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Website performance is essential when running an online business as it directly impacts user experience. If the website or web app is not working properly, both visitors and customers are likely to drop off, and you might lose them forever. In fact, most of the time, these issues will go unreported, and forget fixing them, you’ll not even be aware of them.
These lost opportunities to acquire new users or retain existing ones can prevent any digital business from reaching its real potential. As business owners, marketers, and product managers, you need to ensure that your digital products are maintained, up-to-date, and secure. Utilizing online monitoring tools can be a game-changer in this aspect.
Now, just imagine if you could easily identify any gaps in your website or app, get an alert whenever an issue occurs, and your development team can manage and resolve these issues efficiently. This is exactly what website monitoring tools can do for you. They provide real-time insights and notifications, ensuring that your site's performance is always top-notch.
A website monitoring tool can help you monitor users in real-time, identify errors and performance issues, and debug errors. If you have a mobile app it would be good to know about some popular android debugging tools as well.
In this blog, we will look at the best website monitoring tools and their features. We will also discuss some of the important factors to consider when choosing the right website monitoring tool.
Without further ado, let's get started.
Website monitoring tools are essential for checking a website's performance, security, availability, and functionality. They ensure that your website is up and running, and visitors can smoothly navigate through your site without getting stuck or frustrated at any process. Your entire website needs to perform perfectly to help your users complete tasks, from making a purchase to navigating from one page to another.
If your business has both websites and mobile apps, it’s recommended to utilize both website monitoring tools and mobile app tracking. This will ensure that you can create clear customer journey maps through qualitative data analysis and ensure your users always get a top-notch digital experience.
Think of online monitoring tools as having a friend who constantly checks your website and alerts you if something goes wrong. This can help you avoid losing customers or visitors due to compromised user experience or website metrics. Setting up website monitoring tools is not difficult, and it can save you a lot of time and trouble in the long run.
But before we explore some of the best online monitoring tools in 2024, let’s first go through why you should monitor your website.
Monitoring websites is important as it requires that your website is up and running, without any issues. Here are some reasons why regular monitoring of a website is important:
Website monitoring tools or software help product, marketing, and engineering teams to ensure that your website is working correctly. They keep an eye on your user behavior and any issues with your website, web app, or mobile app.
Good website monitoring tools don’t just help you identify any user experience or tech error but also provide tools to fix these issues. These tools allow you to track your users in real-time, capture website errors, and debug them.
Online monitoring tools are essential for all types of businesses and particularly useful for online businesses with websites, such as e-commerce, digital products, online courses, blogs, gaming sites, and more.
A compromised website experience can make you lose visitors and customers, directly affecting your sales and revenue. Note that it’s cheaper to retain users than to acquire new ones. According to the Gartner report, 48% of SaaS website visitors leave the page without engaging deeper if the layout or content is not appealing, showing that there's much on their website that can be optimized. For which one needs to understand the gaps, and that's where website monitoring tools play a crucial role.
Website monitoring tools have several features that help you monitor various aspects of the user journey, website errors, website performance, etc. Let’s have a look at some of the important features of website monitoring tools.
Now that you understand what is website monitoring, what are website monitoring tools, and what features you should look for in these tools, let’s have a look at the top website monitoring tools that you can use in 2024.
Zipy is a digital experience tool that captures user session replays, track website errors, and provide debugging tools to resolve issues. It helps you identify gaps in user experience and resolve issues - ultimately improving conversion rate and user retention.
“Zipy has changed my life in ways I can’t tell you! Between 2 projects, I have found bugs that would have taken developers years of debugging.” Connolly, Co-founder & CTO at DirectNorth Digital
Zipy allows marketing, product, and engineering teams to work together and:
For every user session captured in Zipy, you can also see the user events, user environment details, corresponding errors, and log details.
Pricing:
Trial: Has a 14-day trial. Sign up
Free plan: Zipy offers a lifelong free plan. No credit cards asked
Paid plan: It starts at $39/month for 7,500 sessions
Thoughts:
If you are looking for results through website monitoring, Zipy is a good tool to go for. The fact that it helps you understand what needs to be fixed and even helps fix it, makes it a complete website motoring tool that delivers results. Try Zipy for free!
