Without active SSL certificates, communication between the website and the user is no longer encrypted, meaning any malicious party can get access to sensitive user data. However, it is unlikely that users will continue using the website after seeing a security warning, e.g. it is known that 85% of shoppers avoid unsecured websites. Using an effective, automatic SSL certificate expiry monitoring tool is the easiest way to keep track of your site certificates’ validity.
When you have a monitoring system, you are notified of the months or days left until your SSL certificate expires. This automatic system provides you with a dashboard that contains all relevant information about your license and alerts you to revalidate your website’s certifications before or as soon as they expire. Also, some tools, such as TrackSSL alert you whenever a new SSL Certificate is changed, renewed, and issued for your domain. However, not all SSL certificate monitoring tools are equal. There are monitoring tools that send alerts before the actual expiry date, while others will simply show that the website is down due to SSL certificate expiry. Moreover, some tools that are specifically developed to track SSL certificate expiry will simply send you a series of alerts, whether or not you’ve renewed the certificate. Tools that are not designed primarily for SSL certificate monitoring often do not provide information about the certificates themselves. If you want more transparency into SSL certificates and advanced features on monitoring – sign up for TrackSSL for free.
Otherwise, here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of the 15 most popular tools that help you not miss the SSL certificate expiry date.
Read further, to learn about the SSL certificate tracking tools and how they differ from one another.
1. TrackSSL – Monitoring SSL Certificate Expiry
TrackSSL keeps tabs on your SSL and TLS certificates and expiry dates. This platform helps you track all SSL certificates used by your organization’s domain, services, and applications, and checks for unusual changes, fraudulent certifications, weak signatures, and other issues on the website.
TrackSSL immediately notifies you when a website’s SSL certificate is updated or replaced. Users can receive notifications via SMS, email, Slack, and Teams. Additionally, alerts can be set up for separate users depending on the certificates they monitor. The cadence of the individual alerting can also be set up.
Among other features that are rarely available with other tools, TrackSSL offers bulk adding and management of SSL certificates.
Also, TrackSSL offers to check the SSL certificate expiration date online.
TrackSSL Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
TrackSSL is free if you’re operating a small-scale business with less than three domains to track. However, if you’d need to watch more than two domains, the solution has cost-effective monthly packages for different scales of websites ranging from $17 to $136. To confirm that TrackSSL is the best option, you can try it for free before subscribing to the premium packages.
Category: Genuine SSL monitoring software
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL cert monitoring: from $0.27 per month.
2. Sematext as an SSL Certificate Expiry Monitor
Sematext is an IT system monitoring tool for DevOps. It offers an always-active SSL analytical tool that tracks all API checks, certificate changes, and validity duration at regular intervals each day for 12 or 13 months, depending on the subscription package of the SSL certificate.
This simple but unique solution uses two separate monitors, the HTTP monitor, and the Browser monitor. You can use the first one to check the name constraints, chain validity, and expiry dates, while the latter uses the Google Chrome browser to check for weak signatures and keys and to observe if a certificate is active.
Sematext sends notifications via Twilio, VictorOps, and Slack. Users can integrate any messenger via Zapier.
Sematext Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
Sematext has a free trial. The company offers a pay-as-you-go plan that allows you to keep track of personal monitors for as little as $2 a month, while the regular plan starts from $29 a month.
Category: IT system monitoring tool
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL cert monitoring: from $2 per month.
3. Site24x7 for SSL Certificate Expiry Monitoring
Site24x7 is an all-in-one monitoring solution that also offers SSL certificate expiry monitoring. The tool performs multiple proactive checks to track your SSL/TLS certificate validity and inform you about any SSL-related issues like revoked certificates and blocklisted certifying authorities.
This solution offers the SHA-1 fingerprint check, which verifies the authenticity of certificates and detects ongoing or potential tampering. It also uses the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) checks. With a tool like Site24X7, you can be sure that your website is credible, reliable, and safe. However, SSL certificate management in bulk is poor with Site24x7.
Site24x7 Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
Site24x7 offers various cost-friendly plans ranging from $10/month to $445/month after users enjoy the 30-day free trial. There are free tests of SSL/TLS certificates available with an option to choose a location. However, no free plan to monitor SSL certificates.
Category: All-in-one monitoring solution
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL cert monitoring: from $0.90 per month.
4. Datadog for SSL Certificate Expiry Monitoring
Datadog is a complex solution that provides a complete package of cloud monitoring and security services.
Apart from its numerous features, Datadog includes SSL monitoring inside its synthetic monitoring product. To ensure secure connections between your essential services and users, Datadog routinely performs SSL API checks to inform you about your certificate’s validity and expiration dates. It immediately clues you in when your certificates get misconfigured across internal and public hosts in multiple locations.
