The observability market has long been carved up between Datadog (expensive), Grafana (complex), and New Relic (somewhere in between). Better Stack enters from a different angle: beautiful, simple, and without six-figure bills. A Czech startup founded in 2021, they’ve bundled uptime monitoring, log management, and status pages under one roof.
Website: betterstack.com
What’s Inside
Better Stack consists of three products you can use separately or together:
Better Uptime — uptime monitoring for websites and APIs. Checks every 30 seconds from multiple locations, error screenshots, alerts to Slack, Telegram, Discord. Supports not just HTTP, but also ping, TCP, SSL, DNS. Multi-step check scenarios let you simulate a user journey.
Better Logs — log aggregation with search, filters, and live-tail. ClickHouse under the hood, so searching through gigabytes of logs is instant. Integrations with a dozen frameworks: from plain syslog to Vercel, Heroku, and Kubernetes.
Better Status Pages — hosted status pages on your own domain. Beautiful, customizable, with automatic status updates from monitoring. Visitor subscriptions to email/SMS incident notifications.
Pricing
Monitoring starts with a free tier (10 monitors, checks every 3 minutes). Freelance at $5/mo gives you 20 monitors and 30-second checks.
Logs: free 1 GB/day with 3-day retention. Paid tiers from $15/mo for 5 GB/day and 15-day retention. Enterprise — unlimited.
Status pages from $20/mo for a basic one with a single admin subscriber.
Combo plans start at $49/mo for everything together — reasonable for a team of 3–5 people.
What’s Good
The design. Seriously, it’s rare to call an observability tool’s interface beautiful. Better Stack has built a minimal, modern UI that’s actually pleasant to spend time in. Not Grafana with its endless configs, and not Datadog with its overloaded dashboards.
Search speed in logs is the main technical advantage. ClickHouse under the hood delivers genuinely instant full-text search across logs. For comparison: ELK starts choking on tens of gigabytes, while here everything flies.
Onboarding — five minutes from signup to your first monitor. One-click integrations with popular hosting providers (Vercel, Netlify, Railway, Heroku).
What’s Not So Great
Better Stack is a young product, and it shows. Some features feel raw: RBAC is limited, custom dashboards are still in beta. If you’re used to Grafana’s flexibility with its plugins and transformations — you won’t find that here.
Log pricing at high volumes escalates quickly. If you generate 100+ GB of logs per day, Datadog or self-hosted ClickHouse may end up cheaper. Better Stack is aimed at small and medium teams — not quite ready for enterprise yet.
Verdict
Better Stack is a refreshing player in the observability market. Ideal for startups and teams of up to 20 people who want monitoring, logs, and status pages without the pain. Beautiful, fast, with an honest free tier. If you’re tired of the tooling zoo — give it a try, it’ll likely click.