Choosing between Sentinel and StatusCake usually comes down to one question: do you need a lightweight, no-cost way to watch a handful of endpoints, or a more mature monitoring platform with status pages, incident tooling and higher monitor counts once you’re willing to pay? Sentinel is a newer uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring service from Elbah Group, built around a free tier for small projects and early-stage products. StatusCake is an established UK-based monitoring provider with a “free for life” plan and several paid tiers aimed at growing teams and businesses. This article compares both products feature by feature — free plan limits, monitoring types, alerting, status pages, and pricing — using only publicly confirmed data, so you can judge which one fits your situation rather than assuming either is the automatic winner.
Sentinel vs StatusCake at a Glance
| Sentinel (Free) | StatusCake (Free) | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | £0/month | £0/month, free for life |
| Uptime monitoring | Included | Included (10 monitors) |
| SSL monitoring | Included | Included (1 monitor) |
| DNS monitoring | Included | Included via domain monitoring |
| Domain expiry monitoring | Included | Included (1 monitor) |
| Heartbeat monitoring | Included | Included (Push monitoring) |
| Minimum polling interval | 5 minutes | 5 minutes |
| Historical data retention | 7 days | Not publicly confirmed |
| Incident management | Not included (Free); included on all paid plans | Not publicly confirmed on free plan |
| Maintenance windows | Not included (Free); included on all paid plans | Not confirmed as free-plan feature (paid plans confirmed) |
| Status pages | Not included (Free); included on all paid plans | Not included (separate paid product from around $12.46/month) |
| Teams | 1 login user, 1 notification user | Not publicly confirmed on free plan |
| Best suited to | Solo developers and small projects needing all core check types free | Users wanting more monitor slots (10) free, with a clear upgrade path |
What Is Sentinel?
Sentinel is a website and infrastructure monitoring product from Elbah Group covering uptime, SSL certificate, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat (cron/push) checks. Its free plan is built for individuals and small projects that need core reliability monitoring without a subscription: up to three monitors, a 5-minute minimum polling interval, and seven days of historical data. All five monitoring types are available on the free tier — there’s no need to upgrade just to unlock SSL or DNS checks. Features that sit above basic monitoring, such as incident management, maintenance windows and public status pages, are not part of the free plan. Sentinel’s paid tiers are now publicly priced: Individual at £12/month, Team at £30/month and Agency at £65/month, each raising monitor counts, login users and notification contacts, with Team and Agency also adding full domain/SSL history and DNS monitoring.
What Is StatusCake?
StatusCake is a UK-based website monitoring platform that has operated a free tier since its early days, marketed as “free for life.” Its free plan covers 10 uptime monitors with 5-minute checks, one page speed monitor, one domain monitor with expiry, blacklist and DNS record-change alerts, and one SSL monitor with certificate expiry and mixed-content checks. Push (heartbeat) monitoring is available on both free and paid accounts. Alerting on the free plan works through roughly 14–15 third-party integrations, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord. Paid plans — Superior and Business — raise monitor counts substantially, shorten check intervals to as low as 30 seconds, add server monitoring, and support larger teams. Status pages are sold as a separate product rather than bundled into any monitoring plan.
Sentinel Free vs StatusCake Free
| Feature | Sentinel Free | StatusCake Free |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £0/month | £0/month |
| Max monitors | 3 (shared across all types) | 10 uptime + 1 page speed + 1 domain + 1 SSL (separate allowances) |
| Login users | 1 | Not publicly confirmed |
| Notification users | 1 | Not publicly confirmed |
| Minimum polling interval | 5 minutes | 5 minutes (uptime); SSL checks every 30 minutes; domain checks every 7 days |
| Historical data retention | 7 days | Not publicly confirmed |
| Uptime monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| SSL monitoring | Yes | Yes (1 monitor) |
| DNS monitoring | Yes | Yes, via domain record monitoring |
| Domain expiry monitoring | Yes | Yes (1 monitor) |
| Heartbeat monitoring | Yes | Yes (Push monitoring) |
| Incident management | No (Yes on all paid plans) | Not publicly confirmed |
| Maintenance windows | No (Yes on all paid plans) | Not publicly confirmed on free plan |
| Public status pages | No (Yes on all paid plans) | No (separate paid product) |
The practical difference is allowance structure. StatusCake’s free plan gives more raw monitor slots but splits them rigidly by type — you get exactly one SSL monitor and one domain monitor regardless of need. Sentinel gives a flat pool of three monitors that can be allocated across uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry or heartbeat checks as needed, with no per-type ceiling. Neither free plan includes incident management, maintenance windows or status pages. If you want to try Sentinel’s free plan for uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring in one place, you can sign up and have monitors running in minutes.
