Better Stack is a uptime & monitoring tool for Developers, offered as freemium ($30/mo). Founded in in 2021. Popular alternatives include Uptime Kuma, openstatus, Pingdom.
About Better Stack
Better Stack is an observability platform built by a Prague-based company of the same name. It started as two products, Better Uptime and Logtail, and now combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, status pages and log and metrics management (Telemetry) under one account and one interface.
Monitors check HTTP endpoints, keywords, ports, DNS, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats from multiple regions, with check intervals down to 30 seconds on paid plans. Alerts go out by phone call, SMS, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams, escalate through on-call rotations, and open incidents that can update a hosted status page automatically. The telemetry side is built on ClickHouse: logs and metrics are queried with SQL, followed in live tail and turned into dashboards, with OpenTelemetry and common log shippers supported. The free plan covers 10 monitors, a status page and a small log allowance; uptime is billed as a monthly plan, while logs and metrics are usage-based per GB.
It fits startups and small to mid-size engineering teams that would otherwise pay for Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately, and its interface is widely praised. It is not as deep as Datadog for APM, profiling and enterprise security, and PagerDuty remains more sophisticated for complex on-call and event routing. Uptime Kuma is the free self-hosted alternative for monitoring only, and Grafana Cloud is the main competitor on cost-efficient logs and metrics.
Key features of Better Stack
- 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
Pros and cons
Pros
- Polished all-in-one for small and mid teams
- Generous free plan
- Fast checks and reliable alerting
- Affordable logs
Cons
- Not as deep as Datadog for APM
- Usage pricing on logs needs monitoring
- On-call features simpler than PagerDuty
- Fewer integrations than incumbents
Better Stack pricing
Better Stack uses a freemium model.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, 3 GB logs |
| Responder | $34 / mo | $29/mo billed yearly; uptime + telemetry seat |
| Telemetry Nano | $30 / mo | EU region ($45 US); 40 GB logs/traces/metrics |
| Telemetry Micro | $120 / mo | EU region ($180 US); 160 GB each |
Source: betterstack.com · checked on Oct 20, 2026
How Better Stack compares in Uptime & monitoring
- Rank by votes
- #1 / 16
- Starting price
- $30
- Free alternatives
- 3
0 votes from members
25% above the category median ($24/mo)
Free or open-source tools in Uptime & monitoring
Better Stack ranks #1 of 16 uptime & monitoring tools by community votes and is priced above most tools in the category.
Common use cases
- 1Startup monitoring its API and website with on-call alerts
- 2Public status page for a SaaS
- 3Centralized logs for a small engineering team
- 4Replacing Pingdom plus PagerDuty plus Statuspage
Best for
Startups and small engineering teams who want monitoring, incidents and logs without three vendors.
Not ideal for
Large enterprises with complex observability needs (Datadog, Grafana Enterprise).
Integrations
- Slack
- PagerDuty
- Opsgenie
- Microsoft Teams
- Zapier
- Vercel
- Heroku
- AWS
- Datadog
- OpenTelemetry
Our take
Better Stack is the best-designed monitoring suite for small teams and replaces several tools. Start free; it scales reasonably.
FAQ
- What is Better Stack?
- Better Stack is a Uptime & monitoring tool: Uptime, incident management and logs.
- How much does Better Stack cost?
- Better Stack uses a Freemium model; paid plans start at $30 per month.
- What are the best alternatives to Better Stack?
- Community-listed alternatives to Better Stack include Uptime Kuma, openstatus, Pingdom, Atlassian Statuspage.
- What does Better Stack integrate with?
- Better Stack integrates with Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Vercel and more.
- Which platforms does Better Stack support?
- Better Stack is available on web.
- Who is Better Stack for?
- Startups and small engineering teams who want monitoring, incidents and logs without three vendors.
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