Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Knapsack Pro VS IsDown.app

Compare Knapsack Pro VS IsDown.app and see what are their differences

Knapsack Pro logo Knapsack Pro

Speed up your tests with optimal test suite parallelisation on any CI provider. Supported test runners in Ruby (RSpec, Minitest, Test::Unit, Cucumber, Spinach, Turnip), in JavaScript (Cypress.io, Jest, Vitest), native API integration.

IsDown.app logo IsDown.app

Monitor all your cloud services with our status page aggregator. IT teams choose IsDown to monitor all their vendors and get alerts whenever an outage occurs. Integration with Datadog, PagerDuty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and a lot more.
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  • Knapsack Pro Landing page
    Landing page //
    2020-11-26

https://knapsackpro.com - Split Ruby, JavaScript tests on parallel CI nodes to save time.

  • IsDown.app Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-11-06
  • IsDown.app Notifications in Slack, Email, Google Chat, PagerDuty, Datadog, and more.
    Notifications in Slack, Email, Google Chat, PagerDuty, Datadog, and more. //
    2024-05-08
  • IsDown.app Dashboard with all your vendor status
    Dashboard with all your vendor status //
    2024-05-08
  • IsDown.app Public or Private Status Pages
    Public or Private Status Pages //
    2024-05-08

IsDown is a powerful vendor monitoring platform that centralizes the status of thousands of cloud services into one easy-to-use dashboard. It helps teams stay ahead of service outages by aggregating official status updates from over 3,200 SaaS and cloud providers.

Key Features: • Unified Monitoring: Keep track of all your critical vendors in a single place. • Real-Time Alerts: Receive instant notifications via Slack, Email, or other integrations when a service experiences issues. • Customizable Notifications: Filter alerts by service components and severity to focus on what matters most. • Historical Data: Access historical uptime and incident reports to assess vendor reliability over time. • Seamless Integrations: Connect with tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, and Datadog to streamline your workflow.

Ideal for teams relying on multiple external services, IsDown ensures you’re always informed about vendor performance, allowing you to respond proactively to disruptions.

Knapsack Pro

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Linux REST API JavaScript Ruby Browser
Release Date
2015 October
Startup details
Country
Poland
State
Malopolskie
City
Krakow
Founder(s)
Artur Trzop, Shadi Rezek
Employees
1 - 9

Knapsack Pro features and specs

  • Ruby test runners
    RSpec, Minitest, Test::Unit, Cucumber, Spinach, Turnip
  • JavaScript test runners
    Cypress, Jest
  • Native API integration
  • Support any CI provider

IsDown.app features and specs

  • Status Dashboard
  • Multiple Profiles for same account
  • Slack App
  • Zapier Integration
  • Scheduled maintenances feed
  • Weekly Digest
  • Datadog Integration
  • Uptime Monitoring
  • Keyword Monitoring
  • SSL Monitoring
  • PagerDuty Integration

Knapsack Pro videos

How optimal parallelisation works? Knapsack Pro intro

More videos:

  • Tutorial - RSpec split by test examples feature

IsDown.app videos

No IsDown.app videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Knapsack Pro and IsDown.app)
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Website Monitoring
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Knapsack Pro and IsDown.app.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Knapsack Pro's answer

Gusto, Calendly, AngelList

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Knapsack Pro's answer

Ruby, Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, JavaScript, Hotwire

What's the story behind your product?

Knapsack Pro's answer

How did Knapsack Pro start? In mid-2014, I worked on a client project where we had slow RSpec tests taking ~15 minutes, and I was looking for a way to save time and run faster CI builds. So I came up with the idea for an open-source Ruby gem called knapsack (the idea for the name came from the knapsack problem). The knapsack gem was helping split tests evenly across parallel CI nodes so you could leverage parallelism on the CI server.

I added a link to the Knapsack Pro beta landing page in the readme. Once ~80 people signed up for the Knapsack Pro beta, I started building it in March 2015. At the end of 2015, I had a working version and started promoting it. In mid-2016, first paying customers validated that improving the product further makes sense. Feedback from users helped me add more features and improvements like Knapsack Pro Queue Mode, which splits tests in a dynamic way across parallel CI nodes to ensure each CI node finishes work at a similar time. Thanks to that, CI build is as fast as possible, and there is no bottleneck in your parallel jobs.

Nowadays, thousands of developers use Knapsack Pro every day to run their CI builds faster. The free knapsack gem was downloaded over 250 million times. In addition, Knapsack Pro supports more test runners (not only in Ruby).

Artur Trzop Co-Founder & COO | Leading Technical Support

How would you describe your primary audience?

Knapsack Pro's answer

Ruby developers, DevOps, JS developers, startups

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Knapsack Pro's answer

Faster tests on your existing CI infrastructure. Thousands of developers use Knapsack Pro every day to run fast CI builds. Risk-free integration! Knapsack Pro runs tests in Fallback Mode if your CI servers can't reach our API for any reason. We don't need access to your repository. Knapsack Pro is a wrapper around test runners like RSpec, Cucumber, Cypress, Jest, Vitest, etc.

What makes your product unique?

Knapsack Pro's answer

Over 10 years of experience built into the product to make it smooth for the users and save them the most time while running automated tests.

User comments

Share your experience with using Knapsack Pro and IsDown.app. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Knapsack Pro should be more popular than IsDown.app. It has been mentiond 3 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Knapsack Pro mentions (3)

  • How I stopped RSpec from spiking to 2x runtime
    This seemed extremely suspicious because we use Knapsack, which should ensure near-equal finishing times for all runners. Luckily, Knapsack stores run data and I was able to identify common offenders and identify the common thread - the spiking specs were writing to the database and then being cleaned up by DatabaseCleaner. The project had a complex DB setup, so I reached for the lowest-hanging fruit - I tried... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've ever built?
    I've created a knapsack ruby gem for CI parallelisation that has over 122 million downloads. Primarily due to the fact, Gitlab is using it. I spin off https://knapsackpro.com from the knapsack gem and we are helping our customers run fast CI builds. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Free for dev - list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.)
    Knapsackpro.com - Speed up your tests with optimal test suite parallelisation on any CI provider. Split Ruby, JavaScript tests on parallel CI nodes to save time. Free plan for up to 10 minutes test files and free unlimited plan for Open Source projects. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago

IsDown.app mentions (1)

  • Ask HN: How did your startup get the first payment?
    I would say almost from day 1. Even at a lower price, it's an important step to validate an idea. When people need to put their credit card in and give you money, it's another level of commitment that I don't think you will have with a free plan. It is a level of commitment from the user but also from you. If you're getting paid, it's expected that, for example, if a service is down/not working, you need to fix... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Knapsack Pro and IsDown.app, you can also consider the following products

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CI’s precision syntax—all with the developer in mind.

UptimeRobot - Free Website Uptime Monitoring

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

Ping Bot - Reliable monitoring for your servers, vendors, and infrastructure.

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.

Better Uptime - We call you when your website goes down