say on a call.
- Your certificates are internal. Private and internal certificate monitoring is on their higher tiers and is genuinely outside what we can do.
- You have hundreds of certificates and no interest in anything else. Their Complete and Scale plans are built for exactly that shape, and paying for checks you will not use is not a bargain.
- You want per-certificate change alerting rather than change alerting derived from public logs. We read Certificate Transparency, which sees issuance; they read the certificate being served.
- You already have uptime, DNS and domain monitoring elsewhere and are happy with them. Adding a focused certificate tool to a working stack is a smaller change than replacing it.
Also compare: UptimeRobot · Better Stack