Better Stack vs Instatus vs Upptime
Three status page tools side by side, on the same feature list and the same verification schedule. We found 3 features where they do not all behave the same.
Verdict in one line each
Better Stack
Choose it if: Teams buying monitoring and a status page at the same time who want one vendor.
Watch out: Overlap cost if you already run Datadog, Grafana or similar.
Instatus
Choose it if: Small teams who want a credible public status page without a per-subscriber bill.
Watch out: Enterprise procurement checkboxes (SSO, audit logs, DPAs) are thinner than the incumbents'.
Upptime
Choose it if: Open-source projects and developers already living in GitHub who want a zero-cost page.
Watch out: Checks run on GitHub's cron schedule, so detection is coarse. There is also no subscriber list — notification happens through GitHub and chat, not an email audience you own.
Where the three diverge
- Email subscribers: Better Stack and Instatus support it; Upptime does not.
- Private status pages: Better Stack and Instatus support it; Upptime does not.
- Self-hostable: Upptime supports it; Better Stack and Instatus do not.
Not yet verified across all three: scheduled maintenance, sms notifications, webhooks, rss / atom feed, embeddable widget, audience-specific pages, built-in uptime monitoring, public api, sso / saml. We leave these blank rather than guessing.
Full feature comparison
Rows where the three tools differ are highlighted.
| Feature | Better Stack | Instatus | Upptime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom domainServe the status page on your own domain, e.g. status.example.com. | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Remove vendor brandingWhether the vendor's own branding can be removed from the public page. | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Per-component statusBreak the page into individual services or components with independent states. | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled maintenanceAnnounce planned windows in advance and notify subscribers. | Yes | Yes | Not verified |
| Email subscribersLet customers subscribe to incident updates by email. | Yes | Yes | No |
| SMS notificationsDeliver incident updates over SMS. | Yes | Yes | Not verified |
| Slack notificationsPush incident updates into a Slack workspace. | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| WebhooksFire an HTTP callback when incident state changes. | Yes | Yes | Not verified |
| RSS / Atom feedMachine-readable incident feed. | Yes | Yes | Not verified |
| Embeddable widgetDrop a live status badge or banner into your own app. | Yes | Yes | Not verified |
| Private status pagesRestrict the page to authenticated or invited viewers. | Yes | Yes | No |
| Audience-specific pagesShow different components to different customer segments. | Not verified | Not verified | No |
| Built-in uptime monitoringThe tool can detect outages itself, rather than only displaying states you set manually. | Yes | Not verified | Yes |
| Public APICreate and update incidents programmatically. | Yes | Yes | Not verified |
| SSO / SAMLSingle sign-on for your internal team members. | Not verified | Not verified | No |
| Self-hostableSource available and deployable on your own infrastructure. | No | No | Yes |
Yes supported · No not supported · not yet verified by us (we show a dash rather than guessing).
Pricing
Pricing
Not yet verified. We have not independently confirmed this against the vendor since the last pricing change. Check the vendor page before relying on it.
Pricing
Not yet verified. We have not independently confirmed this against the vendor since the last pricing change. Check the vendor page before relying on it.
Pricing
No vendor pricing. Upptime is open source and self-hosted, so there is no subscription. The cost is the infrastructure you run it on and the time someone spends operating it.
What each one looks like
Common questions
Can any of Better Stack, Instatus and Upptime be self-hosted?
Upptime can be deployed on your own infrastructure; the others are hosted only. That matters if incident data has to stay inside your own perimeter, and it changes the cost shape entirely — you trade a subscription for the time it takes to run it.
What is the biggest difference between Better Stack, Instatus and Upptime?
On the features we have verified for all three, the split is: Better Stack and Instatus on email subscribers; Better Stack and Instatus on private status pages; Upptime on self-hostable. Everything else on the checklist is either shared or still unverified.
Which of the three is cheapest?
These vendors meter different things, so the ranking flips depending on your subscriber count and how many team seats you need. We link to the live pricing pages rather than quoting figures we have not re-verified. The variable that usually decides it is subscriber count: tools that charge per notified subscriber get expensive at exactly the point your product starts working.