AxoWatch vs Checkly: monitor user flows without writing Playwright

You record flows instead of coding them. Open your site with the AxoWatch Chrome extension and click through sign-up, login, a contact form or checkout. The recording becomes the check. In Checkly a browser check is a Playwright test, written by hand or generated by its AI Assistant on a paid plan. Its old recorder extension was deprecated in 2022.

One tool for the whole site. Next to user flows and uptime, AxoWatch collects your app's own errors through the Sentry SDK, scores page speed on mobile and desktop every day, watches cron jobs and gives you a public status page. When a flow fails, the error your app threw in that run is attached to the step that broke.

Made for the person who owns the site. Alerts name the step that broke and come with a screenshot of every step. A failed run is repeated before anyone gets notified, so one slow page load won't wake you up.

Checkly is the better choice for engineering teams that want monitoring as code.

• Full Playwright. Any logic you can write in a test. You can reuse your existing Playwright suite as monitors, keep checks in Git and run them in CI/CD on every deploy.
• API and protocol checks. API and multistep API checks, TCP, DNS, ICMP, gRPC and traceroute. AxoWatch doesn't do these.
• Locations and frequency. 22 public locations, private locations for internal apps on Team, browser checks down to every minute and uptime checks down to 10 seconds on Team. AxoWatch runs flows at most every 30 minutes, from one location.
• Incident tooling. SMS, phone calls, PagerDuty, Opsgenie and other on-call integrations. Checkly also has OpenTelemetry traces and enterprise options such as SSO.

AxoWatch has one price per plan: Free ($0, 1 site, no card), Starter ($19/month, 3 sites), Pro ($49/month, 10 sites), Agency ($149/month, 30 sites). A year costs 10 months. Every plan includes user flows, uptime, page speed, error tracking, cron monitoring and a status page. Plans differ in how much you can watch and how often.

Checkly sells three modules separately: Detect (monitoring), Communicate (status pages) and Resolve (AI root cause analysis). Browser and API checks are billed per run. Starter is $29 a month for Detect alone, or $60 with all three modules. Team is $80, or $163 with all three. These are monthly prices before any extra runs.

Runs add up fast for browser flows. One browser check every 30 minutes from one location is about 1,440 runs a month. Checkly's Hobby plan includes 1,000 browser runs and Starter includes 3,000, which covers about two such checks. Extra runs cost $5 per 1,000 as an add-on, or $6.50 per 1,000 as overage on Starter. Running a check from several locations multiplies the count. On AxoWatch Pro, $49 a month covers 10 user flows every 30 minutes, and runs aren't billed at all.

1. Create a free AxoWatch account and add your site.
2. Install the Chrome extension and record the flows your Checkly browser checks cover, for example sign-up, login and checkout. Password fields aren't recorded, so you add passwords in the app.
3. Add the pages your Checkly URL monitors watch to AxoWatch uptime monitoring, and move heartbeat checks to AxoWatch cron monitoring.
4. Optional: point your Sentry SDK's DSN at AxoWatch to see your app's errors next to failed flows.
5. Run both tools side by side for a week, then switch off the Checkly checks you no longer need.

If you rely on Checkly's API or protocol checks, keep them. AxoWatch doesn't replace those.