Most Instatus customers should stay on Instatus.
It is a good status page with a generous free tier, and the honest reasons to leave it are narrow. There are two: your bill is moving with page count, or you are tired of running a monitoring tool and a page product that have to be kept in agreement by hand.
Free forever on one page — with your own domain and SSL included.
Two reasons that hold up.
If neither of these describes you, close the tab. We would rather lose the signup than sell a switch you regret in a fortnight.
You are running two products to keep one page correct
A monitoring tool decides something is down, an integration or a person carries that over to the status page, and the two disagree for the ten minutes that matter most. StatusOwl removes the hand-off: the checks that draw the uptime bars are the same checks that open the incident.
The page count is what is moving your bill
If you have grown into a page per product, per region or per customer, price that shape on both sides. StatusOwl bills per status page and Scale removes the page limit entirely. Team members come out of the plan's allowance rather than being billed one at a time, and audience size never appears on the invoice at all.
Not for speed
Instatus is known for very fast pages and we are not going to pretend to have benchmarked our way past them. StatusOwl pages run multi-instance behind Cloudflare and poll for fresh data every 30 seconds. That is good enough; it is not a reason to move.
Not for subscribers
Instatus has a subscriber system. StatusOwl has none — no subscribe form, no subscriber list, no notification email. Moving here to improve how you notify people would make things worse, not better.
Not for polish
Their product is more finished than ours in most places you would look, and their free tier is generous. We are betting on one structural difference, not on out-designing them.
One product, so the page cannot disagree with the monitor.
Everything on the page is drawn from checks StatusOwl ran. There is no integration between two vendors to keep alive, and no window where the monitoring knows something the page does not.
Automatic incidents
Three consecutive failed checks opens an incident and raises the banner. The first successful check posts a recovery update and resolves it.
Read moreBars from real checks
Ninety daily bars per service, each carrying that day’s uptime percentage, average response time and check count.
Read morePages, not seats
A root page plus path-scoped pages per org. Scale removes the page limit at $149/mo.
Read moreLive without refreshing
Pages poll every 30 seconds, pause while the tab is hidden, and keep the last known state if a poll fails.
Read moreAutomatic incidents put the outage on your page. They do not put it in front of your team. A failing HTTP, ping or TCP check dispatches no email, Slack message or webhook today — only Watch Owl server-metric alert rules do that. It is the single biggest thing missing from StatusOwl and it is what we are working on now. Read the roadmap entry.
No importer. Retype the services, move the DNS, lose the history.
It is a couple of hours of work and one permanent loss. Nothing about it is clever, and pretending otherwise would be the exact behaviour this site exists to stop.
Claim the subdomain
Every organisation gets {subdomain}.statusowl.app straight away. Build the page there while your existing one carries on serving traffic.
Turn each service into a monitor
There is no importer. Each service on your current page becomes an HTTP, ping or TCP monitor here, with its own method, expected status codes, headers and timeout, then gets attached to the page.
Let it record for a week
The 90-day strip only knows what StatusOwl has checked. A week of overlap gives you real bars to look at and shows you whether automatic incidents fire where you expect them to.
Re-point the CNAME
Your existing status hostname moves to status-pages.statusowl.app. The dashboard stages the ownership TXT, the CNAME and the ACME TXT one at a time, re-checks every 10 seconds and shows Cloudflare's own error text when a record is wrong. SSL issues and renews with nothing to install.
| Item | What happens |
|---|---|
| Services and components | Recreate by hand as monitors |
| Logo, colours, light / dark | Re-upload and re-pick |
| Custom domain | Re-point the CNAME |
| Uptime history | Starts empty, fills from day one |
| Past incidents and updates | Stay on the old page |
| Subscriber list | Nowhere to import it to |
| Custom CSS | No editor in the dashboard yet |
A day StatusOwl did not check reads as no data and stays that way. If a long unbroken history is part of how you sell trust, keep the old page online at an archive URL rather than deleting it.
Import from Instatus on the roadmap — not startedYou should stay where you are if any of these are true.
Read this before the pricing page. One line landing is enough to make staying the right call.
- Anyone is subscribed to your page
- The single hardest limitation to work around. StatusOwl does not notify readers when you open, update or resolve an incident, because there is no subscriber system to notify them with. If people rely on those emails today, switching takes that away from them.
- You want your team paged from the same tool
- A failing HTTP, ping or TCP check opens an incident on the page and dispatches nothing. The six notification channels are real and tested, but the only thing wired to fire them today is a Watch Owl server-metric alert rule.
- Your page is heavily styled
- Logo, colours and light / dark / auto are all here, with a visitor-facing theme toggle. Custom CSS is not — the renderer accepts and sanitises it, but there is no editor to set it, so a bespoke page has to be rebuilt inside what the themes give you.
- You need more than one language
- There is no internationalisation in StatusOwl status pages at all. One page, one language.
- You are happy
- Genuinely. Instatus is a good product with a generous free tier, and 'the invoice is fine and the page works' is a complete answer. Switching costs you a couple of hours and your published history; do not spend that for a marginal gain.
Asked before every switch.
Including the answers that argue against it.
- Can I import my Instatus components and incidents?
- No. There is no import tool. Moving means recreating each service as a monitor by hand and pointing your DNS at the new page. Past incidents and their update timelines do not come across, and neither does your historical uptime. An importer sits under 'Exploring' on the roadmap, which means it has not been started.
- Does StatusOwl have subscribers like Instatus does?
- No. There is no subscribe form on the page and no subscriber list in the dashboard. Publishing an incident updates the page and notifies nobody. It is being built and it is the clearest reason to stay where you are.
- What is the actual structural difference?
- StatusOwl runs the checks itself. Three consecutive failed checks on a monitor attached to your page opens an incident at your configured default impact, seeds an automatically-detected first update and raises the banner, then posts a recovery update and resolves on the first successful check. You are not wiring a monitoring product to a page product and hoping they agree.
- How do the prices compare?
- We do not publish competitor prices we cannot keep current. StatusOwl runs from $0 on the free plan to $149 a month with no page limit, billed per status page. Put that next to the vendor's own pricing page for the number of pages and people you actually need.
Put one page up and compare them side by side.
Free forever on one page, with your own domain and automatic SSL. Nothing to cancel if you decide to stay where you are.