UptimeRobot vs API Status Check — Which Do You Actually Need?

by API Status Check

You've got UptimeRobot pinging your servers every 5 minutes. Green checkmarks across the board. Life is good.

Then your users start complaining. Your app is broken. But your monitoring says everything is fine.

The problem? It wasn't YOUR server that went down. It was Stripe's API. Or OpenAI's. Or Cloudflare's. And UptimeRobot had no idea, because it was never watching them.

This isn't a knock on UptimeRobot — it's genuinely great at what it does. But it solves a different problem than API Status Check. Let's break down when you need which.

The Core Difference

UptimeRobot monitors your infrastructure — your servers, websites, ports, and SSL certificates. It tells you when YOUR stuff goes down.

API Status Check monitors third-party APIs — OpenAI, Stripe, AWS, Discord, Vercel, and 100+ others. It tells you when THEIR stuff goes down.

These are complementary tools, not competitors. Here's why that distinction matters more than you think.

What UptimeRobot Does

UptimeRobot is one of the most popular uptime monitoring tools, and for good reason:

  • HTTP/HTTPS monitoring — Ping your endpoints at intervals from 30 seconds to 5 minutes
  • Port monitoring — Check if specific ports are open (SSH, SMTP, custom services)
  • Keyword monitoring — Verify specific content appears on your pages
  • SSL certificate monitoring — Get alerts before certificates expire
  • Status pages — Create branded status pages for your customers
  • Alerting — Email, SMS, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, webhooks
  • Generous free tier — 50 monitors with 5-minute intervals

Pricing:

  • Free: 50 monitors, 5-min intervals, 1 status page
  • Solo: $7/month — 60-sec intervals, SSL/DNS monitoring
  • Team: $29/month — 100 monitors, all integrations
  • Enterprise: $54/month — 30-sec intervals, unlimited status pages

UptimeRobot is excellent for monitoring infrastructure you control. If your web server goes down, your database stops responding, or your SSL cert expires — UptimeRobot will catch it.

What UptimeRobot Doesn't Do

UptimeRobot monitors endpoints you configure. It can't tell you:

  • Is OpenAI having an outage right now? You'd need to add their status page URL as a keyword monitor, parse the response, and hope they update their status page promptly (spoiler: they often don't).
  • Is Stripe's API degraded? A keyword monitor on status.stripe.com might work, but you'd need separate monitors for each API you depend on, each configured manually.
  • Which of the 15 APIs your app uses are currently healthy? You'd need 15+ monitors just for third-party status pages, eating into your free tier limit.
  • Is the problem on your end or theirs? When your app breaks, UptimeRobot tells you your endpoint is down. It doesn't tell you WHY — was it your code, your hosting, or a third-party dependency?

This is the gap API Status Check fills.

What API Status Check Does

API Status Check monitors 100+ popular APIs and developer services in real-time:

  • Real-time status dashboard — One page showing the health of every major API: OpenAI, Stripe, AWS, GitHub, Discord, Twilio, Vercel, Cloudflare, and 96 more
  • Outage alerts — Get notified via Discord webhooks, Slack webhooks, or RSS when APIs you depend on go down
  • Status badges — Embed live status indicators in your README, documentation, or internal dashboards
  • Historical data — See when outages happened and how long they lasted
  • Free JSON API — Programmatically check API status from your own monitoring tools
  • "Is X Down?" guides — Detailed troubleshooting guides for major API outages

Pricing: Free. Completely. No paid tiers, no monitor limits, no feature gates.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature UptimeRobot (Free) UptimeRobot (Paid) API Status Check
Monitors your servers ✅ 50 monitors ✅ Unlimited ❌ Not its job
Monitors third-party APIs ⚠️ Manual setup ⚠️ Manual setup ✅ 100+ built-in
Check interval 5 min 30 sec Real-time
Status pages ✅ 1 page ✅ Unlimited ✅ Global dashboard
Status badges ❌ ❌ ✅ For any API
Slack/Discord alerts ✅ (paid) ✅ ✅ (free)
RSS feed ❌ ❌ ✅
JSON API ✅ (paid) ✅ ✅ (free)
SSL monitoring ❌ ✅ ❌ Not its job
Port monitoring ✅ ✅ ❌ Not its job
Price $0 $7-54/mo $0

When to Use UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is the right choice when you need to:

  • Monitor your own websites and servers — Is your site up? Is your API responding?
  • Check SSL certificate expiry — Don't let certs expire silently
  • Monitor specific ports — SSH, SMTP, database ports
  • Create status pages for your customers — Branded, hosted status pages
  • Track your own uptime SLA — Historical uptime data for your services

If you run a website, SaaS product, or any internet-facing service, you should have UptimeRobot (or a similar tool) monitoring it.

When to Use API Status Check

API Status Check is the right choice when you need to:

  • Know if a third-party API is down before your users tell you — Is it your code or OpenAI's outage?
  • Monitor all your API dependencies in one place — Instead of checking 15 different status pages
  • Get outage alerts for services you depend on — Slack/Discord notifications when Stripe, AWS, or Vercel have issues
  • Show your team which external services are healthy — Embed status badges in your internal dashboards
  • Reduce debugging time — When your app breaks, check API Status Check first. If your dependency is red, stop debugging your code.

The Real Answer: Use Both

The most effective monitoring setup combines both approaches:

  1. UptimeRobot (or similar) monitors your infrastructure — servers, endpoints, SSL, ports
  2. API Status Check monitors their infrastructure — every third-party API your app depends on

When something breaks:

  • UptimeRobot says your endpoint is down ➜ Check API Status Check
  • API Status Check shows Stripe is degraded ➜ It's not your fault, communicate to users
  • API Status Check shows all green ➜ The bug is in your code, start debugging

This two-layer approach eliminates the worst kind of outage: the one where you spend 2 hours debugging perfectly working code because a third-party API was silently failing.

Quick Setup (5 Minutes)

Step 1: Keep your UptimeRobot monitors as-is. They're doing their job.

Step 2: Go to apistatuscheck.com and bookmark it. That's your third-party API dashboard.

Step 3: Set up a Discord or Slack webhook for the APIs you depend on:

Step 4: Embed status badges in your README for your critical dependencies:

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

Step 5: Subscribe to the RSS feed for all API status changes.

Total cost of both tools: $0 (UptimeRobot free tier + API Status Check).

The Bottom Line

UptimeRobot and API Status Check aren't competitors — they're the two halves of a complete monitoring strategy. One watches your stuff, the other watches everyone else's.

If you're only using UptimeRobot, you have a blind spot for every API your app depends on. If you're only using API Status Check, you're not monitoring your own infrastructure.

Use both. It takes 5 minutes to set up, costs nothing, and saves you from the most frustrating debugging sessions of your career.

API Status Check monitors 100+ APIs in real-time. Check it out — it's free.

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