Better Stack alternative: Vigil
People leave Better Stack when the responder seats and per-page status-page add-ons push a small team's bill past $200/month. Vigil gives the same monitors, private status pages, heartbeats and server metrics for $10/month flat, but be clear-eyed: you give up phone escalation and on-call schedules.
Why people look for a Better Stack alternative
Better Stack pricing September 2026
- Free: 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack and email alerts, 30-second checks.
- Responder seat (people who receive alerts): $34/month, or $29/month billed yearly.
- Monitors: +50 for $25/month ($21 yearly). Heartbeats: +10 for $20/month ($17 yearly).
- Status pages: extra public page $15/month; password protection $50 per page per month; white-label $250 per page per month; IP allowlisting $250 per page per month.
- Telemetry (logs, metrics, traces): Nano bundle $45/month (40 GB each), Micro $180/month, Mega $375/month, then $0.15 per extra GB (US region).
Source: as of September 2026, from betterstack.com/uptime/pricing and betterstack.com/pricing. Vendors change prices; the Better Stack site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 10 monitors, 1 server, 1 status page, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Free forever.
- Pro $10/month: 100 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 5 servers, 5 seats, 5 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 1M log lines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 100 AI analyses. 10-day trial, no card.
- Enterprise $25/month: 500 monitors, 50 servers, unlimited seats, SSO, SLOs, private locations, 1-year history. 30-day trial.
- Self-hosted $49/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons from $2: +25 monitors, +5 servers ($3), +5 seats, +5 status pages, +1M log lines.
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $10 Pro plan unless stated.
| Better Stack | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 10 free, +50 for $25/month. 30-second checks, HTTP, TCP/UDP, SSL, DNS, ping, keyword, many regions | ✓ 10 Free / 100 Pro / 500 Enterprise. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 11 monitor types (uptime, API assertions, multi-step flows, heartbeats, TCP, domain/DNS, app health, dependency, change, price, keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ~ Via the Telemetry bundle (metrics from a collector), from $45/month; no host agent in the Uptime product | ✓ 1 / 5 / 50 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✓ Telemetry bundles from $45/month for 40 GB, then $0.15/GB | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | ✓ OpenTelemetry traces in the Telemetry product (same bundle) | ~ Endpoint latency and 5xx rates, request traces and a service map through the agent's Python and Node SDKs. Not a full APM: no profiling, no distributed tracing across other languages |
| Kubernetes | ~ Collector-based metrics and logs; no Kubernetes-specific incidents out of the box | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ✕ Not offered | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ~ 1 page free; password protection $50/page/month, white-label $250/page/month | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on Pro. 1 / 5 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ~ Team members are free for Telemetry, but anyone who receives alerts is a $34/month responder | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Phone, SMS, Slack, Teams, email, webhooks, PagerDuty and more. Telegram via Zapier or webhook only | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls |
| Self-hosted option | ✕ SaaS only | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ~ No per-incident root-cause report built from failure evidence; check their site for current AI features | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | About $240/month: $25 monitor pack + 5 responders at $34 + Nano telemetry $45 for server metrics. Fewer responders lowers it | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Better Stack does well
- Polished incident management: on-call schedules, phone and SMS escalation, Slack and Teams workflows, post-incident timelines.
- 30-second checks on the free tier and many public probe regions.
- A real logs and traces product (built on ClickHouse) with dashboards, if you want everything in one vendor.
- Beautiful status pages with subscriber management.
Where Vigil is ahead
- Every person who should receive an alert is a $34/month responder; five people is $170/month before any monitors.
- Password-protected status pages cost $50 per page per month; white-label is $250 per page per month. Vigil includes both on Pro.
- Server metrics need the Telemetry bundle ($45/month and up); there is no included host agent on the Uptime side.
- Heartbeats and monitors are separate paid packs.
When to pick Better Stack instead
Pick Better Stack if you run a real on-call rotation and need phone calls and SMS to wake people, if you want incident management with schedules and Slack workflows, or if your team already lives in their Telemetry product for logs and traces. Their status pages are also prettier out of the box.
What Vigil does not do
- No browser / Playwright checks: Vigil scripts APIs, not clicks in a real browser.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting; alerts go to chat apps, push services, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- No on-call rotations or schedules: escalation policies and acknowledgements only.
- APM covers Python and Node apps on hosts running the agent; it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Better Stack to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Better Stack monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Is Vigil cheaper than Better Stack?
For a small team, by a wide margin: Vigil Pro is $10/month with 5 seats, 100 monitors, 5 status pages (private, custom domain, white-label) and 5 servers. Better Stack's free tier is generous, but five responders alone are $170/month and a password-protected status page adds $50/month.
What does Better Stack do that Vigil does not?
Phone and SMS alerting, on-call schedules and rotations, and a full logs/metrics/traces product with dashboards. Vigil has escalation and acknowledgements, chat/push/webhook/ticket alerts, and included logs and server metrics, but no phone calls and no rotations.
Can I move my Better Stack monitors to Vigil?
Yes. Export your monitor list, turn it into Vigil's YAML (one entry per monitor: name, url, interval, expected status) and apply it with PUT /api/v1/config, or create monitors through the REST API. Heartbeats get new ping URLs; update your cron jobs.
Do I get Telegram alerts on Vigil?
Yes, natively, on the Free plan too. Better Stack routes Telegram through webhooks or Zapier.
Ready to leave Better Stack?
Start free: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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