Pingdom vs StatusCake

Pingdom

The API documentation shows HTTP(S) checks with contains and not-contains matching, TCP, ping, DNS, UDP and mail protocol checks, certificate verification with alerting days before expiry, a one-minute minimum interval, probe regions across EU, North America, APAC and Latin America, and transaction checks as script or browser recording with go-to, click and fill steps and page-state validations — that is exactly how I would test the checkout and payment page rather than just the homepage. We found no public information on confirming a failure from a second location before alerting, maintenance windows, cron or heartbeat checks, or private probe locations inside our network.

StatusCake

Coverage is broad: HTTP(S) with a keyword check that counts the page as down when the string is missing, TCP, ping, DNS, SSL expiry with alerts up to 30 days out, domain expiry reminders, heartbeats, checks as often as every 30 seconds (with a constant option) from 43 locations in 30 countries selectable by continent, country or city, and a failure re-checked from additional servers before alerting — the captured pages give different figures for how many (four on the homepage, up to three in the API settings). What I found no public information on is a browser or transaction check that replays my checkout and payment flow — exactly what broke for six hours while the homepage answered 200 — or multi-step API checks with assertions and private probes inside our own network.

Pingdom

All the captured page proves is that a down alert is triggered when a check fails or exceeds a response-time limit, and that past alerts can be listed through the API. We found no public information on alert channels — SMS, phone call, push, Slack, Teams — escalation policies, on-call schedules or what messages cost, so I cannot tell from this whether whoever is on duty at 3 a.m. in May would even be woken.

StatusCake

Phone call and SMS alerts sit among fourteen platforms including PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Telegram, contact groups take international mobile numbers, there is a delay setting before alerting, maintenance windows mute alerts, and paid plans include SMS credits (75 or 400). But I found no public information on on-call schedules, rotations or an escalation policy that re-pages the next person when the night SMS is slept through, and no per-country price for calls or SMS beyond the included credits.

Pingdom

We found no public information on status pages of any kind: the captured API documentation covers checks, alerts and root-cause analysis, and says nothing about a customer-facing page, components, incident updates, subscribers or hosting of the page itself.

StatusCake

A public status page with our own branding and custom CSS, password or IP-restricted private pages, subscribers notified by email, SMS and RSS, seven days of visible uptime history, an archive of past updates and a pinned updates section, with page and subscriber limits stated per plan. I found no public information on components or component groups (I would want checkout and payment shown as separate components), a custom domain for the page itself, several languages, or how the page stays hosted when the main service is down.

Pingdom

The public API version 3.1 is genuinely well documented: RESTful and HTTPS-only, token authentication with read and read-write permission levels, a downloadable OpenAPI specification, documented rate limits, bulk pause and modification of multiple checks, and a stated aim of covering most of the control panel's functionality, plus a root-cause-analysis endpoint per check. We found no public information on team seats and roles, two-factor authentication, single sign-on, audit logs, client sub-accounts or monitoring-as-code workflows such as Terraform.

StatusCake

A documented REST API with an OpenAPI specification covering uptime, page speed, SSL, heartbeat, maintenance windows and contact groups, plus a Terraform provider the vendor calls the most downloaded in its industry, SDKs, sub-accounts, white-label reports, per-client tag reporting, an audit log and two permission levels — the agency-facing reporting my shop would use is clearly there. Single sign-on is Google or Microsoft only, and I found no public information on SAML, SCIM provisioning, two-factor authentication or checks run from a CI/CD pipeline.

Pingdom

The API returns a list of past alerts for the account and the latest root-cause-analysis results per check, and response times are measured per check, but the captured documentation stops there. We found no public information on uptime or SLA reports, retention periods, export of results, published probe addresses, or the vendor's own status page and availability record — which is what I would need to show the agency what six hours of broken checkout cost us.

StatusCake

Scheduled reports daily, weekly or monthly plus on-demand and unlimited email reports, white-label client reports, public report pages showing per-day uptime percentages and downtime history back to test creation, and retention stated per plan from 90 days of overview data up to six years on the top plan — a solid basis for showing the agency what a March outage cost us. I found no public information on response-time percentiles, published probe IP addresses for allow-listing, or a standard SLA (service-creditable SLAs appear only as a custom-plan option), and the vendor's own status communications run through Atlassian Statuspage.

Pingdom

The captured API documentation says nothing about where account data, the names and phone numbers of our on-call people, subscribers or check results would be stored, who the subprocessors are for hosting, SMS or email, or any certifications. We found no public information on the contracting entity or data residency in what was captured.

StatusCake

The contracting entity is TrafficCake Limited, registered in England and Wales, personal data is primarily stored and processed in the United Kingdom, a data processing addendum covering both UK and EU GDPR is published with standard contractual clauses for transfers, and subprocessors are listed by purpose — DigitalOcean, Google Cloud and AWS for hosting, Twilio for SMS, SparkPost and Mailchimp for email, Stripe and PayPal for payments, Intercom for support, and Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Hotjar for analytics. That is a well-documented UK chain rather than a European one, and I found no public information on an EU hosting option, security certifications, or a self-hosted edition, so the phone numbers of my on-call staff travel under UK safeguards with several US processors in the chain.

Pingdom

The only pricing information captured is that a response-time alert option is "Not available for Starter and Free plans", which confirms a Free and a Starter plan exist and that capabilities are gated by tier. We found no public information on any actual prices, scaling with monitors or intervals, SMS or call costs, overages, minimum term or VAT, so I cannot compute what monitoring across our March-to-June season would cost.

StatusCake

Tiers are public with monitor counts, intervals, logins, page-speed and server monitors and SMS credits — for example €69.99/mo with 300 uptime monitors at 30-second intervals, 10 logins and 400 SMS credits — alongside a free tier, a seven-day trial with no credit card, monthly or annual billing with two months free on the year, and cancellation at any time. I found no public information on the cost of SMS or calls beyond the plan credits, overage handling, bolt-on prices (the custom plan is quoted "POA") or VAT treatment, and the captured pages give different figures for the free plan's monitor count and interval.