Datadog Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
If you need features like website uptime and latency monitoring as well, then together with SSL monitoring Datadog offers a free 14-day trial period to paid plans starting from $5 per month for 10,000 API test runs and $12 per month for 1,000 Browser test runs.
Since Datadog is more focused on observability rather than certificate expiration monitoring, fewer features are available for convenient SSL certificate management.
Category: Observability, monitoring, and security service.
Free plan: No.
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: from $5.00 per month.
5. UptimeRobot as an SSL Certificate Expiry Monitor
UptimeRobot is a reasonably priced monitoring tool, that includes a basic SSL monitor. It checks if your website is securely encrypted, and detects and notifies you of SSL certificate issues within your website’s HTTPS. Upon looking up the information on the SSL certificate, not many details are available, such as issuer, certificate chain, raw certificate, etc.
The UptimeRobot solution sends alerts exactly 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before SSL certificate expiry dates. Users do not have any control over notifications – no option to choose to receive fewer alerts or send them to specific receivers.
UptimeRobot sends notifications via unlimited phone calls, emails, or SMS. Additionally, this tool can notify you through integrated apps like Slack, Discord, or MS Teams. Integration via Zapier is also available.
UptimeRobot Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
This solution allows paid users to set limits from recurring notifications, set up maintenance windows, identify and analyze issues, and make multiple checks from different locations.
You can purchase UptimeRobot advanced features for $15/month. There’s an option for a refund within ten days of subscribing.
Even though UptimeRobot has a free plan, it does not include monitoring and alerting on SSL errors.
Category: Uptime monitoring service
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: starting from $0.14 per month if billed annually.
6. ManageEngine as an SSL Certificate Expiry Tracker
ManageEngine is a complex solution for analytics, security, and management of IT systems. Its monitoring tool is a web-based SSL certificate management solution that audits and tracks the life cycles of all SSL certificates in a domain. The ManageEngine tool, Key Manager Plus, helps you request, consolidate, renew, and deploy new and existing certificates.
ManageEngine gives you a comprehensive report about your domain environment and sends alerts whenever issues arise. However, more advanced SSL certificate monitoring features, such as bulk management or individual alerting are poor.
Otherwise, ManageEngine’s Key Manager enables you to stay on top of SSL certificate renewals as it notifies you about the certificates nearing expiration so you to roll out new validations before they expire.
ManageEngine Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
There’s a free trial available for Key Manager Plus. Contact them for a quote on the advanced features after the trial ends.
Category: Complete solution for IT system management
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: approximately $19, request a quote for precise pricing.
7. StatusCake as an SSL Certificate Expiration Monitor
StatusCake monitors page speed, domains, and servers. You can prevent further or repeated domain failures by analyzing and evaluating downtimes and previous outages using StatusCake’s comprehensive reports.
StatusCake sends reports on website SSL certificates from 43 locations within 30 regions. The tool uses the StatusCake SSL algorithm that assesses your SSL certificate setup and notifies you of the score.
SSL test can be set up at a minimal 5-minute check rate or 7 days max. Apart from regular alerts, you may set up Mixed Content Warnings as an advanced option.
No bulk management of SSL certificates is available.
StatusCake Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
StatusCake subscription bundles range from $0 (free) to $25/month. With the superior paid package, you can monitor 50 domains with a test interval of 30 minutes.
Category: Website monitoring solution
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: starting from $0.41 per month.
8. Zabbix as an SSL Certificate Expiry Monitor
Zabbix is an open-source infrastructure monitoring software that comes with powerful application performance management and offers 2 templates to track SSL certificate validity and expiration. This function is available via the WebCertificate plugin for the Zabbix agent. There are third-party solutions for SSL certificate checks, available mostly on GitHub.
Alerts are triggered whenever a certificate is invalid, expires soon, or fingerprint gets changed.
Zabbix requires hosting, so you will need to set up an environment before using it. Also, since the tool is focused on other functionalities, bulk SSL certificate management is not available.
Zabbix Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
Zabbix is free, but you may request a demo depending on your company’s needs. Even though Zabbix is considered a free tool, it requires a LAMP environment. If you do not have it, then you will need to install Apache, MYSQL, and PHP, perform a set of steps to install Zabbix Server on your system and complete the installation.
Category: Infrastructure stack monitoring
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: free, but it is self-hosted, and therefore consider the cost of hosting, installing, running, and maintaining.
