Better Stack vs Uptime Kuma
Better Stack and Uptime Kuma are both uptime & monitoring tools aimed at developers. Both have a free plan.
Better Stack
Uptime, incident management and logs
Uptime Kuma
Self-hosted uptime monitoring
| Pricing | Freemium · $30 | Open source |
| Starting price | $30/mo | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Developers | Developers |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | CZ · 2021 | HK · 2021 |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Better Stack if
Startups and small engineering teams who want monitoring, incidents and logs without three vendors.
- Polished all-in-one for small and mid teams
- Generous free plan
- Fast checks and reliable alerting
Look elsewhere if: Large enterprises with complex observability needs (Datadog, Grafana Enterprise).
Choose Uptime Kuma if
Developers and small teams comfortable self-hosting who want free, reliable uptime checks.
- Free and open source
- Very easy to deploy
- Huge range of notifications
Look elsewhere if: Teams needing on-call rotations, SLAs and multi-user management.
Better Stack vs Uptime Kuma pricing
Better Stack
- Free$010 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, 3 GB logs
- Responder$34/mo$29/mo billed yearly; uptime + telemetry seat
- Telemetry Nano$30/moEU region ($45 US); 40 GB logs/traces/metrics
- Telemetry Micro$120/moEU region ($180 US); 160 GB each
Uptime Kuma
- Open source$0MIT license, self-hosted via Docker or Node
Better Stack · Key features
- Uptime, SSL, DNS and heartbeat monitors with fast intervals
- Incident management with on-call rotations and escalations
- Beautiful hosted status pages
- Log management with SQL and live tail
- Metrics, dashboards and OpenTelemetry support
- Phone, SMS, Slack and Teams alerting
Cons
- Not as deep as Datadog for APM
- Usage pricing on logs needs monitoring
- On-call features simpler than PagerDuty
Uptime Kuma · Key features
- HTTP, TCP, ping, DNS, keyword, JSON and Docker monitors
- Push monitors for cron and heartbeat checks
- 90+ notification providers including Slack, Telegram, Discord
- Status pages with custom domains
- Certificate expiry monitoring
- Single-container Docker deployment
Cons
- Self-hosted only; you monitor the monitor
- Single-user by default
- Basic incident management
Better Stack vs Uptime Kuma: FAQ
Do Better Stack and Uptime Kuma have a free plan?
Yes, both Better Stack and Uptime Kuma have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.