CheckFast vs Checkly
an honest comparison

Checkly is genuinely innovative

Checkly is the rare monitoring tool with a strong opinion: monitoring should be code, and the unit of that code should be a Playwright script. They built the developer experience to match — a CLI, a Terraform provider, a clean monorepo workflow, and synthetic browser checks that actually click through your real user journeys. For teams who care deeply about catching the regression where the checkout button silently stops working, Checkly is one of very few tools that catches it before the first customer complaint.

CheckFast comes from a different angle. Most teams that look at Checkly never adopt the Playwright workflow because they do not have the engineering bandwidth to write and maintain those scripts. They end up using Checkly for API checks plus a handful of heartbeats, paying for capacity they do not use. CheckFast is built for that bigger group: external HTTP/HTTPS checks, SSL expiry, email deliverability, page speed, cron heartbeats, DNS drift, broken-link sweeps and the rest of a 44-tool catalog — at flat $9 / $29 / $79 per month.

Where Checkly wins

Playwright synthetic checks are the killer feature. If you can codify your critical user journey in a Playwright script, Checkly will run it from multiple regions every minute and alert when something breaks — the kind of bug that “site is up” monitoring is structurally blind to. Monitoring-as-code is also genuinely better engineering: version-controlled monitors, peer-reviewed alert thresholds, change history. The CLI and Terraform provider are first-class. CheckFast has API-key check endpoints and read-only monitor APIs, but no first-class provisioning workflow.

Where CheckFast wins

Email deliverability scoring across SPF / DKIM (probed across thirty-plus selectors) / DMARC / BIMI / MTA-STS / TLS-RPT / DNSSEC / DANE — Checkly does not score any of that. Native Telegram alerts on the entry tier — Checkly routes Telegram via webhook. Bundled SEO snapshots, broken-link sweeps, DNS drift detection. The single-page audit at /check folds nineteen dimensions into one shareable report. And the flat pricing model: Checkly bills scale with browser check minutes, while CheckFast publishes $9, $29 and $79 subscription tiers with explicit monitor and request limits.

The honest recommendation

If your team writes Playwright synthetics and gets value from them, Checkly is the right tool and we are not pretending otherwise. If your team has tried and abandoned Playwright synthetics — or never picked them up — and you are using Checkly for API checks plus heartbeats, switch to CheckFast and consolidate the rest of your site-health stack at a flat lower price. The very common third pattern is to run both: Checkly for the one critical signup-to-checkout Playwright script, CheckFast for the external check breadth.