Honest Comparison
Two monitoring tools built for different problems. Pingdom monitors uptime and availability. Ahoj Metrics monitors Lighthouse performance and Core Web Vitals.
Pingdom (by SolarWinds) is primarily an uptime and availability monitoring tool. It checks whether your site is up, how fast it responds, and alerts you when it goes down. It also offers Real User Monitoring (RUM) and transaction monitoring for checkout flows and login forms.
Ahoj Metrics is a Lighthouse performance monitoring tool. It runs full Google Lighthouse audits from multiple global regions, tracking Core Web Vitals, performance scores, accessibility, and SEO metrics over time.
These tools solve different problems. Pingdom answers "is my site up and responding?" Ahoj Metrics answers "how does my site perform for users in different parts of the world?"
Many teams use both: Pingdom for uptime alerts, and a Lighthouse-based tool for performance monitoring.
| Feature | Ahoj Metrics | Pingdom |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Lighthouse performance monitoring | Uptime & availability monitoring |
| Testing Engine | Google Lighthouse | Proprietary (HTTP checks, page load) |
| Uptime Monitoring | No | Yes (checks every 60 seconds) |
| Lighthouse Scores | Yes (full audit) | No |
| Core Web Vitals (Lab) | Yes (LCP, CLS, FCP, TBT) | No |
| Performance Regions | 18 regions (simultaneous) | 100+ probe locations |
| Simultaneous Multi-Region | Yes | Yes (uptime checks from multiple probes) |
| Transaction Monitoring | No | Yes (login flows, checkout, forms) |
| Real User Monitoring (RUM) | No | Yes (separate plan) |
| Real User Data (CrUX) | Yes (field data lookup) | No |
| Page Speed Analysis | Lighthouse-based (full audit) | Basic (load time, page size, requests) |
| Free Tier | Yes (20 audits/month) | No (30-day trial only) |
| Starting Price | $0 (free tier) | ~$10-15/month |
| Team Features | Yes (Studio plan+) | Yes |
| API Access | Coming soon | Yes |
| Alert Notifications | Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, webhooks | |
| Waterfall Charts | No | Yes (basic) |
| Data Retention | 30 days - unlimited | Varies by plan |
| SEO Audit | Yes (Lighthouse SEO) | No |
| Accessibility Audit | Yes (Lighthouse A11y) | No |
| Status Pages | No | Yes |
We believe in being honest. Here's where Pingdom has the edge:
This is Pingdom's bread and butter. It checks your site every 60 seconds from 100+ locations and alerts you immediately when it goes down. Ahoj Metrics doesn't do uptime monitoring at all.
Pingdom sends alerts via email, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, and webhooks. Ahoj Metrics currently only sends email alerts.
Pingdom can simulate user flows like logging in, adding items to a cart, and completing checkout. If your checkout form breaks, Pingdom catches it. Ahoj Metrics doesn't monitor transactions.
Pingdom offers JavaScript-based RUM that instruments your own visitors by embedding a snippet on your pages — giving you a live feed of real session data from your specific users. Ahoj Metrics offers CrUX field data (aggregated Google Chrome data) rather than first-party RUM.
Pingdom is part of SolarWinds, a major IT monitoring company. It integrates with enterprise incident management workflows and has been trusted by large organizations for years.
Pingdom can generate public status pages showing your uptime history. Useful for communicating reliability to customers.
Here's what Ahoj Metrics does differently:
Ahoj Metrics runs complete Google Lighthouse audits, giving you performance scores, Core Web Vitals, accessibility scores, SEO scores, and specific recommendations for improvement. Pingdom measures basic page load time and size but doesn't run Lighthouse.
Google uses Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FCP) as ranking factors. Ahoj Metrics tracks these from multiple regions over time. Pingdom doesn't measure Core Web Vitals.
See how your Lighthouse score varies across 18 global regions in a single audit. Your site might score 95 in London and 55 in Mumbai. This kind of regional performance insight isn't something Pingdom provides.
Ahoj Metrics has a permanent free plan with 20 audits per month. Pingdom offers a 30-day trial, then you must pay.
If your site is "up" but slow (Lighthouse score dropping from 90 to 60), Pingdom won't catch that. Ahoj Metrics will, because it monitors actual Lighthouse performance, not just availability.
Lighthouse audits include SEO and accessibility scores. If a deployment breaks your heading structure or removes alt tags, Ahoj Metrics surfaces that.
Ahoj Metrics includes CrUX field data lookup — powered by Google's Chrome User Experience Report. Look up any domain and see p75 values and Good/Needs Improvement/Poor distributions for LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB. No snippet to install. Pingdom has no CrUX integration.
| Ahoj Metrics | Pingdom | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes (20 audits/month) | No (30-day trial) |
| Entry price | $35/month (Solo) | ~$10-15/month (Synthetic) |
| What you get | 100 audits, 5 monitors, Lighthouse scores from 5 regions | 10 uptime monitors, 1 page speed check, SMS alerts |
| Mid-tier | $69/month (Studio) | Scales by monitor count |
| High-tier | $299/month (Agency) | Custom enterprise pricing |
These tools have different pricing models because they do different things. Pingdom charges per monitor/check. Ahoj Metrics charges per audit (which can test multiple regions simultaneously). Direct price comparison is tricky because the value they deliver is different.
See our full pricing page for details.
Pingdom for uptime monitoring ("is the site up?") and transaction monitoring ("does checkout work?"). Ahoj Metrics for performance monitoring ("how fast is the site globally?") and Core Web Vitals tracking ("are we meeting Google's thresholds?"). These tools complement each other well because they monitor fundamentally different things.
Track your Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals from 18 global regions. 20 audits per month. No credit card required.
Start FreeAlready using Pingdom for uptime? Add Ahoj Metrics for performance. Different tools for different problems.
Not entirely. They monitor different things. Pingdom monitors uptime (is your site up?) and can simulate transactions (does checkout work?). Ahoj Metrics monitors Lighthouse performance (how fast is your site?). If you only care about performance and don't need uptime monitoring, Ahoj Metrics can work on its own. If you need uptime alerts, you'll want to keep Pingdom or a similar uptime tool.
No. Pingdom measures page load time, page size, and number of requests using its own testing methodology. It doesn't run Google Lighthouse audits or measure Core Web Vitals in the way Lighthouse does.
No. Ahoj Metrics runs scheduled Lighthouse audits. If your site is completely down, the audit will fail, but that's not the same as dedicated uptime monitoring that checks every 60 seconds with instant alerting.
Both matter, but Google specifically uses Core Web Vitals (measured by Lighthouse) as ranking factors. A site that's always up but slow will rank lower than a fast site. Ahoj Metrics tracks the specific metrics Google uses for ranking.
Yes, and many teams do. Pingdom handles uptime and availability. Ahoj Metrics handles Lighthouse performance and Core Web Vitals. They don't overlap or conflict.
Not in the traditional RUM sense — we don't embed a JavaScript snippet to track your own visitors. Instead, Ahoj Metrics includes CrUX field data lookup, which uses Google's Chrome User Experience Report to show real Chrome user experience for any domain. It requires no installation and works for any publicly accessible site.