Pingdom vs Better Stack

From $18 per month (10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS; $16.50 annual)

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

Priced by a calculator rather than named tiers: 50 uptime checks run about $78/month and 100 about $149, so the per-check rate falls slowly with volume. Transaction checks and Real User Monitoring are priced separately from basic uptime checks and add up.

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.

30-day trial.

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

Widely used

SolarWinds · since 2007

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

• Very large global probe network with a long operating history.
• Simple to set up for basic availability monitoring.
• Combines synthetic checks with real-user monitoring.

• 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.

• Feature development has been slow under SolarWinds ownership.
• Transaction-check authoring is dated compared to code-first alternatives.
• Pricing is no longer competitive against newer entrants.

• 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.

Organisations wanting an established name for straightforward uptime monitoring.

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