AlertSite vs Runscope comparison

SmartBear and Broadcom are both solutions in the API Monitoring Software category. SmartBear is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #3. SmartBear holds a 9.3% mindshare in AMS, compared to Broadcom’s 15.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of SmartBear users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

AlertSite

Read 6 AlertSite reviews

58 Views
44 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Runscope

Read 11 Runscope reviews

167 Views
70 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AlertSite

Runscope

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AlertSite and Runscope based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two API Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed AlertSite vs. Runscope Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AlertSite vs. Runscope

January 2025

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Helped 838,713 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

AlertSite

Ranking in API Monitoring Software

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (37th)

Runscope

Ranking in API Monitoring Software

3rd

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the API Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of AlertSite is 9.3%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Runscope is 15.3%, down from 19.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

API Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Suraj Branwal

Senior Analyst Monitoring and Reporting at Empower

Quickly triggers alerts, fast and user-friendly, and makes data available in a single UI

One area that needs improvement in AlertSite is the slow UI. I'm using the classic UI because it's quite user-friendly, or in human-readable format, but it's a little slow. It takes time to load all the monitors, so if that could be sped up, that would be helpful. The AlertSite support team also needs improvement in terms of availability. Most of the agents in the team aren't available 24 x 7, so if there's something you need to discuss, you need to tell the support team ahead of time to schedule it. Multiple times, when a case comes up during weekends or whenever my team is doing an update, support needs improvement, availability-wise. I use AlertSite for synthetic monitoring, so whatever is available right now is okay, but if I want to request a new feature on a website, currently, the UI refreshes automatically. I would like to have the option on AlertSite to configure that manually. The UI auto-updates every few minutes, so if I can control that manually, that would be helpful.

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QualityA876f

Quality Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Enabled us to set up automatic regression tests that cover everything we need to monitor

We would like to be able to select the actual time a test will run automatically. It appears that you can set up the automatic schedule, but the test runs based on the last time it ran and not a time you select. Since we want these tests to run in the middle of the night, it would be nice to be able to select that. Also, it would be nice to be able to generate API documentation.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The alerting capabilities of AlertSite were really helpful."

"There are custom reports available along with the inbuilt reports."

"The alerting capabilities were really helpful."

"If there are any issues, it triggers an alert within 30 seconds. When it triggers the alert, we go ahead and check it immediately. The alert is triggered on a real-time basis."

"I found multiple features in AlertSite that I like. One is data monitoring history, for example, a history of the blackouts and the data. Sometimes, there's a glitch in the application that AlertSite can capture, and the tool notifies you about that glitch. It also identifies issues that could happen in the future. AlertSite is also a fast tool that you can use to monitor on-premise servers, internal applications, and even global applications. The data is available on a single UI in AlertSite, so there's no need to monitor and click on different applications or URLs. I also love that the tool is quite user-friendly, apart from being fast."

"The best feature of AlertSite is that it shows you a visual graph and also sends you notifications about errors, so you get immediate notifications about errors which means that your support team can start taking steps and more quickly make sure the site is up and that customer experience isn't interrupted in terms of using your system and your products. AlertSite is a very good tool. It's user-friendly, and you can see everything on the dashboard. Configuring it is also easy."

"This solution has numerous advantages. It's extremely simple to configure. Either digital monitors or single-URL monitors are simple to configure and build."

"It is a relatively reliable tool for running big amounts of API tests, which you can schedule to run periodically, as the product is very good."

"The schedule is definitely the most valuable. Also, being able to check the JSON attribute values is helpful. We always check the attributes. Finally, the notifications are helpful as well."

"Tests are per-step configurable with script capabilities and support for token-based authentication using variables. Configurable test frequency and integration with both Slack and PagerDuty for alerting our DevOps team are also important. General use of the dashboard by multiple team members is also valuable."

"It helps us verify that production deployments do not break the features our customers use."

"We can receive an email and slack notifications if tests are failing/passing."

"It is a cloud-based environment for building and executing tests, which allows me to focus on building, running, and reviewing test results."

"We love the fact that we can have our API tests run on a schedule as often as we need. We also take advantage of being able to set up different environment settings so that we can use the same test in our production, integration, and QA environments, easily. The ability to string together a number of API tests for a test suite is very important to us as well."

"This solution has improved our responsiveness to issues in both production and non-production environments. Through integration with Slack, our development and DevOps teams are quickly aware of issues related to new changes deployed to non-production environments, which tightens our feedback loop during testing. Through integration with PagerDuty, our DevOps resources are able to reduce the adverse impact of a given production issue."

More Runscope pros

Cons

"I could use a few changes to the user interface."

"I would like the ability to get more data points with regard to some of the unique requirements that we have."

"One area that needs improvement in AlertSite is the slow UI. I'm using the classic UI because it's quite user-friendly, or in human-readable format, but it's a little slow. It takes time to load all the monitors, so if that could be sped up, that would be helpful. The AlertSite support team also needs improvement in terms of availability. Most of the agents in the team aren't available 24 x 7, so if there's something you need to discuss, you need to tell the support team ahead of time to schedule it. Multiple times, when a case comes up during weekends or whenever my team is doing an update, support needs improvement, availability-wise. I use AlertSite for synthetic monitoring, so whatever is available right now is okay, but if I want to request a new feature on a website, currently, the UI refreshes automatically. I would like to have the option on AlertSite to configure that manually. The UI auto-updates every few minutes, so if I can control that manually, that would be helpful."

"AlertSite sometimes triggers false alerts or fake alerts, which needs to be rectified. When we see an alert and go ahead and run certain tests on it, the test always passes. However, on the main screen, it shows up as critical. Therefore, the false alert needs to be fixed."

