TLDR: For monitoring third-party APIs use API Status Check (free) or StatusGator (enterprise), for your own endpoints use UptimeRobot or Freshping (free), and for full observability use Better Stack or Datadog. The optimal developer stack combines third-party status monitoring with endpoint checks for complete coverage.

10 Best API Monitoring Tools in 2026

If your app depends on third-party APIs — and in 2026, whose doesn't — you need to know when they go down before your users start filing tickets. The right monitoring tool catches outages in minutes, not hours.

But "API monitoring" means different things to different people. Do you need to monitor your own API's uptime? Track when third-party services like OpenAI or Stripe have incidents? Or build internal dashboards showing the health of your entire dependency chain?

We tested and compared 10 tools across these use cases. Here's what we found.

Quick Comparison

Tool	Best For	Price	APIs Tracked	Alerts
API Status Check	Third-party API monitoring	Free	100+	✅
UptimeRobot	Monitoring your own endpoints	Free / $7/mo	Custom	✅
Better Stack	Full-stack observability	$24/mo	Custom	✅
StatusGator	Enterprise status aggregation	$19/mo	6,000+	✅
Pingdom	Website uptime	$15/mo	Custom	✅
IsDown	Third-party status aggregation	Free / $29/mo	2,500+	✅
Checkly	Synthetic API monitoring	Free / $30/mo	Custom	✅
Datadog	Enterprise APM	$15/host/mo	Custom	✅
Freshping	Basic uptime checks	Free	Custom (up to 50)	✅
Downdetector	Consumer service outages	Free (ads)	10,000+	Limited

1. API Status Check — Best for Developers Tracking Third-Party APIs

Price: Free
Website: apistatuscheck.com

API Status Check monitors 100+ developer APIs and services — including OpenAI, Stripe, AWS, GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, and more — pulling from official status pages every 5 minutes. When something breaks, you know within minutes, not hours.

What sets it apart is the developer-first approach. Free embeddable status badges for your README, a clean API for building custom dashboards, and zero ads. It's built for developers who need to quickly check "is the API I depend on actually down right now, or is it my code?"

Key Features

• 100+ APIs monitored in real-time (5-minute intervals)
• Embeddable status badges for GitHub READMEs and docs
• "Is X Down" pages — instant outage checks for popular APIs
• Uptime comparisons — compare reliability across similar services
• Incident history — view past outages with timeline data
• Free API access — build custom dashboards
• No signup required — just use it

When to Choose

You're a developer who depends on APIs like OpenAI, Stripe, or AWS and want a single dashboard to monitor all of them without paying for enterprise tools.

Limitations

• Focused on developer APIs (not consumer services like gaming or telecom)
• No synthetic monitoring of your own endpoints

3. Better Stack (formerly Better Uptime) — Best All-in-One for Growing Teams

Price: From $24/month
Website: betterstack.com

Better Stack combines uptime monitoring, incident management, and on-call scheduling in one platform. It's what you graduate to when UptimeRobot isn't enough and you need proper incident workflows.

The monitoring is solid — multi-region checks, screenshots of failures, and detailed response time analytics. But the real value is the incident management: on-call rotations, escalation policies, and post-mortem workflows built in.

Key Features

• Multi-region uptime monitoring (every 30 seconds)
• Screenshot capture on failures
• Built-in incident management + on-call scheduling
• Status pages with subscriber management
• Integrations with PagerDuty, Slack, Linear, Jira

When to Choose

Your team is growing past the "one person checks the dashboard" stage and you need structured incident response alongside monitoring.

Limitations

• More expensive than simple uptime checkers
• Overkill for solo developers
• Primarily monitors your own services, not third-party dependencies

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4. StatusGator — Best for Enterprise Third-Party Monitoring

Price: From $19/month (free tier available)
Website: statusgator.com

StatusGator is the enterprise answer to "what third-party services are down?" It aggregates over 6,000 official status pages into one dashboard and adds early detection by analyzing traffic patterns — catching outages before providers even acknowledge them.

For teams managing complex dependency chains across cloud providers, SaaS tools, and infrastructure services, StatusGator provides the unified view that would take dozens of open tabs otherwise.

Key Features

• 6,000+ services tracked from official status pages
• Early outage detection (traffic analysis + crowdsourced reports)
• Component-level monitoring (e.g., AWS S3 vs EC2)
• Branded status pages
• Private Status Ingestion for enterprise (Microsoft 365, Zendesk)

When to Choose

You're an IT team or platform engineering group managing dozens of SaaS dependencies and need a single pane of glass with enterprise features.

Limitations

• Can be expensive for small teams
• Focused on status page aggregation (not synthetic monitoring)
• Enterprise features locked behind higher tiers

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5. Pingdom — Best for Website Performance + Uptime

Price: From $15/month
Website: pingdom.com

Pingdom (now owned by SolarWinds) has been in the uptime monitoring game since 2007. It combines uptime checks with real-user monitoring (RUM) and page speed analysis — useful if you care about both availability and performance.

Key Features

• Uptime monitoring from 100+ global locations
• Page speed monitoring with Web Vitals
• Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Transaction monitoring (multi-step workflows)
• Root cause analysis

When to Choose

You need combined uptime + performance monitoring and want a mature, battle-tested platform.

Limitations

• Pricing can escalate quickly with multiple check types
• UI shows its age
• Owned by SolarWinds (some teams avoid post-breach)

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6. IsDown — Best Budget Third-Party Status Aggregator

Price: Free (3 services) / From $29/month
Website: isdown.app

IsDown is a cleaner, simpler alternative to StatusGator for teams that don't need 6,000 services. It monitors official status pages and sends alerts when your specific dependencies have issues. The free tier covers 3 services — enough to monitor your critical dependencies.