9. Dotcom-monitor for SSL Certificate Expiry Tracking
Dotcom-Monitor offers multiple web services monitoring to observe the domain’s functionality and performance, track uptime, and receive reports and alerts about your SSL certificate expiry dates.
Dotcom-Monitor sends SSL certificate expiration reminders. These alerts can be configured to be sent to specified users on a specific number of days prior to expiration. The SSL Certificate Monitoring detects any changes, tests the intermediate chain of trust, performs common name verification, and helps to prevent SSL revocation.
Dotcom-Monitor Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
Unrestricted access to Dotcom-monitor’s premium services comes with a 30-day free trial with no credit cards needed.
Category: Website monitoring and performance testing solutions
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: starting from $19.95 per month.
10. Sucuri as an SSL Certificate Expiry Tracker
Sucuri is primarily a website security solution to detect and report possible malware problems, SEO spam, blocklist status, and uptime monitoring. However, it offers excellent SSL certificate tracking services.
The tool notifies users of any suspicious activities in connection to SSL/TLS certificates via email. In contrast to other SSL expiry monitors, Sucuri does not inform of the exact time the issue occurred, but only that it happened.
Sucuri Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
The price of Sucuri monitoring services starts from $199/year. This plan supports monitoring an SSL certificate you get from Sucuri. In case you need a security platform and wish to monitor pre-existing certificates, you will have to pay for an upper-tier plan. The premium plan costs $499/year.
Category: Website security solution
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: starting from $16.66 per month.
11. LetsMonitor.org as an SSL Certificate Expiry Tracker
LetsMonitor.org solution monitors certificate validity using its globally distributed servers. This tool also monitors HTTPS uptime and performance rate to confirm that sites are encrypted and performing well. Users receive alerts about close SSL certificate expiration dates or misconfiguration on domains to their emails.
Interestingly though, LetsMonitor has an unsecured HTTP website that does not have a redirect to the secured version. If you were about to start using this service, we strongly recommend opting for a secure option, which is TrackSSL free account, for example.
As the tool is free, but SSL certificate management is not offered. Also, we were not able to verify if the service is regularly overseen and supported.
LetsMonitor Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
LetsMonitor.org is a free service and can be used by all.
Category: Website SSL certificate monitoring service
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: free, but has a version without an SSL certificate, which is interesting considering the type of services they provide.
12. SSL Certificate Expiration Alerts (working with issues or not working)
You can review your SSL certificate authenticity and adjoining infrastructure via the SSL Certificate Expiration Alerts website. You will be notified via email if your SSL certificate is about to expire before a certain number of days or if it stops working.
The results display an overview of all the SSL certificates for your domains, including expiration and activation dates, when it works.
This service was launched in 2017 and was a part of the HTTPS COP project to be launched soon after. The creator of the project stopped posting on his dedicated Twitter account in 2018. We cannot be sure if SSL Certificate Expiration Alerts is supported, and, therefore, reliable. The service does not seem to work properly most of the time. The loading sometimes takes too long, and other times the web page does not load at all.
If you need a reliable SSL certificate alerting system, try TrackSSL free account.
SSL Certificate Expiration Alerts Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
SSL Certificate Expiration Alerts is a free tool.
Category: SSL certificate expiry alerts system
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: free but not supported any longer, and most likely does not work as expected.
13. Open-Source Certificate Expiry Monitor by Mux Inc.
The Mux’s solution is designed to expose the expiry of TLS certificates as Prometheus metrics. So in case, you monitor your system with Prometheus then TLS Expiry Monitor is what you need for watching the SSL certificate expiration date. It automatically keeps track of your certificates and notifies you when any issues occur or expiration dates approach.
The certificate expiry monitor by Mux Inc., also makes it simple to find and address problems with loading delays. You can keep track of each component’s performance with a thorough web page load test, review past data and assess your page’s performance over time to identify performance trends and issues.
It’s important to understand, that open-source solutions, such as Mux’s TLS Expiry Monitor require hosting, and setting up the environment before use.
Mux Inc. Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
Mux Inc., offers a free and open-source SSL certificate expiry monitoring tool, although it requires experience to set up.
Category: TLS certificate expiry monitor for Prometheus
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: free SSL certificate utility for Prometheus. Consider the cost of a setup, server, management, and maintenance.
14. KeyChest as an SSL Certificate Expiration Monitoring
KeyChest instantly identifies new certificates as they are created; this sets it apart from other SSL certificate monitoring tools. You do not have to enter the certification information manually as KeyChest automatically searches and keeps track of it from configuration to expiration.
KeyChest provides information on the certificate, including the key length and type, the endpoints for use, the renewal line — previous certificates and their expiration — and the renewal procedure.
