AlertMyBusiness and Downdetector: which one for a small business?
Downdetector is built for telling you whether a popular consumer service (a bank, a telco, a game, a social network) is down for other people right now, from the reports they post. AlertMyBusiness is built for a business owner who wants everything that goes wrong quietly watched in one place. Here is where each is stronger.
What Downdetector does well
- The biggest crowd on the internet, so a big outage shows within minutes.
- Thousands of services, including telcos and games.
- A clear graph anyone can read.
Downdetector's own site has the current feature list and prices.
Feature by feature
| What | Downdetector | AlertMyBusiness |
|---|---|---|
| Official vendor status pages, polled | Partly | Yes |
| User-reported outages (is it down for others?) | Yes | Yes |
| Your own website uptime, checked from two regions | No | Yes |
| SSL certificate and domain expiry | No | Yes |
| Plain-English alerts for vulnerable software you run | No | Yes |
| Data breach alerts for your staff emails | No | Yes |
| Scam campaigns aimed at your bank, tools and industry | No | Yes |
| Tax and compliance due dates with reminders | No | Yes |
| Power outages at your locations | No | Yes |
| Grants matched to your business | No | Yes |
| Fix guides written for a business owner | No | Yes |
| A free plan that does not expire | Yes | Yes |
Downdetector column as their site describes the product at the time of writing (26 October 2026); tell us through Report an inaccuracy if it has changed.
Choose Downdetector when
You want to check one big consumer service once, quickly, with no account.
Choose AlertMyBusiness when
You want to be told, on your channels, when the tools your business runs on go down, plus everything else that goes wrong quietly: certificates, domains, software, scams, due dates and power.
Common questions
Is AlertMyBusiness a replacement for Downdetector?
For a small business, usually yes for the overlap, because the same alerts arrive with the rest of what we watch. For telling you whether a popular consumer service (a bank, a telco, a game, a social network) is down for other people righ…, Downdetector may still be the better fit.
What does Downdetector cost?
Their site lists current plans; we do not quote competitors' prices because they change. AlertMyBusiness is free for the basics and sells add-ons from one dollar a month.
Where does your data come from?
Official status pages, government advisories, vulnerability databases, breach catalogues, registries, distributors and our own checks. Every alert and page lists its sources.
Try the free plan beside it
Nothing to cancel: one website, ten tools, one location, scams and due dates, forever. Keep the other tool if it earns its place.