Site24x7, one of the leading online monitoring tools, monitors your website every 30 seconds from more than 120 locations. With Site24x7, a comprehensive website monitoring tool, you can ensure that your website is always available, web pages are performing smoothly, and the functionality of website elements is intact. It supports both synthetic and real user monitoring and even helps you inform your users about website incidents.
Site24x7, suitable for businesses of all sizes from small to enterprise, is a product from Zoho which is typically used by DevOps and IT professionals. As one of the robust website monitoring tools available, it offers a variety of features:
Provides a public status page, allowing you to notify your customers of any downtime.
In addition to being among advanced website monitoring tools, Site24x7 also supports server monitoring, cloud monitoring, performance monitoring, and real-user monitoring, making it a comprehensive solution for modern digital needs.
Pricing:
Trial: 30-day free trial.
Free plan: Site 24x7 offers a free plan where you can monitor the uptime of up to 50 resources. No credit card is required.
Paid plan: It starts at $9/mo for 10 basic monitors.
Thoughts
All in all Site24x7 is a good tool, but lacks any support when it comes to fixing the identified issues.
Middleware is a full-stack cloud observability platform designed to boost operational efficiency, minimize downtime, and enhance user satisfaction. It stands out among online monitoring tools by enabling development and operations teams to expedite issue resolution. This is achieved by consolidating metrics, logs, traces, and events onto a unified timeline. Middleware also leverages AI, a feature often seen in advanced website monitoring tools, to offer improved insights into infrastructure and applications.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: Offers trial
Free plan: Has forever free account with limited usage
Paid plan: Has pay as you go plans. Charges different for different types of monitoring.
Thoughts
Primarily created for developers to capture application and infrastructure issues. The plans are structured to help you explore the product and scale with your needs, if you go for a paid plan.
Sematext offers website performance monitoring that can help you fix critical website performance issues before they affect your users. It is primarily designed for DevOps teams and supports hassle-free log management and analytics, making it one of the essential online monitoring tools.
Sematext provides real user monitoring, which allows you to visualize how the user interacts with your website and experiences the performance of your website. With these website monitoring tools, you can create dashboards and visualize performance metrics, ensuring that your site's user experience is always optimal.
Sematext has flexible alert notifications, which means that if your website suffers from any outages, you will receive alerts through Slack, Zapier, OpsGenie, and many more. You will be the first to know when your website has any issues, thanks to this comprehensive online monitoring tool. It also integrates with other user monitoring agents and log shippers.
Features:
Pricing:
Trail: 14 days free trial.
Free plan: Offer a free plan
Paid plan: Has different plans for log, infrastructure, and synthetic monitoring, each starting at different prices.
Thoughts:
Sematext is a great tool for monitoring but does not have any inbuilt debugging tool. The pricing is also costly. Additionally, it has limited data retention for its standard plan.
Dynatrace, a leading online monitoring tool, helps identify and resolve issues in real-time before they impact customers. You can leverage full-stack monitoring, from the frontend to the backend, to the cloud, to the infrastructure. It helps you manage application performance, response time, and security, all in real time.
Dynatrace gives you comprehensive observability into your infrastructure and full stack. Its business analytics also gives you a complete picture of how end-user performance can impact your revenue. As a vital part of website monitoring tools, it offers features that are indispensable for maintaining optimal online performance.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: 15 days free trial.
Free plan: No free plan exists.
Paid plan: They have usage-based plans. Final pricing is shared by their sales team once they understand your needs.
Thoughts:
Users may need to devote a lot of time and energy to learning how to use Dynatrace, especially those who are new to observability or who have not used similar tools before. It is also expensive, which makes it difficult for small businesses to use.
Datadog is one of the good digital experience platforms out there, functioning effectively as both website monitoring tools and online monitoring tools. It supports real user monitoring as well as synthetic monitoring. With synthetic monitoring, you can simulate user transactions on your applications. It quickly detects user-facing issues with browser tests and API calls, so you can enhance your end-user experience.