KeyChest Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
KeyChest does not have its prices in the open. There’s a free plan that is better suited for personal use. As for business, they are invited to request a quote. According to G2 – prices range from $10 to $99 per month.
Category: Web certificate management and security solution
Free plan: Yes
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: approximately $0.49 per month, however, this is not an official price, but a calculation based on other than KeyChest source.
15. Updown.io as an SSL Certificate Expiration Tracker
Updown.io SSL tracker is an affordable solution that’s simple to use. It has excellent features like a 15-second check frequency, diverse payment methods including cryptocurrencies, and various SSL checks from different locations. It notifies you of invalid or expired SSL certificates that result in downtimes.
Regular notifications are sent via a public or private status page, slack channel, Telegram, Webhook, or SMS.
Since the uptime monitor is Updown’s main feature, to view information on the SSL is not very obvious. You have to hover over the “HTTPS” prefix of the domain name to view the details. The information on your SSL certificate is given in a pop-up, with no dashboard or report view. Bulk SSL certificate management is not available. Also, the frequency of the alerts is pre-defined whether the SSL certificate has been taken care of or not.
From a pricing perspective, Updown.io is somewhat opaque since its pricing is based on credits. The open information does not provide a straightforward answer on how these credits are used.
Updown Pricing for SSL Certificate Monitoring
Updown uses the pay-as-you-go pricing system. With less than $70, you can monitor 50 domains every 30 seconds.
Category: Website monitoring solution
Free plan: No
Cost per SSL certificate monitoring: starting from $0.01 per month.
Summary
With all the things to attend to, it is easy to miss the SSL certificate expiration date, unless a monitoring tool is used.
These SSL expiry monitor tools ensure that you can’t be caught off-guard, or put your website users’ safety at risk.
Start tracking the expiry date of your SSL certificate today – sign up for TrackSSL for free.
FAQ On SSL Certificate Expiry Monitoring
How do I monitor SSL expiration?
One way is to set yourself a reminder to renew each of your certificates on the day of purchase. However, to effectively monitor your SSL certificate expiration date, it is better to sign up for TrackSSL. Now you will receive SSL expiry notifications whenever any of your SSL certificates are getting close to the expiration date. Also, you will be notified of any changes.
What is an SSL monitor?
An SSL Monitor is software that monitors your SSL/TLS certificates for expiration, changes, and fraudulent certs. One of the best SSL monitors is TrackSSL.
What happens when an SSL certificate expires?
Expired certificates can cause service and website downtimes. Also, you may lose your rankings on Google and other search engines. After a certificate has expired your new and existing customers will see a notification saying that your website is insecure. Users won’t fill out forms, register, or purchase on your website, and possibly would go to your competitors. With an expired SSL certificate, you won’t be able to use a secure encrypted HTTPS connection anymore. Your’s and your customer’s data and information will be transmitted in plaintext and can be easily intercepted by any hacker listening to traffic.
Teams all over the world trust TrackSSL to monitor their SSL and TLS certificates, expiration, changes, and transparency.
How do I know when the SSL certificate expires?
To check when the SSL certificate expires:
1. Log in to your TrackSSL account or create a free one if you don’t have one.
2. Add the SSL certificate URL you want to check the expiry date.
3. You will see the expiry date of the SSL certificate.
How do I fix an SSL certificate expiry?
Fix the SSL certificate expiry by renewing it with your certificate authority (CA). Ideally, you should not miss the SSL certificate expiry date and renew your certificate on time. Using an effective, automatic SSL certificate expiry monitoring tool, such as TrackSSL, is the easiest way to keep track of your site certificates’ validity. When you have a monitoring system, you are notified of the months or days left until your SSL certificate expires.
How long does an SSL certificate last?
The length of time your SSL certificate is valid depends on the Certificate Authority you choose, and is typically between one month and two years. In order not to miss the SSL certificate expiry date, it is recommended to sign up for TrackSSL to get notifications on the approaching expiration date, changes, and issue of a new certificate for your domain.
How do you check if the SSL cert has expired?
To check if the SSL cert has expired, you will see a warning on your website that the connection is no longer secure. To ensure you do not miss an expiry date of an SSL certificate – sign up for TrackSSL to receive timely alerts before your SSL/TLS certificate expires.
What is SSL expiry?
SSL certificate expiry means that the SSL certificate issued for your domain is no longer valid. With an expired SSL certificate, you won’t be able to use a secure encrypted HTTPS connection anymore. Your’s and your customer’s data and information will be transmitted in plaintext and can be easily intercepted by any hacker listening to traffic.