Compare · for indie devs

AutoSmoke vs Checkly
For indie devs who ship fast.

Checkly is powerful synthetic monitoring built on Playwright. AutoSmoke is AI-native smoke testing that requires zero test code. Here's how they compare for solo developers and small teams.

Run a Free Smoke Test

Feature comparison

Side by side

Feature
AutoSmoke
Checkly
Test authoring
Plain English — no code
Playwright scripts (JavaScript/TypeScript)
Setup time
Under 5 minutes
30+ minutes (write scripts, configure checks)
Test maintenance
AI vision adapts to UI changes
Manual — update selectors when UI changes
Monitoring
Scheduled runs + deploy hooks
Scheduled checks from global locations
Alerting
Email + Slack
Email, Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and more
Pricing model
$99/mo flat — 100 runs included
Usage-based, starts free, scales with checks
Target user
Indie devs, solo founders
Dev teams with monitoring expertise
CI integration
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions, GitLab, Vercel, and more

Where AutoSmoke wins

Zero test code to write or maintain

Describe what you want to test in English. No Playwright API knowledge required, no selector debugging, no flaky test fixes.

5-minute setup, not 5-hour setup

Paste your URL, describe a flow, run it. No npm install, no config files, no local test runner to configure.

Self-healing by default

Checkly tests break when you change a button class. AutoSmoke uses AI vision — it finds the button regardless of DOM changes.

Where Checkly shines

Global monitoring locations

Checkly runs checks from 20+ global locations, giving you latency data from different regions. AutoSmoke runs from a single region.

Deep Playwright ecosystem

If your team already writes Playwright tests, Checkly lets you reuse them as monitoring checks with minimal changes.

Advanced alerting & integrations

PagerDuty, OpsGenie, webhook escalation policies — Checkly has enterprise-grade incident routing that AutoSmoke doesn't offer yet.

The verdict

Choose AutoSmoke if you ship solo and hate maintaining tests.

If you're an indie developer or small team that wants smoke test coverage without writing Playwright scripts, AutoSmoke gets you there in minutes. Choose Checkly if you have a dev team that already invests in Playwright and needs global multi-location monitoring.

Your app changes daily.
Your guardrails should too.

Run a free smoke test now — and stop finding out from users.

Run a Free Smoke Test