Comparison · checked September 2026

PylonMon vs Netdata

Short answer: they solve different problems. Netdata is a per-second metrics agent with dashboards on every node — the best tool when you want to watch a machine breathe. It can also check HTTP endpoints, but from a node you run, not from the public internet. PylonMon is an off-site watchdog: it checks your sites and services from outside your network, runs an agent inside for vitals and LAN probes, and pages you (email, SMS, voice, Discord, Slack) when something is down — including when the whole site is dark and no node can report. Teams that want deep metrics want Netdata’s job; teams that want to be paged from outside want PylonMon’s. They pair well.

Side by side

	PylonMon	Netdata
What it is	Off-site uptime + infrastructure monitoring with alerting, status pages and an agent	Real-time metrics agent (per-second) with a cloud dashboard and alerts
Sees your site from outside	Yes — HTTP/S, TCP, ping, DNS, UDP, TLS, domain, browser journeys from the public internet (HTTP, TCP and DNS confirmed from a second region on paid plans)	Not from the public internet — its HTTP-endpoint collectors run on a node you operate, so they see what that node sees
Node vitals	CPU, memory, disk, load, temperature, network, custom commands, every 20 s	Thousands of metrics per node, every second, with on-node dashboards
Behind-the-firewall targets	Agent probes (http/tcp/ping), SNMP, log watch; each becomes a monitor	Collectors on the node (many integrations)
Paging	Email, SMS, voice, Discord, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, webhooks, ntfy, push; escalation ladders, on-call	Email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, webhooks and more via Netdata Cloud
Status pages for clients	Yes (1 on Pro, 3 on Team, 10 on Enterprise)	No
Free tier	20 monitors, 3 agent nodes, 1 journey, commercial use allowed	Community: 5 nodes, non-commercial use only
Pricing model	Flat plans: $9 Pro (75 monitors), $49 Team (250), from $129 Enterprise; nodes count as monitors	Per node: Homelab $90/yr (non-commercial, unlimited nodes); Business $4.50/node/month annual, $6 monthly
Hosting	Hosted (US); nothing to run except the agent	Agent on every node; cloud dashboard hosted by Netdata; on-prem for 200+ nodes

What it costs, side by side

Commercial use	PylonMon	Netdata Business (annual)
5 servers + 10 website checks	$9/month (Pro: 75 monitors)	$22.50/month (5 × $4.50)
20 servers + 20 checks + 1 client status page	$9/month (Pro, 40 of 75 monitors)	$90/month (20 × $4.50)
50 servers, 60 checks, 3 status pages, 5 people	$49/month (Team: 250 monitors, 5 members)	$225/month (50 × $4.50)

Netdata’s per-node price buys something PylonMon doesn’t sell: second-by-second visibility into every process on the box. If you need that, the money is well spent. If what you need is to know when it’s down and be paged, PylonMon’s flat plan is the cheaper shape, and it also covers the thing an agent can never see — the site being unreachable from the internet.

PICK NETDATA WHEN

You debug performance: you want per-second CPU, disk I/O, per-process, per-container graphs on the node itself.
You have hundreds of nodes and a metrics budget, or want on-prem metrics at scale.
You already use it for troubleshooting and just need alerts on those metrics.

PICK PYLONMON WHEN

You need to be paged when a site, an API, a certificate, a cron job or a machine fails — from outside your network.
You have clients or a boss who want a status page, and a phone that wants SMS.
You want one flat price for a school, an MSP’s clients or a homelab, with an agent that also watches the NAS and the printer.

Using both

Common and sensible: Netdata for the deep dive, PylonMon for the page. Point a PylonMon HTTP monitor at each Netdata node’s dashboard port from inside (a beacon probe) and at your public services from outside; keep Netdata’s per-node alerts for capacity. Start free alongside what you have — nothing to migrate.

Other comparisons: vs Netdata · vs openITCOCKPIT · vs UptimeRobot · Uptime Kuma alternative · Checkly, PagerDuty, healthchecks.io · what it costs, worked examples

Netdata facts from netdata.cloud/pricing and the Homelab and plan-change announcements, checked September 2026; they set their own prices and may change them. Tell support@pylonmon.com if something here is out of date and we will fix it.