Company Overview
Checkly was founded in 2015 by Timo Käch and Hannes Lenke and is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. It is a synthetic monitoring platform purpose-built for modern development teams, offering Playwright-powered browser monitoring and API monitoring in a unified solution. Checkly enables teams to validate application availability and performance both before and after deployment through its "Monitoring as Code" philosophy.
What sets Checkly apart is its native Playwright integration — it is the only synthetic monitoring platform natively driven by Playwright, allowing developers to write browser checks using the same framework they use for end-to-end testing. Combined with deep CI/CD pipeline integration, Checkly ensures monitoring checks are automatically executed with every code change, making pre-deployment validation a core part of the development workflow.
Related providers: Checkly Monitoring Services
Core Products
| Product | Description |
|---|---|
| Browser Checks | Playwright-powered browser automation checks running in real browser environments |
| API Checks | HTTP API availability and response validation with multi-protocol support |
| Private Locations | Run checks inside customer VPCs for internal and private environment coverage |
| Alert Channels | Multi-channel alert notifications (Slack, Email, PagerDuty, etc.) |
| Checkly CLI | Declarative monitoring configuration with CI/CD pipeline integration |
| Status Pages | Custom-branded status pages for real-time service status display |
Key Milestones
- 2015: Checkly founded by Timo Käch and Hannes Lenke in Berlin, Germany
- 2019: SaaS platform launched with pioneering Playwright-based browser checks
- 2022: Private Locations and Checkly CLI introduced for enterprise scalability
- 2024+: Continued expansion of Playwright integration and AI-assisted monitoring
Market Position
Checkly competes with the following providers in the synthetic monitoring and API monitoring market:
| Competitor | Differentiation |
|---|---|
| Pingdom (SolarWinds) | Traditional uptime-focused website monitoring |
| Datadog Synthetics | Synthetic monitoring as part of a unified observability platform |
| New Relic Synthetics | Built-in synthetic monitoring within the APM platform |
| Postman Monitors | API monitoring integrated into the API development lifecycle |
| Better Uptime | All-in-one monitoring, status page and incident management platform |
| Runscope | API-focused monitoring and testing |
