IT Watch vs. Better Stack
Better Stack is a serious platform. On-call scheduling, escalation policies, phone call routing, incident timelines, log and metric ingestion, Playwright browser checks, status pages good enough to be somebody's public face. If you run an engineering team with a rotation, it is built for you and this page will not talk you out of it.
Every Better Stack price and feature below was read from betterstack.com/uptime/pricing on 9 September 2026. If you find one out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
It is built around the incident: something breaks, somebody is paged, the timeline records what happened. IT Watch is built around the deadline: a certificate expires in thirty days, a domain in sixty, a DMARC policy changed on Tuesday. Nobody gets paged, because there is nothing to page anybody about yet — which is the entire point. The two products answer different questions, and the reason to compare them is that both appear when you search for "website monitoring".
On-call rotations with phone and SMS escalation, incident timelines and postmortems, log and metric telemetry in the same account, Playwright transaction monitoring, private network monitoring, and status pages with subscribers.
Email authentication, Certificate Transparency, blocklist reputation and WordPress health. One flat per-account price instead of seats plus monitor packs. Client workspaces, free read-only client logins and monthly PDF reports.
Feature comparison
What it costs at 10, 25 and 50 sites
Better Stack prices à la carte: responder seats, monitor packs and telemetry bundles are separate lines. At the date above, their free tier is 10 monitors, a responder licence is $34/month ($29 billed yearly), and monitors past the first ten come in packs of 50 at $25/month. SSL and domain expiry require a paid plan. One site is one monitor. The totals are our arithmetic over those published prices — their model changes more often than most, so check the source before quoting us.
Two different products with overlapping words
Better Stack monitors uptime, SSL and domain expiry, DNS, ports, heartbeats and browser transactions, and it does all of that competently. The overlap with us is real and we are not going to minimise it. What differs is everything around the check.
Their product assumes there is a rotation: somebody is on call, an incident opens, it escalates through a policy, somebody acknowledges, a timeline is written. That machinery is valuable when a service falling over at 3am costs money every minute. It is overhead when the thing you are monitoring is a certificate with thirty days left on it, and the correct response is to put it in next week's sprint.
Our escalation exists but is deliberately smaller: ordered routing rules, first match wins, with a delayed rung if nobody acknowledges. There is no phone tree, because a domain expiring in twenty-nine days does not warrant one.
What we monitor that they do not
Email authentication is the biggest gap. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records that decay quietly: an SPF record drifts past the ten-lookup limit and silently stops authorising anything, or a DMARC policy is raised to reject and every message from the CRM starts vanishing. Neither event touches uptime.
Certificate Transparency is the second. A certificate issued for your domain by an issuer you have never used is a public fact from the moment it is logged, and no check that reads the certificate you are serving will ever see it.
Then reputation — blocklist listings and Safe Browsing flags — and, on Agency and above, WordPress core and plugin versions cross-referenced against known CVEs. And registrar-level integrity: whether the transfer lock is on, whether the nameservers still point where they did last week.
What they do that we do not, and will not
Log and metric telemetry. Better Stack will ingest your logs and charge you by volume, and having monitoring and logs in one place is a genuine advantage when you are debugging. We have no plans here; it is a different product with different economics.
On-call scheduling with phone and SMS escalation, and the incident timeline that goes with it. If you need somebody woken up, use a tool built to wake people up.
Playwright transaction monitoring — scripted browser journeys through a checkout or a login. Our content check watches a page for changes to text you specify; it does not drive a browser.
Private network monitoring, for things not reachable from the public internet. Every one of our checks is a capped, SSRF-guarded request to a public address, by design.
The pricing model is the real difference
Better Stack is modular, and the modularity is the point: you buy responder seats, monitor packs, telemetry bundles, extra status pages, call routing, SSO and audit logs as separate lines. For a team that needs three of those and not the other six, that is efficient.
For an agency it is hard to predict. Adding a colleague adds a seat; crossing a monitor threshold adds a pack; putting your own brand on a status page is priced per page per month, and at the date above that line was $250. Our equivalent — your name on every client-facing artefact, and ours off all of them — is the Reseller plan at $89 a month, flat, for up to 500 sites.
Every IT Watch plan is one number: sites and seats included, no per-check pricing, no per-integration pricing. Extra seats past the included allowance are $9 each and read-only client logins never cost anything.
Seats, and who has to have one
This is the line item that catches agencies out, because it is invisible until the second person needs access. A Better Stack responder licence — the thing that lets somebody receive and act on uptime alerts — was $34 a month at the date above, or $29 billed yearly. Team members with telemetry-only access are free, but they are not responders.
Our Agency plan includes 3 seats and charges $9 a month for each one after that, deduplicated across workspaces: a colleague who appears on eight client workspaces is one seat, not eight. Read-only client logins are free and uncapped, and that asymmetry is deliberate. The moment a client login costs you money you stop handing them out, and you go back to emailing screenshots — which is the workflow the product exists to replace.
The arithmetic diverges quickly. Three people watching client sites is $102 a month in responder licences before a single monitor is added, against $29 here with the seats included. Three people plus twenty client logins is unchanged.
What happens when nothing is wrong yet
The clearest way to see the difference between the two products is to ask what each does on a quiet Tuesday when everything is up.
Better Stack, correctly, does very little: there is no incident, so there is nothing to escalate. IT Watch, on the same Tuesday, is showing you a timeline of what expires in the next ninety days — this certificate on the 14th, that domain on the 2nd of next month, a DMARC policy that changed last week and a registrar lock that came off a client's domain on Sunday.
That is the product. Nothing on that list is an incident, and every item on it becomes one if it is left alone long enough.
When to choose Better Stack instead
Written by us, about a competitor, on our own site — so read it with that in mind. Every item is something we would say on a call.
- You have an on-call rotation. Escalation policies, phone routing and incident timelines are their core, and building any of it yourself around our alerts would be a mistake.
- You want logs, metrics and monitoring in one account. We do not ingest telemetry and are not going to.
- You need scripted browser journeys — a checkout or a login flow tested end to end.
- You monitor things inside a private network. All of our checks are public-internet requests.
- You are an engineering team rather than an agency. Almost everything we built after the checks — client workspaces, read-only client logins, monthly reports, white-label — is for people looking after somebody else's website, and is worth nothing to you.