Uptime Monitoring
Both platforms check site availability down to a 5-minute minimum interval on their free plans. StatusCake allows up to 10 uptime monitors free, versus Sentinel’s shared pool of 3 monitors across all check types. If uptime checks alone are the priority and you need to watch more than three endpoints without paying, StatusCake’s free allowance goes further. If you need a mix of uptime plus SSL, DNS, domain and heartbeat checks on a small number of endpoints, Sentinel’s flat allowance avoids StatusCake’s fixed one-monitor-per-type restriction on SSL and domain checks.
SSL Monitoring
Sentinel includes SSL monitoring in its free plan as part of the shared 3-monitor pool, checked at the same 5-minute minimum interval as other monitor types. StatusCake’s free plan includes exactly one SSL monitor, checked every 30 minutes, covering certificate expiry, mixed-content alerts and certificate scoring. Sentinel checks more frequently on the monitors it covers; StatusCake offers deeper certificate diagnostics (mixed-content detection, scoring) but caps free SSL monitoring at a single certificate.
DNS Monitoring
Sentinel offers DNS monitoring as a standard, included check type on its free plan. StatusCake handles DNS monitoring as part of its domain monitoring product — record-change detection and rule-based alerting on DNS records, bundled with the single free domain monitor and checked on a 7-day interval. Sentinel’s DNS checks run independently of domain expiry checks and at a faster 5-minute interval; StatusCake ties DNS record monitoring to its domain product with a much slower check cadence on the free tier.
Domain Expiry Monitoring
Both products monitor domain expiry on their free plans. Sentinel includes it as one of the five core check types drawing from the shared 3-monitor pool. StatusCake provides one free domain monitor covering expiry alerts, blacklist monitoring and DNS record monitoring together, checked every 7 days. For a single domain, StatusCake’s bundled domain monitor covers more ground (blacklist status alongside expiry); Sentinel keeps domain expiry as a distinct, faster-polling check.
Heartbeat Monitoring
Sentinel includes heartbeat monitoring — for cron jobs, scheduled scripts and other “check-in” style processes — as one of its five free-plan check types. StatusCake calls the equivalent feature Push Monitoring, available on both its free and paid plans, with an API for creating heartbeat checks and logging performance data per check-in. Both products support this monitoring type on their free tiers; StatusCake’s implementation has existed longer and is documented with a dedicated API, though some third-party comparisons note its push monitoring as less feature-rich than dedicated heartbeat-first tools.
Alerts and Integrations
StatusCake’s free plan supports alerting through roughly 14–15 third-party integrations, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord. Sentinel’s free plan supports 1 notification user; its paid plans confirm exactly which alert channels unlock at each tier. Individual (£12/month) adds email alerts, capped at 500/month, plus Discord. Team (£30/month) raises the email cap to 5,000/month and adds Microsoft Teams and Slack. Agency (£65/month) raises the email cap again to 25,000/month and adds call and SMS alerting, each with 250 credits included. StatusCake documents its free-tier integration count explicitly; Sentinel’s integration breadth is now confirmed at the paid-plan level, though which channels (if any beyond count) sit on Sentinel’s free tier remains unspecified.
Incident Management and Maintenance Windows
Sentinel’s free plan does not include incident management or maintenance windows — this is stated plainly rather than buried in a footnote. Neither feature is part of the free tier’s scope. Sentinel’s paid plans, however, confirm both capabilities: Individual, Team and Agency all include incident management and maintenance windows as standard. For StatusCake, maintenance windows are confirmed as available on its paid plans (allowing scheduled downtime without triggering alerts, with recurrence options); whether maintenance windows extend to the free tier is not publicly confirmed. StatusCake’s incident management capability on the free plan is likewise not publicly confirmed from official sources. Anyone who needs formal incident tracking or scheduled maintenance suppression today should confirm which plan they’re comparing — on Sentinel, any paid tier covers both.
Status Pages
Status pages are disabled on Sentinel’s free plan, but all three paid tiers — Individual, Team and Agency — confirm public status pages as an included feature, so this is a paid-tier unlock rather than a Sentinel gap. StatusCake does not include status pages in any of its monitoring plans either — it sells them as a separate product, with pricing reported from roughly $12.46/month for a single page, up to $41.63/month for five pages, and $208.29/month for a white-labelled page. In other words, neither vendor gives you a free public status page: Sentinel unlocks it from its cheapest paid tier at £12/month, while StatusCake offers it but only as an additional paid purchase on top of monitoring.
