Checkly vs Better Stack

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

From $25 per month per additional 50 monitors ($21 on yearly billing)

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.

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.

Hobby: 10 uptime monitors, 10k API and 1k browser check runs a month across 6 locations.

10 monitors and heartbeats plus 1 status page, with Slack and email alerts.

Widely used

Checkly · since 2018

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.

Small and mid-sized teams consolidating uptime, on-call and status pages.