Skip to content
testcritic

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 tier

From $24 per month (Starter; Team is $64)

Free tier

What 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

JavaScriptCodeless
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

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.