Teams and Agencies
Sentinel’s free plan is scoped to a single login user and a single notification user, making it a single-operator tool at this tier rather than a team product. Its paid plans open this up considerably: Individual (£12/month) keeps 1 login user but raises notification contacts to 2; Team (£30/month) supports 10 login users and 20 notification contacts; Agency (£65/month) supports 25 login users and 50 notification contacts. StatusCake’s Superior plan (confirmed) supports up to 9 team members, and its Business plan includes broader team tooling; StatusCake’s free-plan user limit is not publicly confirmed. Agencies or teams managing monitoring on behalf of multiple clients now have a clear paid path with Sentinel too — its Agency tier, at £65/month for 25 login users, 250 monitors and a faster 30-second minimum polling interval, is aimed squarely at this use case.
Sentinel vs StatusCake Pricing
For a free/early-stage project with three or fewer endpoints needing uptime, SSL, DNS, domain and heartbeat checks in one place, Sentinel’s £0/month free plan covers all five check types without hitting a per-type cap. For a solo developer or small project needing more than three uptime checks for free, StatusCake’s free plan (10 uptime monitors, plus one each of page speed, domain and SSL) offers more raw slots, at the cost of a slower 7-day domain check interval and a hard one-monitor cap on SSL and domain checks.
For a small team ready to pay, StatusCake’s entry paid tier — Superior — is confirmed at £12.49/month billed annually (£14.99/month billed monthly), covering 100 uptime monitors, a 1-minute check interval, 50 domain monitors, 50 SSL monitors, 3 server monitors and up to 9 team members. Its Business tier is confirmed at £41.66/month annually (£49.99/month monthly), with 300 monitors, 30-second checks, 10 server monitors and broader team tooling. Sentinel’s paid plans are now confirmed at three tiers, billed monthly: Individual at £12/month (20 monitors, 1 login user, 2 notification contacts, 60-second minimum polling interval, Domain and SSL monitoring with 30-day history, email alerts up to 500/month and Discord); Team at £30/month (100 monitors, 10 login users, 20 notification contacts, 60-second polling, adding DNS monitoring and full Domain/SSL history, plus Microsoft Teams and Slack alerting up to 5,000 emails/month); and Agency at £65/month (250 monitors, 25 login users, 50 notification contacts, a faster 30-second minimum polling interval, DNS and full Domain/SSL monitoring, plus call and SMS alerting at 250 credits each on top of 25,000 emails/month). Sentinel’s pricing page does not publish an annual-billing discount, so unlike StatusCake’s annual/monthly split, only monthly pricing can be compared directly at this time; historical data retention is confirmed at 30 days on Individual, 90 days on Team, and 365 days on Agency.
Sentinel’s free plan is a straightforward way to get uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring running on a small project at no cost — worth trying if three monitors covers your current footprint, with a clear, publicly priced upgrade path (£12–£65/month) once you outgrow it.
Sentinel Paid Plans at a Glance
| Individual | Team | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £12/month (7-day free trial) | £30/month | £65/month |
| Monitors | 20 | 100 | 250 |
| Login users | 1 | 10 | 25 |
| Notification contacts | 2 | 20 | 50 |
| Minimum polling interval | 60 seconds | 60 seconds | 30 seconds |
| Monitoring types | Domain and SSL (30-day history) | DNS, Domain and SSL (full history) | DNS, Domain and SSL (full history) |
| Historical data | 30 days | 90 days | 365 days |
| Incident management | Included | Included | Included |
| Maintenance windows | Included | Included | Included |
| Status pages | Included | Included | Included |
| Alert channels | Email (500/month), Discord | Email (5,000/month), Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack | Email (25,000/month), Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Calls (250 credits), SMS (250 credits) |
Where StatusCake Is Better
StatusCake’s free plan allows more raw uptime monitors (10 versus Sentinel’s shared pool of 3), which matters if you’re watching several separate endpoints rather than a handful of critical ones. Its paid tiers are transparently priced and publicly documented, with confirmed monitor counts, check intervals and team sizes at each level, making it easier to plan an upgrade path in advance. StatusCake also has a longer track record and a dedicated Heartbeat/Push API — advantages that hold regardless of Sentinel’s now-published paid pricing, which itself offers comparable or larger team allowances (up to 25 login users on Agency, versus StatusCake’s confirmed 9 on Superior) and now includes incident management, maintenance windows and status pages on every paid tier, so StatusCake’s status-page and incident-tooling edge only holds on the free-vs-free comparison, not paid-vs-paid.
Where Sentinel Is Better
Sentinel’s free plan includes all five core monitoring types — uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat — without the per-type ceilings StatusCake applies (StatusCake’s free plan restricts SSL and domain monitoring to one each, regardless of how many uptime monitors you have spare). Sentinel also polls SSL and domain checks at the same 5-minute interval as uptime checks, faster than StatusCake’s free-tier 30-minute SSL and 7-day domain check cadence. For a project that needs SSL and domain expiry watched as closely as uptime, Sentinel’s flat, faster-polling free allowance is better suited than StatusCake’s slower, capped free monitors for those check types. On paid plans, Sentinel’s Agency tier also polls faster (30 seconds) than StatusCake’s Superior tier (60 seconds), matching StatusCake’s Business-tier interval at a lower price point, while bundling incident management, maintenance windows and status pages in from the cheapest paid tier.
