Better Stack vs Upptime
Better Stack monitoring, on-call and status pages sold as one product. Upptime a status page powered entirely by GitHub Actions, with no server to run. Here is how they actually differ.
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.
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.
Differences that actually matter
- Email subscribers: Better Stack supports it, Upptime does not.
- Private status pages: Better Stack supports it, Upptime does not.
- Self-hostable: Upptime supports it, Better Stack does not.
Not yet verified for both: scheduled maintenance, sms notifications, webhooks, rss / atom feed, embeddable widget, audience-specific pages, public api, sso / saml. We leave these blank rather than guessing.
Full feature comparison
Rows where the two tools differ are highlighted.
| Feature | Better Stack | Upptime |
|---|---|---|
| Custom domainServe the status page on your own domain, e.g. status.example.com. | Yes | Yes |
| Remove vendor brandingWhether the vendor's own branding can be removed from the public page. | Yes | Yes |
| Per-component statusBreak the page into individual services or components with independent states. | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled maintenanceAnnounce planned windows in advance and notify subscribers. | Yes | Not verified |
| Email subscribersLet customers subscribe to incident updates by email. | Yes | No |
| SMS notificationsDeliver incident updates over SMS. | Yes | Not verified |
| Slack notificationsPush incident updates into a Slack workspace. | Yes | Yes |
| WebhooksFire an HTTP callback when incident state changes. | Yes | Not verified |
| RSS / Atom feedMachine-readable incident feed. | Yes | Not verified |
| Embeddable widgetDrop a live status badge or banner into your own app. | Yes | Not verified |
| Private status pagesRestrict the page to authenticated or invited viewers. | Yes | No |
| Audience-specific pagesShow different components to different customer segments. | Not verified | No |
| Built-in uptime monitoringThe tool can detect outages itself, rather than only displaying states you set manually. | Yes | Yes |
| Public APICreate and update incidents programmatically. | Yes | Not verified |
| SSO / SAMLSingle sign-on for your internal team members. | Not verified | No |
| Self-hostableSource available and deployable on your own infrastructure. | 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
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
Do Better Stack and Upptime include uptime monitoring?
Better Stack includes its own uptime monitoring; Upptime includes its own uptime monitoring. If you already run a monitoring stack, a bundled monitor is overlap rather than value; if you do not, buying both separately usually costs more.
Can Better Stack or Upptime be self-hosted?
Upptime can be deployed on your own infrastructure. The other option in this comparison is hosted only.
What is the main difference between Better Stack and Upptime?
On verified features: Better Stack supports email subscribers and Upptime does not; Better Stack supports private status pages and Upptime does not; Upptime supports self-hostable and Better Stack does not. Beyond the checklist, overlap cost if you already run datadog, grafana or similar.
Which is cheaper, Better Stack or Upptime?
Pricing in this category moves often and both vendors meter different things, so 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.