Better Stack vs Checkly
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $25 per month per additional 50 monitors ($21 on yearly billing)
Free tierFrom $24 per month (Starter; Team is $64)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
There are no named tiers for uptime monitoring — you start from the free 10 monitors and add blocks of 50. Still substantially cheaper than assembling Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately.
Priced by check runs; browser checks cost more than API checks, and frequency multiplies the bill. Team at $64 adds 75 monitors, 30-second frequency, all 22 locations and private locations.
Free tier
10 monitors and heartbeats plus 1 status page, with Slack and email alerts.
Hobby: 10 uptime monitors, 10k API and 1k browser check runs a month across 6 locations.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Better Stack · since 2021
Widely used
Checkly · since 2018
Strengths
- Replaces three separate subscriptions with one at a lower total cost.
- Excellent status pages and incident communication out of the box.
- Fast check intervals even on modest plans.
- One Playwright script serves as both an E2E test and a production monitor.
- Monitoring-as-code fits GitOps workflows and code review.
- Excellent developer experience and clear, published pricing.
Limitations
- Browser-based transaction monitoring is limited compared to Checkly or Datadog.
- Log management is capable but not a full observability platform.
- Younger vendor than the incumbents.
- Playwright-centric; teams on other frameworks get less benefit.
- Browser checks at high frequency across many locations get expensive.
- Not a full observability platform — no APM or log management.
Best for
Small and mid-sized teams consolidating uptime, on-call and status pages.
Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.
All of these integrate with: Slack, PagerDuty, Terraform.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.