Who Should Choose Sentinel?
- Running three or fewer endpoints and want uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring covered together for free
- Need SSL or domain expiry checked more frequently than StatusCake’s free-tier 30-minute and 7-day intervals allow
- A solo developer or small project that doesn’t need multiple team members or a public status page yet
- Prefer a flat monitor allowance you can allocate freely across check types, rather than fixed per-type caps
- Want a clear, published upgrade path with call/SMS alerting available on the Agency tier
Who Should Choose StatusCake?
- Need to monitor more than three uptime endpoints without paying
- Want a longer-established provider with fully documented, transparent paid-tier pricing
- Plan to grow into a paid plan with confirmed team member support (up to 9 on Superior)
- Want the option to add a public status page later, even though it’s a separate paid purchase rather than bundled in
- Value a dedicated Heartbeat/Push API for cron and script monitoring
Sentinel vs StatusCake: Which Should You Choose?
Choose StatusCake when you need more free uptime monitors, transparent and fully documented paid pricing, or confirmed team support as you scale. Choose Sentinel when your priority is covering uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring together on a small number of endpoints, with faster polling on SSL and domain checks than StatusCake’s free tier offers, and a straightforward paid upgrade path from £12/month once you need more monitors, users or alert channels. Neither plan currently includes incident management, maintenance windows or status pages for free, but Sentinel’s paid tiers now confirm all three from £12/month, while StatusCake still sells status pages only as a separate paid add-on on top of monitoring — so if those are must-haves today, factor that difference into your choice of provider and plan.
If your current footprint is small and multi-type monitoring in one free plan is what you need, Sentinel is worth trying — sign up for the free plan and see whether three monitors covers your setup before deciding.
Related Comparisons
For a broader look at how Sentinel compares across the market, see our guide to the Best Uptime Monitoring Tools & Sentinel Alternatives.
- Sentinel vs UptimeRobot — worth checking if free-plan monitor limits and check intervals matter more to you than StatusCake’s feature set.
- Sentinel vs Better Stack — a better comparison if you’re weighing Sentinel against a more incident-and-status-page-focused platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sentinel free?
Yes. Sentinel’s free plan costs £0/month and includes uptime, SSL, DNS, domain expiry and heartbeat monitoring for up to 3 monitors, with a 5-minute minimum polling interval and 7 days of historical data.
Is Sentinel a good alternative to StatusCake?
It depends on your needs. Sentinel is a good fit if you want all five core monitoring types available free on a small number of endpoints. StatusCake is a better fit if you need more than three free monitors or want a longer-established provider with fully documented paid pricing.
Which has the better free plan?
Neither is unconditionally better. StatusCake gives more raw monitor slots (10 uptime plus one each of SSL, domain and page speed). Sentinel gives a smaller but more flexible pool of 3 monitors covering all five check types, with faster SSL and domain polling than StatusCake’s free tier.
Does Sentinel monitor SSL certificates?
Yes, SSL monitoring is included in Sentinel’s free plan as one of the five core check types, checked at a 5-minute minimum interval.
Does Sentinel support heartbeat monitoring?
Yes. Heartbeat monitoring, for cron jobs and scheduled scripts, is included in Sentinel’s free plan alongside uptime, SSL, DNS and domain expiry monitoring.
Does Sentinel’s free plan include status pages or incident management?
No. Sentinel’s free plan does not include public status pages, incident management or maintenance windows. All three, however, are included on every paid tier — Individual, Team and Agency — so upgrading from £12/month unlocks them.
How many team members can use Sentinel’s free plan?
Sentinel’s free plan supports 1 login user and 1 notification user, making it suited to solo use rather than team collaboration at this tier.
What is StatusCake’s cheapest paid plan?
StatusCake’s Superior plan starts at £12.49/month billed annually (£14.99/month billed monthly), covering 100 uptime monitors, a 1-minute check interval and up to 9 team members.
What does Sentinel’s paid plan cost?
Sentinel’s cheapest paid plan, Individual, is £12/month with a 7-day free trial, covering 20 monitors, 1 login user and 2 notification contacts, with a confirmed 30-day historical data retention limit (versus 7 days on the free plan). Team is £30/month (100 monitors, 10 login users) and Agency is £65/month (250 monitors, 25 login users); Team retains 90 days of history and Agency retains 365 days. All three are billed monthly; Sentinel does not publicly list an annual-billing discount.