Datadog provides insights into your application's frontend monitoring data. It helps you identify the root cause of issues like slow loading, fraud, and website errors, whether it's because of code, infrastructure, or network. This makes it an essential part of any online monitoring tools suite.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: Try it free for 14 days
Free plan: It has a free plan, but it does not cover monitoring or log management.
Paid plan: Has a usage-based pricing for all solutions it offers.
Datadog's pricing is also somewhat high in comparison to other tools out there. For better pricing we can explore other Datadog competitors.
Thoughts:
Datadog is a pretty good application performance monitoring platform and offers monitoring, and bug tracking solutions. However, getting a hang of Datadog can take a while for a new user.
Pingdom is a powerful website monitoring tool that helps you monitor performance, website uptime, user experience, and user behavior. It is cloud-based, very easy to set up, and has a simple user interface designed for both technical and non-technical professionals.
As one of the leading online monitoring tools, Pingdom supports infrastructure monitoring, synthetic monitoring, and real user monitoring. With Pingdom, you can view detailed reports in your dashboard and receive email reports (daily, weekly, or monthly), for page speed and uptime checks.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: 30-day free trial.
Free plan: No free plans.
Paid plan: Starts at $10/month billed annually.
Thoughts:
Many other vendors offer similar monitoring and charge less. SMS alerts are paid. They also do not have any debugging tools or session replay tools.
New Relic is an observability platform to monitor, debug, and improve your entire stack. It helps you catch mobile app, web app, and website issues faster, prioritize the important issues, and get to their root cause. As a comprehensive online monitoring tool, New Relic supports application monitoring, error tracking, change tracking, network monitoring, and more.
Features:
Pricing:
Free plan: Its free plan includes 100 GB/month data ingest
Paid plan: Has a pay-as-you-use plan
For better pricing we can explore New Relic alternatives.
Thoughts:
New Relic is a mature tool and we can say it is one of the good customer experience platforms. At the same time, you can find it imposing data usage limits and charging more for it.
Uptime Robot is the leading website monitoring service. It checks your website every minute so that you can receive an instant alert in case of any outages. This robust online monitoring tool even monitors your server, SSL certification, and domain name expiry. In case of any issue, it notifies you via voice call, email, SMS, or through integrations like Slack, or Zapier.
Uptime Robot provides a mobile app that you can use to get updates on the go, making it a versatile website monitoring tool for busy professionals.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: No free trial.
Free plan: Its free plan includes 50 monitors.
Paid plan: The plan starts at $7/month billed annually.
Thoughts:
It's good to ensure website accessibility, but does not monitor errors or user behavior, which is a big limitation. Forget any debugging tools.
Uptrends help you monitor your website via synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and server monitoring. As a robust website monitoring tool, Uptrends helps you track your website's uptime and performance, ensuring that your online presence is always optimal. Uptrends enable you to monitor your website from 233 checkpoints located globally, making it a comprehensive online monitoring tool. It will notify you in case of any issue and supports continuous monitoring of website availability, performance, and transactions.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: All plans come with a 30-day free trial.
Free plan: No free plan. You need to upgrade the post-trial period.
Paid plan: The starter plan starts at $17.50/month billed annually. It includes 10 monitors.
Thoughts:
It can be counted among decent customer journey map tools, primarily because of its transaction recording features. However, its free version is still limited and you might find the pricing to be on the higher side as well for the features included.
Logrocket can help engineers, support teams, product managers, designers, and marketers. It helps track and aggregate website issues and performance data to understand their impact on business goals.
As an effective website monitoring tool, Logrocket alerts you about high-severity issues in your website or web app, allows you to debug them, and ship fixes. Using Logrocket, you can also get an accurate picture of exactly what users experience with session replay.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: Offers 14-day trial
Free plan: Has a forever free plan, includes 1,000 sessions/month
Paid plan: Starts at $69/month which includes 10k sessions/month, if paid annually.
Thoughts:
LogRocket is one of the good website monitoring and user experience tools. But their pricing is higher than other similar tools in the market.
Smartlook helps customers understand how users navigate and experience your website end-to-end, by combining quantitative and qualitative analytics. As a versatile website monitoring tool, it combines session replays, heatmaps, events, funnels, and crash reports to help you analyze user experience on your website and app.
