SolidPing vs Better Stack
Better Stack is the tool SolidPing is most often measured against, and deservedly so. It set out to replace PagerDuty + Pingdom + Statuspage with one product, and it largely did. Several things SolidPing ships — multi-step escalation policies, on-call rotations, one incident per outage instead of one per check — exist because Better Stack showed they belonged in a monitoring tool rather than a separate subscription.
Both sides of this table are hosted services. Better Stack is hosted only, so the comparison is against SolidPing Cloud — the plan you would buy, with its real caps and its six regions. Our self-hosted build answers a different question and gets its own section below.
This page is worth reading if you have hit one of the two edges people actually hit with Better Stack: the bill, which grows in modules, and the boundary of a SaaS, which is where your credentials and your internal hostnames stop being yours alone.
You can bring your setup with you. SolidPing ships a first-party Better Stack importer, with a dry-run mode so you can see exactly what you would get before anything is created.
Prices below were last checked against Better Stack's own pricing page in July 2026, and they restructure the packaging fairly often — verify before you budget on them. If we've gotten a detail wrong, please open an issue.
At a glance
| SolidPing Cloud | Better Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Hosted — the same AGPL-3.0 build also self-hosts, free | Hosted only |
| Free tier | 100 monitors, 10 checks/min, 5 seats, on-call included | 10 monitors, 3-minute checks, 10 heartbeats |
| Entry paid | €5/mo — 1,000 monitors, 20 checks/min, 10 seats | ~$25/mo for the monitors module; on-call and telemetry priced separately |
| Pricing shape | One plan, everything included; €0 → €5 → €15 → €45 | Modular — Uptime, incident management and Telemetry bill as separate products |
| What is metered | Monitors, checks/minute, seats, private agents, status-page domains | Monitors, seats, modules, retention |
| Check types | 40 | HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP/UDP, DNS, SMTP/POP3/IMAP, heartbeat, SSL, domain, Playwright |
| Minimum interval | 10 s on every plan, spent from your checks/minute budget (browser 60 s, JS 30 s) | 30 seconds on paid plans |
| Shared probe regions | 6 — Gravelines, Paris, Lauterbourg (FR), Nuremberg (DE), Kansas City (US), Tokyo (JP) | 4 logical buckets (us, eu, as, au) over a much larger footprint |
| Failure confirmation | Per-region results across the regions you selected | Time-based confirmation window plus a fixed 3-of-N region quorum |
| Private-network probing | Deported agents you run: 1 on Free, 2 / 3 / 5 on paid — the server cannot decrypt their credentials | Not available |
| Browser checks | Headless Chrome over CDP — load, wait for a selector, match a keyword, screenshot on failure | Playwright monitors — real @playwright/test scripts with a step-by-step screenshot timeline |
| On-call & escalation | Rotations, overrides, iCal feeds, multi-step escalation, on every plan | Rotations and multi-step policies, with time- and metadata-branching steps |
| Body assertions | String, regex and JSONPath | Literal substring keyword match |
| Databases, queues, SNMP, SSH | Yes | No |
| Notification channels | 15 on hosted plans — SMS, voice and WhatsApp are not included | Email, SMS, voice, push and the usual chat targets |
| Config as code | YAML export / import / apply, REST API, sp CLI | REST API, first-party Terraform provider |
| Data location | Our infrastructure, in France | Better Stack's infrastructure |
| Import from Better Stack | Built in | — |
Where SolidPing Cloud is the stronger choice
The bill stops being a function of how much you monitor. Better Stack's modular pricing means uptime, on-call and telemetry are three lines, and a realistic team plan lands in the low hundreds per month. SolidPing Cloud runs €5 to €45/mo with on-call, status pages and every check type on all of them, including Free — 5,000 monitors and 500 checks a minute is the top of our ladder, not the start of a conversation. If your monitoring cost has quietly become a line item somebody asks about, that is the comparison.
