Better Stack
Uptime checks, on-call paging and status pages, plus logs, traces, metrics and errors in a ClickHouse-based store, sold as one SaaS billed per responder and per GB.
- What it is
- Observability
- Used for
- Logs,Metrics,Distributed tracing,Synthetic monitoring,On-call,Incident management,Error tracking
- Type
- Commercial product
- Made by
- Better Stack, Inc.
- License
- Proprietary (the Better Stack collector is Apache 2.0)
- Facts checked
- 5 October 2026
What it is
Better Stack has two halves. Uptime checks your URLs, ports, DNS, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats from regions in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia, as often as every 30 seconds, and runs a multi-step verification before it opens an incident. It records the error and a screenshot, then alerts whoever is on call by phone, SMS, Slack, Teams, email or push, escalating step by step until someone acknowledges. Alerts from other tools, such as Datadog monitors, can open the same incidents, and a hosted status page tells your users what is going on.
Telemetry stores logs, traces, metrics, errors and session replays. An open-source collector (built from Vector, OpenTelemetry and an eBPF sensor) or any OpenTelemetry exporter sends data over HTTPS with a source token, and error tracking accepts events from the Sentry SDKs. Data lands in a warehouse built on ClickHouse that you query with SQL, PromQL or a drag-and-drop builder, or remotely from Grafana or the ClickHouse client. Pricing splits people from data: read-only team members are free, each responder who can be paged costs $29 to $34 a month, and telemetry is billed per GB ingested and per GB-month retained, at rates that depend on the data region.
Why teams pick it
- Uptime checks, on-call schedules, escalation, unlimited phone and SMS alerts and status pages in one product, instead of separate uptime, paging and status page services
- Logs and traces are queried with SQL on ClickHouse, and the same data is reachable over an HTTP API from Grafana or the ClickHouse client
- Billed by data volume and responder seats, not by host, and engineers who only read telemetry don’t need a paid seat
- Standard ways in: OTLP, Vector, Sentry SDKs, or the open-source collector, which uses eBPF to trace Kubernetes and Docker workloads without code changes
- A usable free plan: 10 monitors and heartbeats, a status page, 3 GB of logs kept 3 days and 100,000 exceptions a month
Watch out for
- Proprietary SaaS with no self-hosted version; keeping the data in your own S3 bucket costs $250 a month, and dedicated clusters are an enterprise option
- Prices depend on the data region: ingestion runs from $0.10 to $0.35 per GB and retention from $0.05 to $0.18 per GB-month, so the same volume can cost more than three times as much
- Everyone who should be paged needs a responder licence, and white-label status pages cost $250 per page per month
- eBPF auto-instrumentation needs Linux kernel 5.14 or newer, and the collector is sized at 4 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM for full functionality
Alternatives
What all observability have in common →
Amazon CloudWatchAWSAWS’s built-in monitoring service: metrics from every AWS service, logs, alarms and dashboards, and now traces, OpenTelemetry and PromQL, billed per metric, per GB and per alarm.
ClickStackOpen sourceClickHouse’s open-source observability stack: an OpenTelemetry collector, ClickHouse for storage and the HyperDX UI for search, dashboards and alerts on logs, traces, metrics and session replays.
DatadogCommercialA hosted monitoring platform: an agent on every host ships metrics, logs and traces to Datadog’s SaaS, which bills per host, per GB and per metric.
GrafanaOpen sourceDashboards and alerts over data that stays where it is: Prometheus, SQL databases, cloud monitoring and more.
OpenTelemetryOpen sourceThe vendor-neutral standard for producing and shipping traces, metrics and logs, with SDKs for most languages and a Collector to route the data.How it fits with other technologies
What Better Stack uses
- Better Stackstores and queries telemetry inClickHouse
- Better Stackingests OTLP traces, metrics and logs fromOpenTelemetry
- Better Stackaccepts error events from the SDKs ofSentry
- Better Stackopens incidents from monitor alerts inDatadog
- Better Stackcan be queried over SQL byGrafana
- Better Stackinstalls its collector with Helm inKubernetes
- Better Stackcan keep your data in your own bucket inAmazon S3
Create a 30-second uptime monitor, then send a log line · bash
# Uptime: check the API every 30 s from two regions; phone the on-call person if it fails
curl --request POST https://incidents.betterstack.com/api/v2/monitors \
--header "Authorization: Bearer $UPTIME_API_TOKEN" \
--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{
"monitor_type": "status",
"url": "https://api.example.com/health",
"pronounceable_name": "Checkout API",
"check_frequency": 30,
"regions": ["eu", "us"],
"call": true, "sms": true, "email": true
}'
# Telemetry: one structured log line to a source (host and token come from the source page)
curl -X POST "https://$INGESTING_HOST" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SOURCE_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"dt":"2026-10-05T09:14:07Z","message":"payment declined","order_id":8812,"level":"warn"}'What you pay for#
List prices from betterstack.com, checked 5 October 2026. Telemetry prices vary by data region (United States, Europe or Singapore), so they are shown as a range.
