Checkly vs Continue: Which Is Better in 2026?

Checkly is a monitoring platform that uses code-based synthetic monitoring to continuously check that your APIs and critical user flows actually work in production — catching problems before your users do. Rather than just checking whether a server responds, Checkly runs real, scripted checks (including full browser-based end-to-end tests) against your application from around the world, verifying that key journeys — logging in, checking out, calling an API — behave correctly. This proactive, behavior-based monitoring gives teams confidence that their most important flows are working, not just that their servers are up.

The platform lets developers write checks as code, using familiar tools and frameworks, to monitor API endpoints and simulate real user interactions in a browser, running these checks on a schedule from multiple locations. When something breaks — an API returns errors, a checkout flow fails, performance degrades — Checkly alerts the team quickly, with the details needed to diagnose the issue. By embracing a "monitoring as code" approach that fits modern development workflows, and by testing real user-facing functionality, Checkly bridges the gap between testing and production monitoring in a way developers appreciate.

Checkly is used by development and DevOps teams that want to ensure their APIs and key user flows are reliable in production and prefer a code-based, developer-friendly approach to monitoring. By catching failures in critical journeys early — from anywhere in the world — it helps teams maintain reliability, protect the user experience, and resolve issues before they cause significant impact. Its synthetic, end-to-end focus complements traditional observability by verifying that things actually work as users would experience them. As applications grow more complex and reliability becomes ever more important, proactive synthetic monitoring of real flows is increasingly valuable. For development teams that want to monitor their APIs and critical user journeys in production with code-based synthetic checks, Checkly offers a powerful, modern and developer-friendly solution.

Continue is an open-source AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains that brings customizable, model-flexible AI help right into the editors developers already use. Rather than locking you into one closed platform, Continue lets you configure exactly which models you want to use — including your own keys and even local models — giving you control, flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in while you get AI completion, chat and assistance inside your normal workflow.

Its strengths are openness and configurability. As an open-source project, it is transparent, community-driven and free, and its flexibility around models means you can tune it to your preferences, budget and privacy needs. It works across popular IDEs, so teams using different editors can share a consistent AI-assisted experience. For developers who want modern AI coding help without committing to a single proprietary editor or model provider, Continue offers a powerful, adaptable middle ground that respects how they already work.

Continue is ideal for developers and teams who value open source, want to choose and control their AI models, and prefer adding AI to their existing VS Code or JetBrains setup rather than switching editors. It sits alongside tools like Cline and Aider in the open-source AI-coding ecosystem, and is a flexible alternative to closed AI editors like Cursor. If you want customizable, open, model-agnostic AI assistance integrated into the IDE you already love, Continue is a standout choice that keeps you in control of both your workflow and your AI.