Checkly vs Better Stack

From $40 per month (indicative, Team plan by check runs)

From $29 per month (indicative)

Priced by check runs; browser checks cost more than API checks, and frequency multiplies the bill.

Substantially cheaper than assembling Pingdom, PagerDuty and Statuspage separately.

Free plan with a monthly check-run allowance covering a small site.

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

Widely used

Checkly · since 2018

Established

Better Stack · since 2021

• One Playwright script serves as both an E2E test and a production monitor.
• Monitoring-as-code fits GitOps workflows and code review.
• Excellent developer experience and clear, published pricing.

• 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.

• Playwright-centric; teams on other frameworks get less benefit.
• Browser checks at high frequency across many locations get expensive.
• Not a full observability platform — no APM or log management.

• 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.

Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.

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