Freshping Alternatives in 2026: Free & Paid Options After the Shutdown

Freshping is gone. Freshworks shut the product down in March 2026, and with it went one of the most popular free uptime monitors on the internet, the default choice for thousands of freelancers and small agencies who needed to watch a few dozen client sites without paying enterprise money.

If you're reading this, your monitors have probably already stopped checking, or you exported your list before the lights went out and it's been sitting in a spreadsheet since. Either way: your client sites are currently unmonitored, and the whole point of monitoring is that you find out about downtime before the client does. So let's fix that today.

Full disclosure up front: I run Sentinel, one of the paid options below. I'll make the case for it where it's genuinely the right fit, and tell you plainly where a free tool will serve you better.

What Freshping actually gave you (so you know what to replace)

Before comparing tools, be honest about what you were using:

• HTTP uptime checks on a decent interval, for free
• Multiple checks, enough to cover a real client roster
• Public status pages
• Email/Slack alerts

Notice what's not on that list: SSL expiry monitoring, DNS change detection, domain expiry tracking. If you were relying on Freshping alone, you were only watching one failure mode. Sites go down because certs expire and DNS gets fat-fingered at least as often as because servers crash. Whatever you pick next, consider covering all four.

Option 1: Uptime Kuma (free, self-hosted)

Best for: developers who'd rather run a container than pay a bill.

Uptime Kuma is the open-source darling of this category, and deservedly so. It's a self-hosted monitoring app you run via Docker, with a genuinely nice UI, HTTP/TCP/ping/DNS checks, status pages, and a long list of notification integrations.

The honest trade-offs:

• You're monitoring from one place: your own server. If your VPS goes down, your monitoring goes down with it, and you won't get an alert, because the thing that sends alerts is the thing that died. This is the fundamental problem with self-hosted monitoring, and it bites everyone eventually.
• It's another thing to maintain. Updates, backups, the reverse proxy, the disk filling up with check history. If you bill by the hour, the "free" tool costs whatever your hourly rate is times however long you spend babysitting it.
• No multi-region confirmation. A network blip between your server and the client's host looks identical to real downtime.

If you're technical, cost-sensitive, and monitoring your own projects, Uptime Kuma is a great answer. For client work where you're contractually on the hook, think hard about whether "the monitor was down too" is a conversation you want to have. (For a deeper head-to-head, see Sentinel vs Uptime Kuma.)

Option 2: UptimeRobot (free, with a serious caveat for client work)

Best for: personal projects. Read the fine print before using it for clients.

UptimeRobot's free plan is famously generous on paper: 50 monitors with 5-minute checks. For years it was the obvious Freshping sibling, and plenty of Freshping refugees will land there by default.

Here's the caveat that matters for this audience: UptimeRobot's terms of service restrict the free plan to non-commercial use. The change dates back to November 2024. Monitoring client websites as part of a paid service (a care plan, a maintenance retainer, hosting you resell) is commercial use. If that's you, the free plan isn't actually available to you; you're expected to be on a paid plan. (We wrote a full breakdown of what the ToS says and who's affected: see our post on the UptimeRobot free-plan commercial-use ban.)

The paid plans are fine products, but note the pricing model if you have a team: UptimeRobot charges $15 per seat per month. A five-person shop pays $75/month in seats before counting the monitoring itself. For a solo freelancer who's happy to pay, it's workable. For a growing agency, the seat math gets uncomfortable fast.

Option 3: HetrixTools (free tier, agency-aware)

Best for: budget-first users who want hosted monitoring without self-hosting.

HetrixTools is a smaller, scrappier hosted option with a usable free tier covering uptime monitoring, plus server monitoring and blacklist monitoring (useful if you handle client email deliverability). It's hosted, so it dodges Uptime Kuma's "who monitors the monitor" problem, and the free tier doesn't carry UptimeRobot's commercial-use restriction drama.

The trade-off is scope and polish: it's a leaner product, and if you need client-facing status pages, per-endpoint SSL/DNS/domain coverage across a large roster, or a tool your whole team logs into, you'll outgrow the free tier and should compare paid plans carefully at that point.

Option 4: Sentinel (paid, built for the client-site use case)

Best for: freelancers and agencies monitoring a roster of client sites who want one flat, quotable bill.

This is us, so here's the pitch as plainly as I can make it. Sentinel exists because most monitoring pricing punishes exactly the person Freshping served: someone responsible for 20, 50, 100 other people's websites.

What's different:

• Every endpoint gets every check. On any paid plan, uptime, SSL expiry, DNS changes, and domain expiry are monitored on each site you add (the free plan covers uptime and SSL). No separate quotas, no choosing which 50 clients deserve SSL monitoring.
• Flat plans, no per-seat fees. Starter is $14/month for 25 endpoints, Pro is $29/month for 100. A 50-site agency pays $29. For comparison, the same roster runs roughly $76–95/month on Pingdom's agency tier, ~$108/month on Better Stack, or ~$140/month on Cronitor at July 2026 pricing.
• No growth cliffs. Adding site #101 moves you from Pro ($29) to Business ($59), which also gets you 30-second checks, unlimited team seats, and status pages on your own custom domain. Some competitors triple your bill at that same threshold.
• A free plan to start: 10 monitors with 5-minute checks, no card required. If you're a freelancer with a small roster, that might simply be your plan.

What we're not: the cheapest tool on the internet. StatusCake, Updown, and Phare will all undercut us on raw price, and UptimeRobot's free tier has more monitors than ours. If price-per-monitor is your only axis, buy on that axis. Sentinel wins on fit: when the sites belong to clients, the team needs shared access, and you want a bill you can quote inside a care plan without an asterisk.

Quick comparison

The bottom line

• Hobby projects, technical user: run Uptime Kuma and enjoy the $0 bill.
• Personal sites, want zero setup: UptimeRobot free is fine, for non-commercial use.
• Tight budget, hosted, small roster: try HetrixTools.
• Client sites, a team, and an SLA to keep: that's the job Sentinel was built for. Start free: monitor 10 sites, no card required.

Whatever you choose, choose it this week. Freshping's shutdown means every site on your old list is flying blind right now, and the worst monitoring tool on this page beats the one you no longer have.