The Short Version
These tools answer different questions. Downdetector tells you whether other people are having trouble right now, from user reports. StatusGator and IsDown tell you what the vendors themselves have posted, by reading official status pages and sending you alerts. Downdetector is free and best for a quick check. The other two are paid tools for teams that depend on many outside services.
Side by Side
| Downdetector | StatusGator | IsDown | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main data source | Reports from users, plus social media and web signals | Official status pages, plus its own early-warning signals | Official status pages, checked every 2 to 5 minutes |
| Owner | Accenture, since June 2026 | Nimble Industries, founded 2015 | UptimeRobot, since June 2026 |
| Services covered, as claimed | Not confirmed | More than 12,680 | More than 6,320 |
| Free option | Yes, the public site | Yes: 3 monitors, 1 user | 14-day trial only |
| Paid from | Enterprise pricing not published | $72 a month on an annual plan, 25 monitors | $22 a month on an annual plan, 15 monitors |
| Alerts | Not on the free site | Slack, Teams, email, SMS, PagerDuty, webhooks and more | Slack and email on the lowest plan, more on higher plans |
| Best for | Checking whether it is just you | IT teams watching many vendors, including ones without status pages | Smaller teams that want vendor alerts at a lower price |
Downdetector
Downdetector counts problem reports and compares them with a baseline for that time of day. It shows an incident when reports are well above normal. Its strength is speed: users often report before a vendor confirms anything. Its weakness is that a report count is not a measure of impact, as our Downdetector report count entry explains. During the Microsoft outage of November 12, 2026, outlets quoted Outlook peaks from about 97,000 to 138,058. Downdetector belongs to the Ookla business, which Ziff Davis sold to Accenture for $1.2 billion in a deal completed on June 17, 2026.
StatusGator
StatusGator reads the official status pages of the services you choose and brings them into one dashboard with alerts. For services that have no status page, it says it uses a detection algorithm that looks for unusual signals, and it can show a "possible outage" warning before the vendor confirms. That warning is unconfirmed by design.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Monitors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 3 |
| Starter | $79 | $72 | 25 |
| Team | $149 | $137 | 75 |
| Corporate | $299 | $274 | 150 |
IsDown
IsDown also aggregates official status pages and says it checks them every 2 to 5 minutes. It joined UptimeRobot in June 2026. It has no permanent free plan, and its lowest tier is cheaper than StatusGator's.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Monitors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $27 | $22 | 15 |
| Pro | $49 | $40 | 30 |
| Premium | $99 | $80 | 70 |
| Business | $179 | $150 | 150 |
What None of Them Replace
- The vendor's own page: it is the only source for what failed, the incident reference and the cause. Aggregators repeat it.
- Your own monitoring: a status page describes the vendor's view. A check from your own systems shows whether the service works for you.
- A plan: knowing sooner helps only if someone knows what to do next. See how to keep a team working when an AI assistant is down.
How to Choose
- One person, occasional checks: Downdetector and the vendor's status page are enough.
- A team with a handful of critical vendors: subscribe directly to those vendors' status pages by email or Slack. It costs nothing. See where to check each AI assistant.
- A team with dozens of vendors: an aggregator earns its price. Compare the monitor counts above with the number of services you rely on.
Sources
StatusGator plans and about page; IsDown pricing and its UptimeRobot announcement; the Ziff Davis quarterly filing for the Accenture sale. Prices read November 13, 2026. Downdetector's own methodology page could not be read directly, so its method is summarised from published descriptions. Presenc AI has no commercial relationship with any of these tools.