Better Stack (formerly Better Uptime) is not really an uptime monitor with extras. It is an incident-response platform that includes uptime monitoring: on-call schedules, escalation policies, phone calls that wake the right person, Slack-based incident channels, status pages, and log management alongside. Its pricing says as much. You pay mainly per responder, the people who can be alerted and put on call.
That model is excellent for a team with a rotation. It is a lot of machinery if your incident process is "I get an email and look".
What the money buys
- Free
- 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack and email alerts, checks every 3 minutes.
- Responder license
- $29 a month billed yearly, $34 month to month, per person. Includes unlimited phone and SMS alerts, on-call scheduling and escalations.
- Monitors
- Sold in packs: $25 a month for 50 more. Paid checks can run every 30 seconds.
- Status pages
- One free; each extra public page is $12 a month yearly or $15 monthly.
For two engineers sharing nights, that is $58 to $68 a month before extra monitors, and worth it: someone's phone rings at 3 a.m., and if they do not acknowledge, the next person's does. For a founder with one product, most of that bill pays for people and schedules that do not exist.
Four locations, or three clouds
Better Stack's defence against false alarms is sound. By default every monitor is checked from at least four locations, and an incident opens only after a check fails from at least three of them. Its locations are spread across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.
CheckHTTP confirms along a different line: cloud providers. Every site, on every plan, is checked by runners on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and you decide how many runners must see a failure, and for how many checks in a row, before anyone is told. Spreading checks across continents catches regional routing trouble. Spreading them across providers catches the failure mode that geography does not: the provider itself having a bad day, as AWS's US-East-1 region did for most of October 20, 2025.
aws/us-west-1 and gcp/us-west-1.Alerts go out by email, to Slack, or as JSON to any webhook, name the runners that saw the failure, and follow up when the site recovers. That covers what most small teams use an incident tool for, without a per-seat price.
Three minutes is a long time
Better Stack's free plan checks every 3 minutes. We measured what that interval means against real outages: across the 30 days to October 17, 2026, CheckHTTP recorded 165 outages on 36 sites, and most were over within three minutes.
On a 3-minute schedule, about a quarter of those outages would likely have come and gone between checks. Paid Better Stack plans close the gap, down to 30 seconds. CheckHTTP checks every 60 seconds on every plan, the free one included.
At a glance
Competitor details from their own pricing and documentation pages, checked October 18, 2026.
Where Better Stack is the better choice
- Someone carries a pager. Phone calls, SMS, on-call calendars and escalation are the core of the product, and CheckHTTP has none of them.
- Incidents as a workflow. Acknowledgements, incident timelines and Slack incident channels help a team coordinate. CheckHTTP keeps a simple incident list you can resolve.
- Faster checks. Paid checks run every 30 seconds. CheckHTTP checks every 60 seconds on every plan.
- One platform for everything else. Logs, tracing, error tracking and real-user monitoring with web analytics and session replay are sold on the same account, billed by usage. CheckHTTP's real-user monitoring has no session replay.
Where CheckHTTP fits
CheckHTTP is for the step before a rotation. It checks every minute from three clouds, records DNS, TLS and first-byte timing on each request, and alerts by email, Slack or webhook once the runners you require agree.
Pricing is per plan, not per person: free for one site, $7 a month for five, $15 for ten. Each plan includes real-user monitoring and visitor stats from one script on your site, with no separate meter: real visitors, engaged sessions, Core Web Vitals and JavaScript errors, bots filtered out, next to the uptime chart. An alert comes with page speed and visitor numbers rather than a status code alone.
If you grow into needing a rotation, the two work together. Keep CheckHTTP's checks and real-user data, and forward its webhooks into whichever paging tool your team adopts.
Multi-cloud checks and real-user data without a per-seat bill. Free for one site.
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