# DebugBear review (2026): is it worth $99 a month, billed yearly? > Page speed and Core Web Vitals monitoring with lab tests and RUM Checked Oct 23, 2026 ยท graded Oct 23, 2026 by ToolGPA. DebugBear monitors website speed and Google's Core Web Vitals in three ways: scheduled Lighthouse lab tests, real user monitoring on the site's own visitors, and Google's Chrome UX Report data. It adds request waterfalls, fix recommendations, page speed experiments, regression alerts and uptime checks. Plans are priced by synthetic tests and page views a month. - **Category:** Technical SEO & Site Audits - **Made by:** DebugBear Ltd (since 2018) - **Website:** https://www.debugbear.com - **Runs on:** Web - **Who should skip it:** Pricey if you have one small site, at $99 a month on yearly billing with no free plan. - **Facts last checked:** Oct 23, 2026 ## Pricing As of Oct 23, 2026, DebugBear is a paid product with a free trial, starting at $99 per month, billed yearly ($1,188 a year). - **Pricing model:** Free trial - **Free plan:** None. - **Free trial:** 14-day free trial, no credit card required. | Plan | Price | What you get | | --- | --- | --- | | Startup | $99 per month, billed yearly ($1,188 a year) | 4,000 synthetic tests (about 125 pages tested daily), 100,000 RUM page views, 10 uptime monitors, 1 project and 10 users. | | Team | $249 per month, billed yearly ($2,988 a year) | 10,000 synthetic tests (about 320 pages daily), 500,000 RUM page views, 50 uptime monitors, 5 projects and 50 users. | | Corporate / Agency | $699 per month, billed yearly ($8,388 a year) | 50,000 synthetic tests (about 1,600 pages daily), 2 million RUM page views, 100 monitors, 100 projects and unlimited users. | | Enterprise | Custom | Custom quotes with invoice payment, single sign-on, security forms, custom contracts and data retention, training and Slack support. | Read from https://www.debugbear.com/pricing on Oct 23, 2026. Prices change, so confirm with DebugBear before buying. ## Ways to pay less - **Save 20% with yearly billing** (Annual discount): DebugBear's pricing page marks yearly billing as a 20% saving over paying month to month. Source: https://www.debugbear.com/pricing ## Key features - **Synthetic monitoring:** Scheduled and on-demand Lighthouse lab tests from test locations around the world, including pages behind a login and multi-step user flows. - **Real user monitoring:** Measures Core Web Vitals for real visitors and shows which page elements and scripts cause slow interactions that hurt INP. - **Google CrUX data:** Tracks Chrome User Experience Report data over time and compares your site's real-visitor speed with competitors. - **Waterfalls and recommendations:** Request waterfalls tied to CPU and rendering activity, automatic fix suggestions, and ready-made prompts for coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor. - **Page speed experiments:** Try an optimization on a test run to see its effect before deploying the change to the live site. - **Alerts, comparisons and exports:** Automatic alerts on regressions, before-and-after comparisons, chart annotations, video exports and PDF or CSV reports. Data is kept for 24 months. ## Good for - SEO and development teams working to pass Core Web Vitals - Agencies watching page speed across many client sites - Catching speed regressions after a deploy ## Worth knowing - There is no free plan; after the 14-day trial, plans start at $99 a month on yearly billing. - Startup covers 1 project and 10 users; more projects need Team (5) or Corporate / Agency (100). - Extra RUM page views, synthetic tests and projects can be added to a plan for an extra monthly fee. - Single sign-on, invoice payment and custom data retention come only with the custom-priced Enterprise plan. ## ToolGPA grades **GPA: 2.2 out of 4**, graded Oct 23, 2026. DebugBear tracks page speed three ways: scheduled Lighthouse tests, real user monitoring and Google's CrUX data, with waterfalls, fix suggestions and regression alerts. There's no free plan, it starts at $99 a month on yearly billing for 1 project, extra page views and tests cost more each month, and SSO and invoice payment are Enterprise only. - **Value for money: C.** Startup is $99 a month billed yearly ($1,188 a year) for 4,000 lab tests, 100,000 real-user page views and 1 project, in this category's dearer quarter. Team is $249 and Corporate / Agency $699. - **Free plan and trial: C.** No free plan, but the 14-day trial needs no card. After it, plans start at $99 a month on yearly billing. - **Features: C.** Lighthouse lab tests including logged-in pages and user flows, real user Core Web Vitals with INP attribution, CrUX tracking against competitors, waterfalls, speed experiments, alerts and uptime checks. It does speed monitoring fully, but that's a smaller job. - **Ease of use: C.** No rating on record. You set up projects, pages and test schedules, then read waterfalls across three kinds of data. - **Platforms and integrations: B.** Web, with an API, Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Looker Studio, Netlify, Vercel and CircleCI. No desktop or phone app. These are ToolGPA's own grades. Graded from this listing, whose facts were read from DebugBear's own pages on 23 October 2026. Not based on using the product, and shorter than our full reviews. ## Where it stands among technical SEO tools - DebugBear's GPA of 2.2 is higher than 20 of the 83 other technical SEO tools we grade, and level with 20. - It stands best on platforms and integrations (B, above 27 of 83) and worst on ease of use (C, above 7). - Its paid plans start at $99 a month, against a middle price of $22.41 for the category: 45 of the 52 others that charge start lower. - On features, ease of use and platforms it scores 2.3 out of 4. 7 tools score higher and cost less. The category's chart of price against score: https://toolgpa.com/charts/technical-seo ## Keep it, or make your own? **Keep it.** Nothing DebugBear does is plain enough to make in a weekend. The 3 things listed below take a company. That makes this kind of software worth paying for, not this one in particular: 43 of the 83 other technical SEO tools grade higher. It costs $1,188 a year. - You could not: Speed tests run from real browsers on a schedule. - You could not: Connections that pull numbers from dozens of other services. - You could not: It plugs into other products, Slack, Microsoft Teams and GitHub among them, and has an API. A judgement by ToolGPA from this listing, by rules that are the same for every tool. Nothing was built to test it. ## Works with Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Looker Studio, Netlify, Vercel, CircleCI **Tags:** Page speed, Dashboards, Public API ## Alternatives - [SpeedCurve](https://toolgpa.com/tools/speedcurve): Web performance monitoring with RUM, synthetic tests and budgets. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/debugbear-vs-speedcurve) - [Calibre](https://toolgpa.com/tools/calibre): Web performance monitoring with RUM, CrUX data and synthetic tests. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/calibre-vs-debugbear) - [GTmetrix](https://toolgpa.com/tools/gtmetrix): Page speed testing with Lighthouse reports, monitoring and an API. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/debugbear-vs-gtmetrix) - [WebPageTest](https://toolgpa.com/tools/webpagetest): Page speed tests from real browsers in locations around the world. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/debugbear-vs-webpagetest) - [Treo](https://toolgpa.com/tools/treo): Core Web Vitals dashboard built on CrUX data and Lighthouse runs. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/debugbear-vs-treo) ## Sources The prices, plans, platforms and features above were read from these pages on Oct 23, 2026: - https://www.debugbear.com/pricing - https://www.debugbear.com/ - https://www.debugbear.com/about - https://www.debugbear.com/docs - https://www.debugbear.com/docs/slack-integration Page: https://toolgpa.com/tools/debugbear Listed by ToolGPA (toolgpa.com).