| Item | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Per account | $0: 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, 3 GB of logs and 3 GB of traces kept 3 days, 30 GB of metrics, 100,000 exceptions |
| Team member | Per person, read-only telemetry | $0 |
| Responder | Per licence, per month: on-call, uptime, status pages | $34 monthly, $29 billed yearly |
| Uptime monitors | Each extra block of 50, per month | $25 monthly, $21 billed yearly |
| Status pages | Each extra public page, per month | $15 monthly, $12 billed yearly; white-label $250 |
| Logs and traces | Per GB ingested, plus per GB-month retained | $0.10 to $0.35, plus $0.05 to $0.18 |
| Metrics | Per GB-month retained (about 1,000 time series) | $0.50 to $1.75 |
| Errors | Per exception beyond 100,000, kept 90 days | $0.00005 to $0.000175 |
- Fixed telemetry bundles are an alternative to per-GB billing; the smallest, Nano, includes 40 GB each of logs, traces and metrics with 30-day log retention, from $25 a month billed yearly.
See it in a real stack
No architecture uses Better Stack yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →Where it came from2021–2025
In 2021 a small team led by Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak launched two products. Better Uptime combined uptime checks every 30 seconds, verified from at least three locations, with phone-call alerts, on-call scheduling and a public status page. Logtail offered “SQL-compatible structured log management” on custom-built storage it said was far cheaper than the Elastic stack.
In July 2022 the company, by then called Better Stack, raised an $18.6 million Series A led by Creandum. It had over 70,000 developers and more than 1,400 customers, and pitched one platform for monitoring, logging, incident management and status pages, kept in ClickHouse and queried with SQL. Kolejak argued that few engineers know Datadog’s, New Relic’s or CloudWatch’s query languages, “But every engineer knows SQL.”
The separate brands have since gone: the old Better Uptime and Logtail domains now redirect to Better Stack pages. The platform added traces, metrics, error tracking compatible with Sentry’s SDKs, and in 2025 an open-source collector. The company says it has raised $28.6 million in total, and many of its roles are based in Prague.
Why it’s built this way
- SQL instead of a new query language
- Every observability vendor had its own query language. The founders bet that engineers already know SQL. ClickHouse, which speaks SQL, also let customers keep data in hot storage for longer at lower cost, the Series A announcement said.
- Uptime, paging and status pages in one product
- Better Uptime’s 2021 site pitched built-in incident management and status pages next to the checks, with “all-you-can-alert pricing” for phone calls, SMS and other alerts, so one tool could notice an outage, wake someone up and tell customers.
- Accept other tools’ formats
- Ingesting OTLP, Vector output and Sentry SDK events means teams can switch without re-instrumenting their code.
Timeline
- 2021
Better Uptime launches: uptime checks, on-call alerts and status pages
- 2021
Logtail launches: SQL-compatible log management
- 2022
Now Better Stack, raises an $18.6 million Series A in July
- 2025
Open-sources the Better Stack collector under Apache 2.0
- Better Uptime homepage (March 2021, archived) · archived copy, original
- Logtail homepage (September 2021, archived) · archived copy, original
- Better Stack press release: Series A (21 July 2022)
- Better Stack homepage (August 2022, archived): Logtail and Better Uptime under Better Stack · archived copy, original
- Better Stack careers (founded 2021, $28.6M funding, Prague)
- GitHub: BetterStackHQ/collector (Apache 2.0, created July 2025)
Sources18 · facts checked 5 October 2026
- Better Stack pricing (checked 5 October 2026)
- Better Stack: Uptime monitoring
- Better Stack docs: Uptime
- Better Stack docs: Uptime monitors
- Better Stack docs: Escalation policies
- Better Stack docs: Status pages
- Better Stack docs: Datadog integration
- Better Stack API: Create a new monitor
- Better Stack docs: Telemetry getting started
- Better Stack docs: Ingest logs over HTTP
- Better Stack docs: OpenTelemetry
- Better Stack docs: Collector (Vector, OpenTelemetry, eBPF; requirements)
- Better Stack docs: Kubernetes
- Better Stack docs: SQL query API (Grafana, ClickHouse client)
- Better Stack docs: Error tracking (Sentry SDKs)
- Better Stack press release: Series A (ClickHouse, SQL)
- Better Stack terms of use (Better Stack, Inc.)
- GitHub: BetterStackHQ/collector