Smartlook enables you to see all the actions, aka events, your users perform on your website or mobile apps, like button clicks or visits to a page. It helps to find out exactly where users drop off and see why they don’t follow the path you want them to. This functionality is essential for any website monitoring tool aiming to optimize user experience.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: Comes with a 30-day free trial.
Free plan: Offers a free plan that has 3000 monthly sessions.
Paid plan: Starts at $55/month for 5000 monthly sessions.
If you feel the cost is higher for your stage of the company, there are other smartlook alternatives, which give you a better ROI in terms of the price.
Thoughts:
It’s a decent qualitative data analysis software, but costs more than other similar tools. Also has devtools and product analytics as add on, which adds to the cost.
Sentry is a developer-first app monitoring platform that helps you take action on broken lines of code, crashes, and busted API calls. As an effective website monitoring tool, Sentry enables you to get to the root cause of an error or latency issue faster with context like DOM events, console logs, and network calls.
You can quickly identify performance issues before they cause downtime, and you can view the entire end-to-end distributed trace to see the poor-performing API calls and frontend-related errors.
Features:
Price:
Trial: 14 days free trial.
Free plan: Has a free plan with limited performance and error monitoring
Paid plan: Starts at $26/month billed annually. For advanced analytics and cross-project visibility, you would need a higher plan.
For better pricing we can explore sentry alternatives.
Thoughts:
Sentry is an open-source tool, some of its advanced features and integrations are only available in the paid plans. It also has a relatively steep learning curve, especially if you are new to website monitoring tools or user behavioral analytics software. One of the main drawbacks of Sentry is its cost, as it can be relatively expensive for small businesses or startups.
FullStory is a digital intelligence system that helps optimize customer experience on your website and web and mobile app. As an advanced website monitoring tool, it enables you to track and monitor your customer's activities and discover bugs, friction, and opportunities in your digital products. It indexes your user activities automatically from clicks to page transitions. With FullStory, you can run powerful queries to target sessions that match specific user and event criteria.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: 14-day trial with up to 5,000 sessions.
Free plan: Free edition comes with 1,000 sessions/month
Paid plan: For a paid plan, you have to contact the team.
If you feel the cost is higher for your stage of the company, there are other fullstory alternatives, which give you a better ROI in terms of the price.
Thoughts:
FullStory's basic features are user-friendly, however, the advanced functions may have a steeper learning curve. You can find other tools at better pricing.
StatusCake, a reliable website monitoring tool, helps you track your website's performance, downtime, and domain expiry, and alerts you promptly. It will alert you even if your site is down for just 10 seconds. Boasting a global reach, StatusCake has 43 testing locations spread across 30 countries around the world.
This website monitoring tool offers convenient, user-friendly dashboards that provide you with detailed information about your tests.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: Offers 7-day free trial.
Free plan: Free plan includes limited uptime, page speed, domain, SSL, and server monitoring
Paid plan: Starts at $24.49/month billed annually.
Thoughts:
StatusCake specializes in monitoring website uptime. However, it does not capture user session recordings, or errors occurring in your website. It’s advised to go for it if your main focus is website uptime.
Uptimia is a website monitoring tool that covers website uptime, speed, transaction, and real user monitoring. It has a free website availability tool that is available from different locations across the globe. As a versatile website monitoring tool, Uptimia offers comprehensive features to ensure your website's optimal performance.
Features:
Pricing:
Trial: 30-day free trial.
Free plan: Has a free plan for one website.
Paid plan: Paid plans start at $9/month billed annually.
Thoughts:
Good tool to track site performance. But does not support error tracking or debugging tools.
Its free plan does not include real user monitoring, website transactions, and speed monitoring. Can go for it if your main concern is website uptime and can are not looking for an end-to-end digital experience tool.
We have discussed some of the best website monitoring tools. Now, the question is, what are some of the key factors to consider when choosing a website monitoring software? Here are some key factors that you should look at when choosing the right website monitoring tool for your website:
Easy to use and set up
The website monitoring tool you choose should be easy to use and set up to save time from an extreme learning curve. If the tool is difficult to use, it will make it difficult to identify and troubleshoot website issues. It would be a good idea to go for a free website monitoring tool if you are just starting off.
