Better Stack alternative for teams who only wanted uptime checks
Logdash gives you the HTTP monitors, status page and alerts without the on-call schedules, escalation policies and incident timelines you are being billed for and never configured.
Better Stack is a competent incident management platform that happens to include uptime checks. If you run a rotation, escalate to a second responder, and write postmortems afterwards, it earns the money. The part small teams actually use is much narrower: is the API answering, tell me on my phone, and show customers a status page while I work out what happened.
The bill tracks the suite rather than the usage. Monitors are priced per monitor, log ingestion is priced by volume and retention, seats are priced per person, and the plan you land on is sized by incident tooling instead of by the four checks you run. The paging features are the expensive ones and they are the exact features a three-person team never sets up, because the rotation is one phone and the escalation policy is your co-founder.
Logdash does the narrow version on purpose. HTTP checks with status code and response time, cron-scheduled intervals, push heartbeats for background jobs, a public status page with a custom domain on Pro, and alerts on Telegram or a webhook. No schedules, no escalation ladders, no acknowledgement tracking. If someone has to be woken in a defined order at 4am and it matters that the second name gets called when the first one sleeps through, that is a real requirement and Better Stack has it.
The health check the monitor reads
export async function GET() {
try {
await sql`select 1`;
return Response.json({ ok: true });
} catch {
// 503, not 200 with a body the monitor cannot read
return Response.json({ ok: false }, { status: 503 });
}
}- 1 Recreate the monitors One service per app, one URL each. Every check keeps the status code and the response time, and the uptime history is drawn from those rather than a separate counter.
- 2 Move the status page Make the service public and repoint the DNS record your customers already use. Custom domains are a Pro setting, so the address on your support docs does not need editing.
- 3 Retire the escalation policy Connect Telegram, take the staging app down on purpose, and watch the alert arrive with the failing endpoint in it. That is the whole on-call configuration, and it behaves the same at 4am as it does at 4pm.
Logdash vs Better Stack
| Feature | Logdash | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|
| On-call schedules and escalation | Not built | Rotations, escalation policies, acknowledgements |
| Phone and SMS alerts | Telegram and webhook only | Phone, SMS, Slack, email and more |
| Uptime checks with response time | Both stored on every check | Both stored on every check |
| Heartbeats for background jobs | A public POST, no auth header | Heartbeat monitors included |
| Cost at four services and one person | Free plan covers five services | Priced as an incident platform |
| Logs | Eight SDKs, retention by plan | A full log platform billed by volume |
| Source code | MIT licensed, public repository | Closed source |
When Better Stack is the better pick
- You have a genuine on-call rotation. Schedules, escalation and acknowledgement tracking are the product, and Logdash has none of it.
- You need a phone call, not a Telegram notification that a do-not-disturb setting can swallow.
- Your logs already run through them at volume, and moving ingestion is a far bigger job than moving four monitors.
- Someone external asks for incident timelines and postmortems held in one system.
What migrating costs
The monitors take twenty minutes and the status page takes a DNS change and a wait. The part that is not free is the habit. If your team currently relies on an escalation policy to guarantee somebody answers, a Telegram channel is a downgrade, and it is better to know that now than to discover it during the first incident after the switch. Run both for two weeks and cancel only once you have missed nothing.
What is a cheaper alternative to Better Stack?
Logdash covers uptime, status pages and alerts on a free plan that includes five services. It is cheaper because it does less: no on-call schedules, no escalation policies, no acknowledgement tracking.
Is there an open source Better Stack alternative?
Logdash is MIT licensed with a public repository, though production self-hosting is not ready and is tracked on GitHub. For self-hosting the uptime half today, Uptime Kuma is the usual pick.
Can Logdash replace Better Uptime?
For HTTP monitors, heartbeats, a status page and alerts, yes. For paging a rotation in a defined order until someone acknowledges, no.
Does Logdash have a status page?
Yes, a public page per service showing its uptime history, with a custom domain available on Pro.