Vigil vs Better Stack
Updated · prices checked September 2026
Better Stack is the most polished uptime and incident tool on the market, and it earns its price when you need on-call schedules and phone escalation. Vigil covers the monitoring, status pages, servers and logs from a flat $19/month, with alerts to every team member and simple on-call rotations included, but the hosted service does not make phone calls or send SMS.
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: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
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 $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Vigil | Better Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) | ✓ 10 free, +50 for $25/month. 30-second checks, HTTP, TCP/UDP, SSL, DNS, ping, keyword, many regions |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts | ~ Via the Telemetry bundle (metrics from a collector), from $45/month; no host agent in the Uptime product |
| Logs | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules | ✓ Telemetry bundles from $45/month for 40 GB, then $0.15/GB |
| APM / traces | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling | ✓ OpenTelemetry traces in the Telemetry product (same bundle) |
| Kubernetes | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure | ~ Collector-based metrics and logs; no Kubernetes-specific incidents out of the box |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business | ✕ Not offered |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages | ~ 1 page free; password protection $50/page/month, white-label $250/page/month |
| Team seats | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles | ~ Team members are free for Telemetry, but anyone who receives alerts is a $34/month responder |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account | ✓ Phone, SMS, Slack, Teams, email, webhooks, PagerDuty and more. Telegram via Zapier or webhook only |
| Self-hosted option | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases | ✕ SaaS only |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month | ~ No per-incident root-cause report built from failure evidence; check their site for current AI features |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) | About $240/month: $25 monitor pack + 5 responders at $34 + Nano telemetry $45 for server metrics. Fewer responders lowers it |
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
Limits of Better Stack that Vigil does not have:
- 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 from Starter ($19/month).
- 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
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and 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. Import in about a minute
Paste a Better Stack API token into the importer. It shows every monitor it found before anything is created, skips URLs you already watch, and stops at your plan's monitor number.
2. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels and set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs.
3. Run both for a while
Keep Better Stack running until Vigil has caught a real failure for you. Monitors can live in git afterwards: GET /api/v1/config exports them as YAML.
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 $49/month with unlimited team members, 200 monitors, 10 status pages (private, custom domain, white-label) and 15 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 a hosted service, deeper incident management, and a larger logs/metrics/traces product with dashboards. Vigil has rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, chat/push/webhook/ticket alerts, and included logs and server metrics, but the hosted service makes no phone calls and sends no SMS (the self-hosted edition can, through your own Twilio account).
Can I move my Better Stack monitors to Vigil?
Yes. The importer at /app/import reads your monitors and heartbeats with a Better Stack API token, shows a preview, and creates them when you confirm. 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.
Try Vigil next to Better Stack
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
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