Asking your certificate authority whether you need its certificate monitoring is a bit like asking a student to grade their own homework. They will have an opinion. It will be sincere. It will also, reliably, come back marked "yes, and here is the deluxe package."
There's a deeper issue than the upsell. Buying issuance and monitoring from the same vendor puts both eggs in one basket. Issuing certificates and monitoring them are genuinely different disciplines - issuance is a CA's core business; monitoring is usually a feature bolted on beside it, not the thing they are best at. An independent monitor that does nothing but watch certificates tends to do that one job better, catch failure modes well beyond expiry, and cost a fraction of what a CA charges for the same capability stacked on top of its issuance bill.
This isn't a slag on DigiCert. CertCentral is a solid product, especially if you already buy most of your certificates from them. But if you're reading this page, something about it isn't working for you. Maybe the price tag has crept up. Maybe the dashboard feels like it was designed in 2008 and last loved in 2012. Maybe you've got certificates from three different CAs and CertCentral only really cares about its own.
Here is an honest look at the alternatives - when each one makes sense, when it doesn't, and what to actually pay attention to before you switch.
When CertCentral is the right tool
Before you leave, a fair question: when is CertCentral the right call?
- You buy almost all your certs from DigiCert anyway. You want monitoring and issuance from one vendor, one bill, one throat to choke. You don't mind paying enterprise prices for an enterprise feel. You have a Microsoft-heavy environment and value the integrations.
If that's you, stay. Save yourself an evaluation.
When it isn't
CertCentral starts to feel like wearing a tuxedo to the grocery store when:
- You have certificates from multiple CAs (Let's Encrypt, AWS ACM, GoDaddy, internal CAs) and you want one dashboard for all of them - not just the DigiCert ones. You want monitoring as a neutral second opinion, not as an upsell channel. You're a team of two to twenty people and CertCentral's per-feature pricing makes your CFO twitch. You want vulnerability scanning, cipher checks, and chain validation - not just "this cert expires on Tuesday." You've tried the support and the dashboard and felt, as one G2 reviewer put it, like the workflow "can feel heavy for non-technical users."
If any of those is you, here are the alternatives worth a look.
The alternatives
TLS Radar. Honest disclosure: this is us. We monitor TLS certificates from any CA - DigiCert, Let's Encrypt, AWS, internal - from outside your network, the way a real user would. We check expiry, cipher suites, chain validity, hostname matches, and known vulnerabilities. We don't sell certificates. The free tier covers three domains. The Business tier starts at $199.99 a month for teams up to a certain size, and Enterprise pricing scales with cert count. We're best for organisations that want focused monitoring without certificate lifecycle management bolted on.
Keyfactor Command. The closest direct competitor to DigiCert at the enterprise tier. It does both monitoring and certificate lifecycle management, with strong support for internal CAs. The trade-off is that "comprehensive" sometimes means "heavy" - implementation and onboarding can take months. Worth it if you want one platform for everything. Overkill if you just want monitoring.
Venafi TLS Protect (now part of CyberArk). The biggest, most mature, most expensive option. If your organisation has tens of thousands of certs across multiple internal PKIs, machine identities, and code signing certs, Venafi is built for you. If you're not at that scale, the cost-to-value ratio gets unfriendly fast. G2 reviewers consistently note the price.
AppViewX AVX ONE. Strong on automation and workflows. Good for organisations that want to script everything. The learning curve is real, and the UI rewards practice. Best for environments where a small platform team owns cert ops and serves the rest of the company.
Red Sift Certificates (formerly Hardenize). Lean product, strong opinions on TLS posture, good vulnerability detection. Their wider Red Sift product range leans toward email security (DMARC) and brand protection, so cert monitoring is a fit but not always the centre of gravity. Good for security-led teams.
Keychest. Affordable, practical, focused. Solid choice for smaller teams. Less polished than the enterprise options, more honest about what it does and doesn't do. If TLS Radar isn't a fit for some reason, Keychest is the next place I'd look.
Sectigo Certificate Manager. Comparable position to DigiCert - a CA that also offers a manager. Same conflict-of-interest pattern, slightly different price point. Useful if you already buy from Sectigo.
AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Free, fully managed, AWS-native. It's also a different category of product: ACM handles certificates for AWS services. It does not monitor third-party certs, internal CA certs, or anything outside AWS. People sometimes confuse "I use ACM" with "I have cert monitoring." If you have a mixed environment, this is a partial answer at best.
Cloudflare's cert management. Same idea as ACM, but Cloudflare-shaped. Good if you're fully on Cloudflare. Same blind spots otherwise.
Build it yourself, with openssl + cron + a Slack webhook. A real option. Many engineering teams start here. The Hacker News crowd will tell you (rightly) that Nagios was checking certs in 2005. The script is twenty lines. The cost is your team's time when something breaks at 3am, when a renewal fails silently, when a junior engineer "improves" the script and stops the alert from firing. As one operator put it: "renewal worked fine for months, something changed (new server config, DNS change, firewall rule), renewal failed silently, and you found out when users started seeing browser warnings."
How to actually choose
Ignore the feature checklists for a minute. Three questions matter more than any of them.
One: how many CAs do your certs come from today? If the answer is "just one and we plan to keep it that way," your current CA's tool is probably fine. If the answer is "two or more, plus some I don't know about," you need an independent monitor that doesn't care which CA issued the cert.
Two: who is going to look at the alerts? If the answer is "a single person whose calendar reminder you'll inherit when they leave" - that's the problem, not the tool. Pick something with team-based alerting (Slack, webhooks, an inbox a team owns).
Three: what's the cost of a single outage to you? A small marketing site can probably tolerate the build-it-yourself route. A fintech company processing real money during business hours cannot. The right tool is whatever has the smallest gap between "an alert fires" and "the right person acts on it."
A small bias to declare
We built TLS Radar because the existing options either bundled monitoring with certificate sales (both eggs in one basket), priced independent monitoring for the Fortune 500, or required you to write your own scripts and pray. We do one thing - watch your certificates, from any CA, from the outside - and we price it so a two-person team can afford the same independent second opinion an enterprise gets. If that's the gap you're trying to close, give us ten minutes. The free tier exists exactly so you can try it without a meeting.
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