Better Stack vs Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

From $29 per month (indicative)

Free tier available

Substantially cheaper than assembling Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately.

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

Free plan with 10 monitors at 3-minute intervals and a status page.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

• Replaces three separate subscriptions with one at a lower total cost.
• Excellent status pages and incident communication out of the box.
• Fast check intervals even on modest plans.

• Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
• Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
• Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.

• Browser-based transaction monitoring is limited compared to Checkly or Datadog.
• Log management is capable but not a full observability platform.
• Younger vendor than the incumbents.

• Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
• Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
• Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.

Small and mid-sized teams consolidating uptime, on-call and status pages.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.