IT Watch vs. UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is the default answer to "how do I know if my site is down", and deservedly so. It has been running since 2010, the free tier is genuinely generous, and it long ago stopped being uptime-only — SSL expiry, domain expiry and DNS monitoring are all in the product now.
Every UptimeRobot price and feature below was read from uptimerobot.com/pricing on 9 September 2026. If you find one out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
The difference is not a feature checklist, it is what each product is organised around. UptimeRobot is built around a monitor that is either up or down, with expiry dates attached to it. IT Watch is built around a renewal calendar — the certificate, the domain, the DMARC policy, the registrar lock — with uptime attached to that. If your question is "is it up right now", UptimeRobot answers it well. If your question is "what breaks in the next ninety days across forty client sites", that is the question this product was built for.
Uptime monitoring at 30- and 60-second intervals, checks from multiple regions, a very large integration catalogue, status pages with subscribers, and a free tier of 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals that many small sites never outgrow.
Email authentication, Certificate Transparency, blocklist reputation and WordPress health — none of which UptimeRobot monitors. Client workspaces with free read-only logins, a monthly PDF report, and pricing counted in sites rather than monitors.
Feature comparison
What it costs at 10, 25 and 50 sites
UptimeRobot bills per monitor, and its SSL and domain-expiry checks ride on the HTTP monitor rather than costing extra — so one site is one monitor. The totals below are our arithmetic over their published plan sizes, not prices they quote.
What UptimeRobot already covers
It is worth being precise about this, because most comparison pages are not. UptimeRobot monitors SSL certificate expiry. It monitors domain expiry, reading the WHOIS record and alerting at 30, 14, 7 and 0 days — which is very close to our own ladder, and arrived at for the same reasons. It has DNS monitoring, ping and port monitoring, keyword checks, and a long list of integrations that includes everything you would expect and several you would not.
Its free tier is 50 monitors at five-minute intervals. For a freelancer with a dozen sites and no budget, that is a real answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Domain expiry is the one thing gated behind a paid plan.
So the honest version of this comparison is not "they only do uptime". It is that the two products draw the boundary of "monitoring" in different places.
Where the boundary actually falls
Four categories of failure sit outside what UptimeRobot watches, and all four break a site while every uptime monitor in the world reports green.
Email authentication. Your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are DNS records, and they rot. A provider changes an include, an SPF record crosses the ten-lookup limit that silently voids it, or somebody raises a DMARC policy from p=none to p=reject and every invoice stops arriving. The site is up throughout. We check the records and alert when a policy weakens or a lookup budget is blown.
Certificate Transparency. Every certificate issued for your domain is logged publicly. A certificate you did not order — from an issuer you have never used, for a hostname you did not know existed — is visible in those logs the day it is issued, and invisible to a check that only reads the certificate you are serving.
Reputation. A shared IP gets listed on a blocklist, or a site gets flagged by Safe Browsing, and mail stops being delivered while the server keeps answering requests instantly.
WordPress health. On Agency and above, we read the version of core and the plugins a site publishes about itself and cross-reference known CVEs. We do not test whether wp-login is rate limited, because establishing that means firing failed logins at a client's production site, and our address in their access log looks exactly like an attacker's no matter how good the reason.
Monitors versus sites
UptimeRobot counts monitors. IT Watch counts sites, and every site gets every check type at every tier — you never choose between watching a domain and watching its certificate because both consume the same allowance.
That distinction used to cut against us. Before C1 we counted monitors too, and a single domain used four of them, so our own free plan could not cover one site. Counting in sites is the fix, and it is why the numbers below are comparable at all.
The practical consequence is at the middle of the range. UptimeRobot's entry paid tier is ten monitors; the next step is Team at $39. So twenty-five sites costs $39 a month there and $9 here, and fifty sites costs $39 there and $29 here. At ten sites their free tier wins outright, unless you want domain expiry.
The alert ladder
Both products ladder their expiry warnings, which is the correct design and not an accident that two teams landed on it. Ours fires at 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 days; theirs at 30, 14, 7 and 0. The gap that matters is the bottom rung: a warning on the day of expiry is a warning that arrives after somebody has already seen the browser error.
Each of our rungs fires exactly once, enforced by a uniqueness constraint in the database rather than by application logic, because application logic that de-duplicates alerts is application logic that will eventually send two. When the certificate renews, the open alerts resolve themselves and you get one message saying so.
If the sites belong to clients
This is the part of the product UptimeRobot has no equivalent for, because it is not what they are building. On Agency and above you get a workspace per client, with its own sites, alerts and access. Colleagues are seats. Client logins are read-only, free and uncapped — a client with a login stops asking you for screenshots, and metering that would defeat the point.
Each workspace can send a monthly PDF report: what expired, what was renewed, what we caught and how many days of warning you had. On Reseller, our name comes off all of it, including the status page and the report footer.
When to choose UptimeRobot 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.
- Uptime is the actual job. If what you need is to know within thirty seconds that a server stopped answering, from several countries at once, that is their core competence and not ours — our floor is five minutes.
- You need a specific integration. Their catalogue is far larger than ours, and if your workflow depends on one particular destination it is more likely to be there.
- You want a status page with subscribers and incident history. Ours is deliberately simple; theirs is a real product.
- Your budget is zero and ten sites is the whole estate. Fifty monitors at five-minute intervals, free, is a better deal than our free tier, which covers one site.