If you manage websites for clients, you've likely found yourself comparing monitoring tools. Sentinel, a new uptime monitoring product from rootstuff, launched in February 2026 and positions itself squarely at agencies and freelancers. It's a clean, well-built tool - and a fair question to ask is: how does it compare to SiteVitals?
This post gives an honest, side-by-side look at both products. We'll cover what each tool actually monitors, how pricing stacks up, and who each one is best suited to. We'll be straight with you: SiteVitals is our product, and we naturally think it's the better fit for most agencies - but we've tried to let the facts make that case rather than just asserting it.
What Is Sentinel?
Sentinel is a website monitoring tool built by rootstuff, founded in 2024 and publicly launched in February 2026. Its core focus is infrastructure-layer monitoring: is the site up, is the SSL certificate valid, have any DNS records changed, and does a given keyword appear on the page?
It monitors from four global regions, checks every 30 seconds on its Business plan, and sends alerts via email, SMS, Slack, Teams, Discord, and webhooks. It also includes client-facing status pages.
What Is SiteVitals?
SiteVitals is a comprehensive website health monitoring platform built for agencies, freelancers, and site owners who need more than just uptime data. Alongside uptime and SSL tracking, SiteVitals monitors SEO health, page speed and Core Web Vitals, security vulnerabilities, asset integrity, content changes, domain expiry, server health, and scheduled tasks - all from a single dashboard.
It was built around a simple insight: when a client site has a problem, it's rarely just "the server is down." Slow page speeds cost search rankings. Security misconfigurations create liability. SEO regressions erode organic traffic quietly over weeks. A scheduled backup that silently stopped running three months ago. SiteVitals is designed to surface all of those issues, not just the binary up/down question.
Feature Comparison
Here's how the two products compare across the full monitoring surface:
| Feature | Sentinel | SiteVitals |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime Monitoring | ✓ (1 min on Pro; 30s on Business) | ✓ (1 min on Agency) |
| SSL Certificate Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| DNS Monitoring | ✓ (7 record types) | ✓ (7 record types) |
| Keyword / Content Monitoring | ✓ | ✓ (full content change detection) |
| Multi-location Checks | ✓ (4 global regions) | - |
| Status Pages | ✓ (up to unlimited on Business) | - |
| SEO Auditing | - | ✓ Full suite |
| Page Speed / Core Web Vitals | - | ✓ Full suite |
| Security Scanning | - | ✓ Full suite |
| Asset Integrity Checks | - | ✓ (broken links, assets) |
| Server Monitoring | - | ✓ Agent-based (CPU, memory, disk, services) |
| Scheduled Task / Cron Monitoring | - | ✓ (/start, /fail, /log endpoints; 30-day stats) |
| Domain Expiry Monitoring | ✓ (Starter and above) | ✓ |
| Monthly Client Reports | ✓ (Business plan only) | ✓ (all paid plans) |
| Team Collaboration | ✓ (up to 5 members on Pro; unlimited on Business) | ✓ (unlimited seats on all plans) |
| API Access | ✓ (Pro and above) | ✓ |
| MCP / AI Integration | - | ✓ |
| Alert Channels | Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, Discord, Webhooks | Email, Slack, Webhooks, In-app |
The most significant gaps: Sentinel does not offer SEO auditing, security scanning, page speed monitoring, server monitoring, or scheduled task monitoring. For agencies whose clients care about search visibility and overall site health - not just whether the server responds - these aren't optional extras.
Where Sentinel Has the Edge
To be fair, there are a couple of areas where Sentinel genuinely pulls ahead:
Check Frequency
Sentinel's Business plan offers 30-second check intervals at $48/mo. SiteVitals' Agency plan offers 1-minute uptime checks, which is sufficient for the vast majority of use cases - but if you need sub-minute precision for latency-sensitive applications, Sentinel's 30-second cadence is worth noting.
Status Pages
Sentinel includes branded, customisable client status pages on all paid plans - a feature SiteVitals doesn't currently offer.
Alert Channel Variety
Sentinel provides native, out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Teams and Discord, in addition to standard Email, SMS, Slack, and Webhook channels. While SiteVitals focuses on core alerting through Email and Slack, it remains highly extensible. By utilising the available Webhook engine, users can bridge alerts to any third-party platform - including Teams, Discord and SMS - using integration tools or custom API endpoints.
