Failing to renew your SSL certificates can significantly damage your reputation, but fortunately, monitoring them is quite simple.

Before diving into SSL monitoring tools, it’s essential to understand what SSL is and why it matters. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard technology that keeps your internet connection secure and protects data—especially sensitive information—exchanged between two systems. It prevents anyone from reading or tampering with the data during transmission. SSL encrypts this data, making it unreadable to anyone attempting to intercept it.

You may have heard of TLS (Transport Layer Security), the updated and more secure version of SSL. While TLS is the current standard, the term SSL is still widely used when referring to security certificates. When you purchase a security certificate, you are actually getting a TLS certificate, which can include different encryption types such as ECC, RSA, or DSA. These certificates typically come with an expiration period of one, two, or more years.

Now that you understand the critical role security certificates play in your website’s security, let’s explore the best SSL monitoring tools.

1. Pingdom

Pingdom provides SSL/TLS monitoring as part of its uptime monitoring feature. When setting up an HTTP uptime check, you can select HTTPS to monitor your website’s SSL certificates. Once enabled, Pingdom automatically monitors your certificates, alerting you to any errors or upcoming expiration dates.

Pingdom offers two main bundles: Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring. Synthetic Monitoring includes features such as Uptime, Page Speed, Transaction, and API monitoring. You can also create customizable public status pages to display real-time information. Pingdom monitors your site from over 100 global locations, and in the event of an outage, you’ll receive notifications via SMS or email. To avoid false alarms, each issue is double-checked.

Pingdom helps you diagnose and resolve issues related to website performance. Its granular load tests allow you to monitor the performance of every element on a web page. You can also review historical data to track performance trends and identify potential issues over time. Complex transactions, such as login, search, or checkout processes, are monitored frequently—up to every five minutes—to ensure they function correctly.

Uptime monitoring is included in the Synthetic Monitoring bundle, starting at $10 per month. Transaction and Page Speed monitoring are also part of this package.

Key Benefits of Pingdom:

• Public status pages and reports
• Multi-location monitoring

2. StatusCake

StatusCake monitors your website from 43 locations across 30 countries, allowing you to track performance globally. With historical website downtime reports, you can analyze past outages, compare them with real-time data, and gain insights to help prevent future issues.

StatusCake also provides robust SSL monitoring, sending up to three alerts before your SSL certificate expires. Additionally, you can use their SSL algorithm to assess your SSL score and identify any potential problems with your certificates.

The SSL monitor is included in all StatusCake plans, from the Free plan to the Business plan. The Free plan offers one monitor with a daily testing period, while upgrading to the Superior plan at $24.49 per month provides 50 monitors and a testing frequency of every 30 minutes.

Key Benefits of StatusCake:

• Page speed monitoring
• Domain monitoring
• Server monitoring
• StatusCake Pages app for real-time updates

3. Keychest

KeyChest provides a comprehensive SSL certificate monitoring and maintenance solution, catering to both personal and enterprise needs. In addition to monitoring certificate expiration and updates, KeyChest helps you locate certificates across your systems. To prevent downtime, KeyChest can handle certificate renewals on your behalf, independent of the certificate issuer. It offers on-demand renewals, deployment automation, failure detection, and a lightweight proxy for internal networks.

Pricing is flexible based on your needs. The Personal plan is free and includes HTTPS/TLS monitoring for personal use, certificate discovery, endpoint detection, and expiration reports. For larger organizations, the Enterprise plan supports multiple users and provides full reporting, internal certificate management, and integration with certificate providers like Sectigo, DigiCert, GeoTrust, Thawte, RapidSSL, GoDaddy, and COMODO. The Enterprise plan is available under a fixed-price annual license.

Key Benefits of KeyChest:

• Vulnerable endpoint monitoring
• Phishing threat monitoring
• Single sign-on with OKTA (Azure support coming soon)

4. Better Stack

Better Stack provides a robust uptime monitoring solution that includes built-in incident management. Along with SSL certificate and cron job monitoring, the platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools combining synthetic monitoring, incident management, and status page management.

Better Stack monitors your website every 30 seconds from multiple global locations, significantly reducing the risk of false alarms or missed location-specific issues. When incidents occur, each error is documented with a screenshot and detailed second-by-second timeline, allowing for rapid identification and troubleshooting.

The platform supports a wide range of integrations, including Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk On-Call, Zabbix, AWS CloudWatch, GCP, and Azure. With unlimited phone call alerts, SMS, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and push notifications, you’re always in the loop when errors arise.