Scalability
Scalability matters a lot when choosing a site monitoring software. A scalable tool can handle high traffic on your website without slowing it down. It should be able to automatically handle sudden spikes in traffic without your team's intervention.
Integrations
While choosing among website monitor tools, go through the supported integrations. Look at your existing tools and see if the web monitoring software integrates with them or not? Also, consider if it’s a single-click integration or if you have to add a code snippet. Ideally, good website monitoring tools integrate with alerting and ticketing tools, along with other monitoring and event management platforms.
Pricing and value for money
Pick a website monitoring tool that fits your business needs. Pay attention to its pricing plans as much as you do to its features. You can find tools with similar features at much more affordable cost than the market leaders. Look at the sessions or monitors they are offering and what falls within your budget, especially if you are in an early stage. Don’t forget to look for start-up plans.
Monitoring capabilities
When looking at web monitoring tools, make sure they offer monitoring features like real user monitoring, error tracking and debugging, performance monitoring, and security and customer data privacy. Features like user identification, session replay, filter and search are a plus. These Monitoring capabilities can help you improve your website performance, increase traffic, and more.
Alerts
To deliver a good digital experience, once an issue is identified by a website monitoring tool, it needs to be resolved real quick, and that makes alerting all the more important. At the same time, too many alerts can feel like noise. What you need is a tool that alerts you on channels you use and also gives you the flexibility to choose what alerts you want. Also do look for slack and email alerts, as most of your team is already present here.
Data security
Security is important to consider when choosing a website monitoring tool. This is because these tools gather and store significant data about your website, such as its login credentials, performance, availability, and security. If not properly protected, this data may be vulnerable to unauthorized access and can harm your website's reputation and erode customer trust. So, do check the website monitoring tool you want to buy for SOC2, GDPR, and CCPA compliance.
Web monitoring tools are frequently used by developers, marketers, and product managers. The tools help ensure that your website or web app is working correctly and identify user issues.
These website monitoring tools usually come with features like session replay, error monitoring, and performance tracking. They help teams with qualitative data analysis, and error management, and ultimately improve user experience.
Website monitoring service is essential for all types of businesses and particularly useful for online businesses with websites, such as e-commerce, digital products, online courses, blogs, gaming sites, and more. You should consider a website monitoring service to improve your customer experience and optimize conversion throughout the funnel.
Website monitoring tools regularly check your website for errors, performance issues, and availability. If an issue is located, these tools alert the team about it, so that the issue can be fixed quickly. Some website monitoring tools even allow you to set up custom checks, which you can use to cover the exception issues as well.
Website monitoring tools usually use synthetic monitoring or real user monitoring. Synthetic monitoring is a controlled monitoring technique that uses scripts or software to simulate user behavior. Real user monitoring (RUM) on the other hand collects data from real users as they interact with your website.
Most website monitoring tools come with a free trial for 14 to 30 days. These free trials usually unlock all features in the product to give you a glimpse of what you can achieve with them. Once the trial period is over, your plan can convert to a forever free plan or ask you to upgrade.
The exhaustive list of website tracking tools, we have shared above, can help analyse qualitative data, draft better customer journey maps, and improve user experience of your digital products.
We analyses these website behavioral analytics softwares on the basis of what they bring on the table, pricing, and shared some thoughts on the basis of customer reviews. Decent website monitoring tools should include real time user monitoring, features for error management and debugging, performance monitoring, capability to filter and search through sessions and errors, along with alerts.
It would be a good approach to find free website monitoring tools and give them a shot. If you find a web monitoring tool easy to use, within budget, and has capabilities you need, you are good. You can check out the above list to see which of these site monitoring software have a free or a trial plan.
We hope this blog helps you explore website monitoring tools for your business.
Feel free to comment or write to us in case you have any further questions at support@zipy.ai. We would be happy to help you. In case you want to explore for your app, you can sign up or book a demo.
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The unified digital experience platform to drive growth with Product Analytics, Error Tracking, and Session Replay in one.
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