Synthetic monitoring vs full AI-native reliability. Checkly runs Playwright and API checks from outside your stack. Nova runs synthetic checks too, plus 99 more agents that diagnose and resolve the issues those checks expose.
Checkly is the modern Playwright-based synthetic monitoring leader, Monitoring as Code, API checks, browser checks, multi-region, GitHub-native workflow. It excels at detection from outside your stack. Nova bundles synthetic monitoring alongside 99 other agents that diagnose and resolve incidents, not just detect them.
| Capability | Nova AI Ops | Checkly |
|---|---|---|
| Synthetic Browser Checks | ✓ 15 global locations, Playwright-compatible scripts | ✓ Best-in-class Playwright Checks with video traces |
| API Checks | ✓ Built-in HTTP/REST/GraphQL probes from synthetic locations | ✓ Strong API Checks with assertion library & secrets |
| Heartbeat / Cron Checks | ✓ Built-in heartbeats with grace windows | ✓ Heartbeat Checks for cron jobs and pipelines |
| Monitoring as Code | ✓ Terraform & SDK; checks defined in Git | ✓ ChecklyCLI + TypeScript-native MaC workflow |
| Internal Metrics Collection | ✓ Native agent, full-stack metrics, logs, traces, RUM | ✗ External-only, no internal telemetry collection |
| Log Management | ✓ 1B+ events with AI anomaly detection | ✗ No log management |
| Distributed Tracing | ✓ Flame graphs, service maps, SLA alerts | ✗ No tracing |
| Incident Management | ✓ Full incident lifecycle, war rooms, post-mortems | ✗ Sends alerts to PagerDuty/Slack, no native incident workflow |
| AI Agents | ✓ 100+ specialized agents for detection, diagnosis, remediation, postmortems | ✗ No AI agents |
| Auto-Remediation | ✓ 78% incidents auto-resolved in <90s | ✗ No auto-remediation, detection only |
| On-Call Scheduling | ✓ Follow-the-sun, zero-gap scheduling | ✗ Routes alerts to external on-call (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) |
| Private Locations | ✓ Run probes inside your VPC with managed agents | ✓ Private Locations supported via Checkly Agent |
Checkly has a generous Basic tier and per-check-run pricing that scales linearly with check frequency. Nova replaces the entire SRE stack, synthetic + monitoring + on-call + remediation, with one predictable per-user price.
Full platform: synthetic monitoring, metrics, logs, tracing, incidents, AI agents, runbooks, on-call, auto-remediation. Basic tier available.
Hobby tier free (10k API runs/mo). Team plans start ~$80/mo and scale per check run. Still needs PagerDuty/Opsgenie for incidents and Datadog/Grafana for internal observability.
Illustrative example: a 20-engineer SRE team running 30 browser checks, 80 API checks, and 10 heartbeats on Checkly Team. Synthetic detects from outside, but internal monitoring, on-call, and incident management still need their own vendors.
Scenario assumes 20 engineers, 30 browser checks at 5-min cadence, 80 API checks at 1-min cadence, 10 heartbeats. Unit prices sourced from Checkly's public pricing page as of April 2026. Your actual cost will vary with check frequency, parallelism, and negotiated discounts. Checkly, Datadog, PagerDuty, Grafana, and Sentry are trademarks of their respective owners. Nova AI Ops is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
Keep the Playwright workflow you love. Add AI-powered incident resolution, auto-remediation, and 100 AI agents that close incidents while Checkly is still firing the alert.