Better Stack starts free but limits you to 5 monitors and 1 team member. Their paid plan is $25/mo per seat. Uptime Kuma gives you unlimited monitors and users for $3/mo on InstaPods.
| Feature | Better Stack | Uptime Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | Free (5 monitors), $25/seat/mo | $3/mo total (self-hosted on InstaPods) |
| Monitors (Free) | 5 monitors | Unlimited |
| Team Members | 1 (Free), per-seat pricing | Unlimited users |
| Check Interval | 3 min (Free), 30s (paid) | Down to 20 seconds |
| Status Pages | 1 (Free), branded (paid) | Unlimited status pages |
| Incident Management | Built-in (paid plans) | Basic incident tracking |
| On-Call Scheduling | Included in paid plans | Not included |
| Multi-Location | Yes (global network) | Single location |
| Notification Channels | Email, SMS, Slack, etc. | 90+ channels |
| Source Code | Closed source | Open source (MIT license) |
Limitations that push you toward self-hosting.
Better Stack charges $25/seat/month. A 4-person team pays $100/mo just for uptime monitoring. The free tier with 5 monitors and 1 seat is too limited for real use.
Five monitors covers one small project at best. Most teams need 20-50 monitors for APIs, frontend, databases, and background services.
Shorter check intervals (30s), phone call alerts, custom domains for status pages, and audit logs all require paid plans.
Better Stack bundles uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call, and logging into one platform. If you only need uptime monitoring, you're paying for features you don't use.
What you get when you own your infrastructure.
Unlimited monitors, unlimited users, unlimited status pages. No artificial limits to push you to higher tiers.
Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks, and dozens more. Better Stack charges extra for phone alerts.
Create professional status pages with custom branding, grouped monitors, and incident history. No paid plan required.
Your monitoring runs on your infrastructure. If Better Stack has an outage, it doesn't affect your monitoring.
Monitoring 30 endpoints with a 3-person team and 2 status pages.
For uptime monitoring and status pages, Uptime Kuma is comparable or better (more notification channels, more monitor types). Where Better Stack excels is in incident management, on-call scheduling, and log aggregation - features that Uptime Kuma doesn't include.
Not directly. Uptime Kuma sends alerts via webhook, which you can connect to services like PagerDuty or Twilio for phone calls. Better Stack includes phone calls natively in paid plans.
Uptime Kuma tracks incidents through its status page feature (incident creation, updates, resolution). For full incident management with runbooks, escalation policies, and post-mortems, you'd need a separate tool.
Uptime Kuma. Better Stack's per-seat pricing makes it expensive for teams, and their free tier is too limited. Uptime Kuma gives you unlimited monitors and users from day one for $3/mo.
Deploy Uptime Kuma on InstaPods and stop paying for features that should be free.
Deploy Uptime Kuma