Pricing Comparison
Both products use monthly subscription pricing. Note that Sentinel prices in USD and SiteVitals prices in GBP, so direct comparisons require currency conversion (approximate at time of writing).
| Product & Plan | Price | Sites / Endpoints | Check Interval | What's Monitored |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentinel - Free | $0/mo | 5 monitors | 5 min | Uptime + SSL |
| Sentinel - Starter | $12/mo | 25 endpoints | 1 min | Uptime, SSL, DNS, Domain |
| Sentinel - Pro | $24/mo | 100 endpoints | 1 min | Uptime, SSL, DNS, Domain, Keywords |
| Sentinel - Business | $48/mo | 300 endpoints | 30s | Everything above + reports, unlimited teams |
| SiteVitals - Free | £0/mo | 1 page | 10 min | Uptime |
| SiteVitals - Starter | £19/mo | 5 pages | 5 min | Full suite (all 8 monitoring areas) + 1 server + 5 task monitors |
| SiteVitals - Marketer | £45/mo | 10 pages | 1 min | Full suite + 180 days history + 2 servers + 15 task monitors |
| SiteVitals - Agency | £99/mo | 30 pages | 1 min | Full suite + 1 year history, unlimited seats, 10 servers, 30 task monitors |
The key pricing difference isn't really about price per se - it's about what you get at each tier. Sentinel's plans are priced for uptime monitoring only. SiteVitals' plans include the full monitoring suite across SEO, security, performance, content, integrity, server monitoring, and task monitoring at every paid tier, with no feature gating by plan level.
To replicate SiteVitals' full monitoring suite using Sentinel, you'd also need separate tools for SEO auditing, security scanning, page speed monitoring, server monitoring, and cron job monitoring. Credible standalone tools in each of those categories typically cost anywhere from $20 to $100+ per month each. When you factor those in, SiteVitals' Agency plan at £99/mo usually works out considerably cheaper than the equivalent multi-tool stack - and you get everything in one dashboard rather than juggling four or five separate logins.
SiteVitals also offers unlimited seats on every plan - no per-user fees, ever. A single Agency plan covers your whole team and all your clients, with shareable reports that require no login to view. Sentinel's Pro plan caps at 5 team members, with unlimited members only on Business.
Who Should Use Which Tool?
Sentinel is a strong fit if you:
- Primarily need uptime and infrastructure monitoring
- Want client-facing status pages included out of the box
- Manage a very large number of endpoints (up to 300 on Business)
- Need sub-minute check intervals as a priority
- Use Teams or Discord for internal alerting
SiteVitals is the better choice if you:
- Need a complete picture of site health - not just uptime
- Want to catch SEO regressions, security issues, and performance problems before clients do
- Manage client sites where search visibility and Core Web Vitals matter
- Want visibility into the server behind the website — CPU, memory, disk, and service health — alongside your website checks
- Run scheduled jobs (backups, reports, data syncs) and need to know immediately if one silently stops running
- Want your whole team and all clients covered on a single plan with no seat limits
- Need monthly health reports you can share with clients
- Want MCP / AI integration to query your monitoring data conversationally
The Bottom Line
Sentinel is a specialised utility focused on the traditional pillars of monitoring: uptime, SSL, and DNS. For agencies whose primary requirement is a basic heartbeat check and a public status page, it offers a functional, low-cost entry point.
But for most agencies, website health is a broader problem. When a client's organic traffic drops because their page speed deteriorated after a plugin update, or when their site develops a security misconfiguration, or when their SEO meta tags get wiped by a CMS migration, or when the server starts running out of memory, or when the nightly backup silently stopped three weeks ago - uptime monitoring won't catch any of that. SiteVitals will.
Sentinel monitors infrastructure. SiteVitals monitors website health — and now the infrastructure behind it too. If you need both covered in one place, the choice is straightforward.
Try SiteVitals for free and generate your first health snapshots and uptime monitor - no credit card required.
Originally published March 2026. Updated April 2026 to reflect the addition of server monitoring (agent-based CPU, memory, disk, load, and service health) and task monitoring (scheduled job heartbeat monitoring with /start, /fail, and /log endpoints). Sentinel pricing is in USD; SiteVitals pricing is in GBP excluding VAT. Feature details sourced from each product's public website.
Articles written collaboratively by the SiteVitals team.