BetterUptime, part of Better Stack, offers SSL monitoring starting with the Small Team bundle at $64 per month, which also includes smart incident merging, post-mortem reports, and ping monitoring. Higher-tier plans like Business or Enterprise introduce additional features like TLD expiration monitoring, TCP/UDP port monitoring, POP3/IMAP/SMTP monitoring, and DNS server checks.

Key Benefits of Better Stack:

• Integrated platform for Incident Management, Status Pages, and Uptime Monitoring
• Log management and monitoring via integration with Logtail
• Competitive and flexible pricing model

5. Site24x7

Site24x7 offers comprehensive SSL/TLS certificate monitoring from the cloud, alerting you before certificates expire. In addition to expiration alerts, Site24x7 helps monitor potential certificate revocation and enables SHA-1 fingerprint checks to detect certificate tampering or blacklisted certificate authorities. It monitors SSL certificates for key web services such as HTTPS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, and FTP servers from over 100 locations worldwide.

Site24x7’s Synthetic Monitoring tests the availability, performance, and functionality of critical components, ensuring the reliability of your digital services and an optimal user experience. You can use regular expression patterns or specific strings to verify the presence of values in response bodies, and check web server configurations by reviewing response headers. To optimize performance, you can record business transactions with their browser extension, simulate traffic from multiple locations, and detect issues. You can also import Selenium IDE test scripts to be run on real browsers like Chrome or Firefox at regular intervals.

SSL monitoring is included in all Site24x7 plans, with the Starter plan beginning at $9 per month. For more advanced features, you can opt for higher-tier plans like PRO, Classic, or Enterprise.

Key Benefits of Site24x7:

• Port monitoring
• FTP server monitoring
• Root cause analysis
• Mail delivery monitoring

6. Sematext

Sematext offers a broad range of monitoring solutions, including Synthetics, which allows you to monitor uptime and API performance from multiple locations, private networks, and behind firewalls. With Sematext Synthetics, you can track network timings across all layers, such as DNS, TCP, SSL, and HTTP. You can also set up custom requests to monitor your APIs and receive notifications via platforms like Slack, email, and webhooks in case of errors.

SSL Certificate monitoring is part of the Synthetics service, helping you prevent downtime caused by SSL-related issues. It continuously monitors SSL certificate validity, alerting you before expiration and enabling tracking of the entire certificate chain to avoid disruptions.

Sematext Synthetics also provides performance monitoring for your website, offering insights into page load times, core web vitals, third-party software performance, and SLA verification. All tests run in a real Google Chrome browser, ensuring accurate measurements of user experience.

Pricing for Sematext Synthetics is flexible, depending on the number of monitors and data retention. It starts at $5 per month with a pay-as-you-go model. The Standard plan, priced at $29 per month, includes 40 HTTP monitors and 5 browser monitors, as well as advanced SSL certificate monitoring for detailed alerts and reports.

Key Benefits of Sematext:

• Custom metrics
• Browser console error logs
• Webhooks integrations

7. Robot Alp

Robot Alp includes SSL monitoring as part of its comprehensive website monitoring solution. It regularly monitors your SSL certificates to detect misconfigurations or upcoming expirations, which could otherwise flag your website as unsafe.

Robot Alp’s pricing is based on the number of monitors rather than individual features. With any plan, you get access to all eight monitoring tools: Website, Port, JSON, SSL, Keyword, DNS, Safe Browsing, and Page Speed. The Starter Plan begins at $7.50 and includes 10 monitors, along with 500 email and 100 SMS tokens. Higher-tier plans, such as Premium, Pro, and Business, are also available for expanded needs.

Key Benefits of Robot Alp:

• Unlimited Slack alerts
• Unlimited Telegram alerts
• Timezone management
• Log storage

8. Track SSL

TrackSSL is designed to help you keep track of your SSL certificates with ease. Trusted by both large and small companies, it regularly checks your SSL certificates for expiration and common errors. Beyond just tracking expiration, TrackSSL also monitors infrastructure changes and sends alerts whenever certificate information is updated.

TrackSSL offers four subscription plans. The Free Plan allows you to monitor up to 2 domains, while the entry-level paid tier, Small, covers up to 20 domains for $25 per year. For larger needs, you can track up to 200 domains for $99 annually.

Key Benefits of TrackSSL:

• Slack integration
• Customizable notifications