Checkly alternative for teams that do not need browser synthetics
Logdash checks whether your API answers and how fast, with no browser and no test code to maintain, which is all that most Checkly accounts were actually doing.
Checkly is a synthetics product. You write Playwright, it runs in hosted runners on a schedule, and you find out the checkout flow broke before a customer does. That is real value, and nothing on this page replaces it. A signup form can break in a way that still returns 200 on every request, and only a browser catches that.
The trouble is that plenty of Checkly accounts are not doing that. They are hitting /health, hitting /api/v1, and sending an email when one of them stops answering. For that you are carrying a browser test suite. A selector changes, two checks go red, and someone spends an afternoon working out whether the alert was real. That is a tax on monitoring you did not need in the first place.
Logdash does not do browser synthetics at all. It will not click a button, fill a form or run your specs, and there is no roadmap where it does. It hits a URL on a schedule, records the status code and the response time, keeps the history and messages you when that changes. If your monitoring-as-code repo is really four HTTP checks written in TypeScript, this is the smaller version of it. There is also a push monitor for the jobs that have no URL at all, so the nightly export ends up in the same list as the API.
A health endpoint worth checking
// Return 200 only when the things you depend on are actually up.
app.get('/health', async (_req, res) => {
try {
await db.query('select 1');
await redis.ping();
res.status(200).json({ status: 'ok' });
} catch {
res.status(503).json({ status: 'degraded' });
}
});- 1 Ship the endpoint Deploy /health and confirm it returns 503 when the database is down, not a 200 with a sad message in the body.
- 2 Point a monitor at it Add a service in Logdash, paste the URL, and it starts recording status codes and response times on your plan interval.
- 3 Attach Telegram Connect a Telegram channel. The next check that does not come back 200 sends the alert to Telegram, and the response time chart shows whether it was already sliding.
Logdash vs Checkly
| Feature | Logdash | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Browser synthetics | Not built. No browser, no Playwright, ever. | Playwright checks in hosted runners |
| Assertions on the response | Status code and response time only | Assertions on body, headers and timing |
| Monitoring as code | Dashboard. No CLI, no Terraform provider. | CLI and Terraform provider, checks live in your repo |
| What you maintain | A URL and an interval | A test suite that has to stay green |
| Logs and metrics from your own app | Eight SDKs into the same project | Not what the product is for |
| Public status page | Public dashboard, custom domain on Pro | Public status pages |
| Open source | MIT, full source on GitHub | Commercial SaaS, the CLI is open source |
When Checkly is the better pick
- You need to know that a real login, checkout or signup still works end to end. Logdash cannot tell you that, because it never opens a browser.
- Your checks belong in version control and in CI. Checkly has a CLI and a Terraform provider. Logdash has a dashboard.
- A 200 is not enough. An empty products array behind a healthy status code is still a bad day, and only an assertion catches it.
- You already have Playwright specs that work. Hosting them somewhere is a smaller decision than deciding you no longer need them.
What migrating means here
If your Checkly account is API checks on a handful of URLs, this is an afternoon: one service per URL, paste the URL, attach Telegram. If it is browser checks, do not migrate them, because there is nowhere for them to land. The split most teams settle on is Playwright for the two or three flows that make money and a plain HTTP monitor for everything else, and the second half should not cost what the first half costs. Before you cancel anything, look at which Checkly checks actually paged you in the last quarter. Usually it is the health endpoints, and the browser suite has been failing on selectors.
Is there an open source Checkly alternative?
Logdash is MIT licensed with the source on GitHub, but it is a different shape: HTTP monitoring, logs and metrics, no browser synthetics. If you want open source Playwright synthetics specifically, you are looking at running Playwright on your own CI, not at Logdash.
Does Logdash run Playwright tests?
No. It makes an HTTP request and records the status code and the response time. There is no browser and no test runner anywhere in it.
Can I self-host Logdash?
Not in production yet. It runs locally for development and a supported production install is open work on GitHub, so the hosted version is the real option today.
Can Logdash monitor cron jobs as well?
Yes. A push monitor gives you a URL your job POSTs to when it finishes, and the monitor goes down when a check window passes with no ping.