Grafana Synthetic Monitoring vs Better Stack

Free tier available

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

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

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.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

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

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

• Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
• Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
• Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.

• 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.

• Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
• Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
• Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.

• 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.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.

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