You need to watch things that are not websites. Better Stack covers the web-facing protocols well and stops there. SolidPing covers 40 check types — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse; SMTP, IMAP and POP3, plus a passive email-reception check; gRPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, SIP; SSH, RDP, FTP, SFTP; SNMP, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus; SSL and domain expiry; NTP, DNSBL; headless-browser and sandboxed JavaScript checks.
Your assertions are more than "does this string appear". Better Stack matches a
literal substring. SolidPing does string, regex and JSONPath against the response body,
so $.database.status == "ok" is a check rather than a hope.
The private stuff stays private. Better Stack has no private-location story at all: everything it checks, it reaches from its own network, with credentials it holds. SolidPing Cloud lets you run deported agents inside your network — one on Free, up to five on Scale. Each one generates its own keypair locally and receives age-sealed credentials, so a check that runs only inside your network is structurally unreadable by us.
On-call is not a second product. Better Stack's incident management bills separately from its uptime module. Ours is on the Free plan.
Ten-second checks on any plan. Better Stack's floor is 30 seconds on paid plans. Ours is 10 on Free — you spend checks-per-minute budget rather than upgrading.
Where Better Stack is the stronger choice
Incident management is more mature than ours. They have been refining ack, escalation and post-mortems since 2021, and it shows in the small things — screenshots captured on HTTP failure, traceroute on the incident, AI-assisted merging and silencing. SolidPing has the primitives; Better Stack has the polish on top of them.
A global probe network you do not have to build. Their footprint is far bigger than our six regions and will be for a long time. If you genuinely need "is this slow from São Paulo", they have a machine there today and we do not.
Playwright monitors. Better Stack runs real @playwright/test scripts as monitors,
with encrypted environment variables and a step-by-step screenshot timeline of each
page.* call. SolidPing's browser check loads a page and asserts on it; it does not run
your test suite. For scripted multi-step flows they are simply ahead.
SMS and voice are included. Ours are not — not on any hosted plan. The carriers bill per message and we have not priced that in yet, so if SMS is part of how your team gets paged, Better Stack does it and SolidPing Cloud does not.
Logs and telemetry in the same place. The Telemetry product means uptime alerts and the logs explaining them live under one login. SolidPing does not do log management and has no plans to.
A first-party Terraform provider. If your infrastructure is Terraform end to end,
theirs is shipped and supported. SolidPing's answer is declarative YAML through the API
and the sp CLI, which is genuinely good, but it is not a Terraform resource.
Mobile apps. They have them. We do not.
The other model, on both sides
Better Stack does not self-host. There is no on-premise build, so "keep the data" is not a choice their product offers at any price.
SolidPing does, and that build has no plan at all. The same Go binary, AGPL-3.0, against your own PostgreSQL or SQLite: unlimited monitors, unlimited check rate, unlimited private agents and status-page domains, 30 members by default and raisable in config, and SMS, voice and WhatsApp working through your own Twilio account. There is no export deadline and no tier that gates retention. What you pay instead is a VM, the upgrades, and the pager when the monitoring itself breaks — which is exactly the operational weight Better Stack exists to take off you, so be honest with yourself about which you want.
Migrating from Better Stack
SolidPing has a first-party converter for Better Stack monitors, reachable through the API:
POST /api/v1/orgs/{org}/checks/import/convert?source=betterstack&dryRun=true
Run it with dryRun=true first: it returns exactly what would be created, without
touching anything. Drop the flag when the result looks right.
Not everything maps one-to-one. Monitor types with no SolidPing equivalent are reported rather than silently dropped — Playwright monitors are the obvious one, since we have no script runner to convert them into. Escalation policies and on-call calendars are not part of the import either; those you rebuild, and SolidPing has the same primitives to rebuild them with.
Which should you pick?
Stay on Better Stack if incident response is the product you are buying, you want logs and uptime under one roof, you need Playwright flows or SMS paging, and the modular bill is not something anyone is asking you about. It is a genuinely good tool and switching for its own sake is a waste of an afternoon.
Look at SolidPing when the bill has become a conversation, when you need to watch a database or a queue rather than a URL, or when there is infrastructure you are not willing to hand credentials for to a third party. The importer means finding out costs an afternoon, not a migration project.