Pulsy vs Zabbix
Uptime monitoring in an afternoon, not an infrastructure project
Zabbix is a full infrastructure-monitoring platform: agents, hosts, templates, triggers, discovery, capacity planning. It is genuinely powerful and genuinely a lot. If what you actually need is to know when your websites and APIs stop answering, Pulsy does that specific job in a few minutes, is also open source, and does not ask you to model your estate first.
Where Pulsy differs from Zabbix
- Set up in minutes: paste a URL, pick an interval, connect a channel. No agents, hosts, templates, or triggers.
- Scoped deliberately to uptime, response time, TLS expiry, incidents, and status pages — nothing else to learn.
- Public status pages with custom domains, built in rather than assembled.
- Also open source and self-hosted, so narrowing scope costs you no freedom.
Zabbix vs Pulsy, side by side
| Feature | Pulsy (self-hosted) | Pulsy Cloud | Zabbix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free forever — you run it (AGPL-3.0) | Free tier, paid plans from $12/mo | Free — you run it (paid support available) |
| Source code | Open source, AGPL-3.0 | The same AGPL-3.0 code, managed for you | Open source, AGPL-3.0 |
| Where your data lives | Your own infrastructure | Hosted by Pulsy, exportable any time | Your own infrastructure |
| Scope | Uptime, response time, TLS, incidents | Uptime, response time, TLS, incidents | Full infrastructure and network monitoring |
| Time to first check | Minutes | Seconds | Hours to days, depending on estate |
| Agents required | None — outside-in HTTP | None — outside-in HTTP | Agents for host-level metrics |
| Status pages | Included, custom domains | Included, custom domains | Not a built-in feature |
| Dashboard | Localized (5 languages, RTL) | Localized (5 languages, RTL) | Localized, extensive |
Switching from Zabbix is painless
If Zabbix is monitoring your servers and you only want to move the web checks, do not migrate — run Pulsy beside it for the HTTP and TLS side and leave host metrics where they are. If you are replacing Zabbix outright because uptime was all you ever used it for, re-create those web scenarios as Pulsy monitors and you are done.
Frequently asked questions
- Can Pulsy replace Zabbix?
- Only if you were using Zabbix purely for website and API availability. Pulsy does not do host metrics, network device monitoring, log analysis, agents, or capacity planning, and it is not trying to.
- Why choose a narrower tool?
- Because a monitor nobody has configured correctly does not alert. Zabbix's power comes with a modelling and maintenance cost that is worth paying for an estate and hard to justify for eight URLs.
- Are both AGPL?
- Zabbix moved to AGPL-3.0 with version 7.0, and Pulsy is AGPL-3.0-or-later, so the licence terms are effectively the same.
- Can I run Pulsy alongside Zabbix?
- Yes, and it is a common arrangement — Zabbix for infrastructure, Pulsy for the outside-in view and the public status page.
Compare Pulsy with other monitors
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