Key Features

• 2,500+ services tracked
• Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, webhook integrations
• Custom status pages
• API access on all plans
• Component-level monitoring

When to Choose

You want third-party status monitoring like StatusGator but at a lower price point, and you don't need enterprise features.

Limitations

• Free tier limited to 3 services
• Less early detection capability than StatusGator
• Smaller service catalog

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7. Checkly — Best for Synthetic API Testing + Monitoring

Price: Free (limited) / From $30/month
Website: checklyhq.com

Checkly takes a different approach: instead of just pinging endpoints, it runs actual API tests (using Playwright and Node.js) as monitoring checks. This means you can verify not just "is the endpoint responding" but "does it return the right data?"

If you're already writing API tests, Checkly turns them into continuous monitoring. It's infrastructure-as-code native, with Terraform and Pulumi support.

Key Features

• API checks and browser checks (Playwright-based)
• Multi-step API workflow monitoring
• Monitoring-as-code (version control your checks)
• Parallel checks from 20+ global locations
• Detailed dashboards with request/response analysis

When to Choose

You want to go beyond simple ping checks and actually verify your API's behavior in production. Especially powerful for teams that already use Playwright.

Limitations

• More complex to set up than simple uptime monitors
• Monitors your own APIs, not third-party dependencies
• Free tier is quite limited

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8. Datadog — Best for Enterprise APM + Monitoring

Price: From $15/host/month
Website: datadoghq.com

Datadog is the 800-pound gorilla of monitoring. It does everything: APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, synthetic monitoring, real-user monitoring, and more. If you're running a complex microservices architecture, Datadog gives you the deepest visibility.

Key Features

• Full APM with distributed tracing
• Infrastructure monitoring (servers, containers, serverless)
• Synthetic monitoring (API + browser tests)
• Log management and analytics
• 700+ integrations
• AI-powered anomaly detection

When to Choose

You're an engineering team that needs deep observability across your entire stack and has the budget for it.

Limitations

• Expensive — costs add up fast with multiple products
• Complex to set up and configure
• Overkill for monitoring third-party dependencies
• Pricing is opaque (per host, per event, per log)

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9. Freshping — Best Free Basic Uptime Monitor

Price: Free (50 monitors)
Website: freshping.io

Freshping by Freshworks offers a generous free tier: 50 monitors with 1-minute check intervals. That's better than UptimeRobot's free tier (which caps at 5-minute intervals). If you just need basic uptime monitoring without paying anything, Freshping is hard to beat.

Key Features

• 50 monitors free with 1-minute intervals
• Multi-location checks (10 global locations)
• Public status pages
• Integrations with Slack, Freshdesk
• SSL certificate monitoring

When to Choose

You want free uptime monitoring with better check intervals than UptimeRobot's free tier.

Limitations

• Fewer advanced features than paid tools
• Limited alerting options
• No incident management or on-call features
• Freshworks ecosystem lock-in

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10. Downdetector — Best for Consumer Service Outage Awareness

Price: Free (ad-supported)
Website: downdetector.com

Downdetector is the world's most recognized outage tracking site, covering 10,000+ services from gaming (PlayStation, Xbox, Fortnite) to telecom (T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon) to social media (Instagram, TikTok, Discord). It relies entirely on crowdsourced user reports.

If you're wondering "is Netflix actually down right now?", Downdetector is where everyone goes. But for developer API monitoring, it has significant gaps.

Key Features

• Massive service catalog (10,000+)
• Real-time crowdsourced reports
• Outage maps showing geographic distribution
• Historical outage data
• Comment threads during outages

When to Choose

You're checking if a popular consumer service is down and want to see if others are experiencing the same issue.

Limitations

• Crowdsourced data (false positives during high traffic)
• Limited developer API coverage (no Supabase, Vercel, Render, etc.)
• Ad-heavy experience
• No embeddable badges or API access (free tier)
• Consumer-focused, not developer-focused

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How to Choose the Right Tool

The "best" tool depends on what you're monitoring:

"Are the APIs I depend on working?"

→ API Status Check (free) or StatusGator (enterprise)

You depend on OpenAI, Stripe, AWS, etc. You need to know when they break so you can adjust — switch to fallbacks, notify users, or at least stop debugging your own code.

"Is my own API/website up?"

→ UptimeRobot (free/cheap) or Better Stack (growing teams)

You need to monitor your own endpoints. Start with UptimeRobot's free tier and graduate to Better Stack when you need incident management.

"Are my API responses correct?"

→ Checkly (synthetic monitoring)

Simple uptime checks aren't enough — you need to verify response bodies, test multi-step workflows, and catch regressions.

"I need to see everything in one place"

→ Datadog (if budget allows) or Better Stack (mid-market)

Full observability: traces, logs, metrics, and monitoring in one platform.

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The Developer's Monitoring Stack

For most development teams, the optimal setup is a combination:

1. API Status Check — Monitor your third-party API dependencies (free)
2. UptimeRobot or Freshping — Monitor your own endpoints (free)
3. Better Stack or PagerDuty — Incident management and on-call (when you need it)

This gives you complete coverage — knowing when both your services AND your dependencies have issues — without spending hundreds per month on enterprise tools.

Start Monitoring Now

Don't wait for your next outage to set up monitoring. Check your API dependencies right now — it takes 10 seconds and costs nothing.

Add a status badge to your README:

![OpenAI Status](https://apistatuscheck.com/api/badge/openai)
![Stripe Status](https://apistatuscheck.com/api/badge/stripe)
![AWS Status](https://apistatuscheck.com/api/badge/aws)

Your future self (and your on-call engineer) will thank you.

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Last updated: February 2026. We'll keep this comparison current as tools evolve.