"What needs improvement in AlertSite is the documentation, particularly the lack of documentation. If there's a specific activity you want to do, you can't even find information on how to do it, so you have to contact the AlertSite support team to assist you, and only then would the issue be resolved. At the moment, it's not easy to find or get full documentation on how to deal with different issues. You always have to go back to AlertSite support and get help. The documentation for AlertSite could be improved and it's what I'd like to see in the next release of the tool because at the moment, the documentation isn't complete, so you'll have to contact support, but contacting support isn't an issue because the team responds to you quickly."

"It is not compatible with all of the product platforms that we use."

"If triggering test bucket via trigger API, there is no option to see if the tests which were triggered passed or failed."

"We would like to have an improved ability to share a set of tests across different environments (e.g., dev, stage, and prod)."

"Currently, we can only schedule to the nearest five minutes, one hour, two hours, etc. If we could set up the exact time that we want it to run, that would be good because sometimes we have one service that crosses another service."

"If you forget to set the default environment during test creation, you have to go through every test and make sure that it is set to the environment that you prefer if using shared environments. If there was an option to force all tests within a bucket into a specific environment with one click, this would save a lot of time."

"the built-in editor for the scripts can be improved a lot. Instead of making such a basic editor, maybe include a little more so it is easier to look at things and debug."

"The initial setup included a lot of repetitive manual work."

"We would like the ability to configure Runscope behavior when a given test has its schedule modified. That is, in a non-production environment, we often need to pause a test (either by removing it from the schedule or adjusting its frequency) and this results in the automatic kick-off of this test in all other environments. We would like the ability to simply pause a test for a specific shared environment without causing additional tests to be started."

"I would like to see easier integration and display of test results so that the data could be shared via a dashboard within our company. (Some integration is possible, provided you use one of the supported platforms)."

More Runscope cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company pays to use AlertSite, but I'm unsure of the exact costs because it depends on how many monitors you have."

"The cost is high."

"We purchased the license once and had the option of selecting the number of user licenses."

"Having the different plans organized by team size, buckets, and requests per billing period works for our needs. Larger companies may need to take a close look at these elements."

"The price for the product is very reasonable for a team of more than four to five members."

"Pricing is fair."

"Runscope pricing is unbeatable"

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

10%

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs AlertSite

Compared 58% of the time

Apica vs AlertSite

Compared 42% of the time

More AlertSite Competitors

Postman vs Runscope

Compared 100% of the time

More Runscope Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AlertSite

February 2025

Download AlertSite product report

Buyer's Guide

Runscope

February 2025

Download Runscope product report

Also Known As

No data available

CA Runscope

Overview

SmartBear's AlertSite is an application performance management and system monitoring software. AlertSite is an early warning system that users can rely on to monitor their websites, web apps, and APIs from any physical location as well as from within their private networks. It offers real-time alerting with root-cause analytics and robust reporting. AlertSite allows you to proactively monitor from an independent network of over 350 monitoring nodes worldwide.

Here are AlertSite’s 6 use cases:

Monitor web: AlertSite monitors beyond availability to detect performance anomalies and notify the appropriate people when deviations occur, whether it's online apps or websites.
Monitor APIs: Check to see that your internal, external, and third-party APIs are working properly, returning the correct content, and performing as expected.
Monitor apps: With nearly any action, monitor your online sites and applications using actual browsers, just like a consumer. There is no need for scripting.
Monitor mobile: Monitor your mobile-friendly websites, native mobile apps, carrier-based nodes, and network speeds with real devices (3G, 4G LTE).
Monitor SLAs: Make sure you're meeting service-level agreements' requirements. SLA requirements are monitored and reported on by AlertSite.
Monitor cloud: Monitor your cloud-based applications to improve mobility. AlertSite monitors your apps across public and private clouds, giving you complete visibility into their status.

AlertSite Features

AlertSite has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Enables a comprehensive view of UI and API performance.
Monitoring coverage from 350+ worldwide nodes and private networks.
Integrates with DevOps and Ops tool stacks.
Displays availability and performance data that assist in determining the root cause of performance problems.
With AlertSite's Single Sign-On (SSO) support, you can assist your authentication procedures.
Free training and assistance. AlertSite’s responsive team is always there to assist you, from the initial rollout through day-to-day support.
Eliminates the stress of false alerts using these key features:
- Tracks the performance of your apps, APIs, and websites.
- Sets up monitor and alarm schedules, as well as blackout periods and retry choices.
- Sets alert thresholds that are both static and dynamic.
- Calculates the number of failures needed to set off an alarm.
- After the first failure, retries logic.
- Based on error code, sends an alert to recipients and group routing.
- Tests from over 85 different locations across the world, with internal and external monitoring.
- Defines assertions and validations.
- Integrates with PagerDuty, Slack, Splunk, VictorOps, and more.

Easy configuration with help from these key features:
- DejaClick is an intuitive, seamless plug-in for documenting web transactions and user journeys.
- Use the point-and-click script creation for website, web, and mobile monitor scripts.
- Benefit from using native API monitor creation.
- Scripts for functional tests can be reused.
- Automate monitor creation by using Swagger Specs or OpenAPI Specification files.

SmartBear

Information not available

Broadcom

Sample Customers

JetBlue, Payless ShoeSource, Hilton Inc., StubHub, Symantec, Newegg, Sapient, AstraZeneca, Dell, Quest Diagnostics

Twilio, Microsoft, Adobe, Okta, Tesco, Charter Communications

Buyer's Guide

AlertSite vs. Runscope

January 2025

Free Report: AlertSite vs. Runscope

Find out what your peers are saying about AlertSite vs. Runscope and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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