Better Stack Alternative: Wakestack for Teams Who Need Server Monitoring

Who This Is For

This guide is for DevOps teams and platform engineers who use Better Stack (formerly Better Uptime) but need visibility into their server infrastructure—not just external endpoints.

If you're finding that Better Stack tells you that something is down but not why, and you're tired of SSHing into servers to diagnose issues, Wakestack might be a better fit.

Quick Comparison: Wakestack vs Better Stack

When Wakestack Is Better

1. You Need to Know WHY Things Break

Better Stack excels at telling you when your endpoints are down. But when the alert fires, you're left guessing:

• Is it the application?
• Database connection pool exhausted?
• Server out of memory?
• Disk full?

Wakestack's server agent gives you immediate context. When an endpoint goes down, you can see:

• CPU spike at 98% at the same time
• Memory exhaustion
• Disk at 100%
• Specific processes consuming resources

This reduces your mean time to resolution (MTTR) significantly.

2. You Want Simpler Pricing

Better Stack charges per seat. A 5-person team pays $145/month just for Pro monitoring.

Wakestack charges per monitors, not per user. Your whole team can access the dashboard for one price:

• Pro: $29/mo for 50 monitors
• Enterprise: $99/mo for unlimited monitors

For teams larger than 1 person, this is often significantly cheaper.

3. You Monitor Infrastructure, Not Just URLs

If you're monitoring:

• Bare metal servers
• VPS instances
• Self-hosted applications
• Docker hosts
• Kubernetes nodes

Wakestack's agent-based monitoring provides infrastructure visibility that Better Stack's external-only approach can't match.

4. You Prefer Hierarchical Organization

Wakestack lets you nest monitors under hosts:

Production Cluster
├── API Server 1
│   ├── Health endpoint
│   ├── CPU/Memory/Disk
│   └── Process: node
├── API Server 2
│   └── ...
└── Database Server
    ├── TCP port 5432
    └── CPU/Memory/Disk

This infrastructure-aware approach helps you understand blast radius during incidents.

When Better Stack Is Better

1. You Need Built-In On-Call Scheduling

Better Stack includes on-call schedules, rotations, and escalation policies. If you don't have PagerDuty or Opsgenie and need this functionality, Better Stack provides it out of the box.

Wakestack integrates with PagerDuty and Opsgenie but doesn't have native on-call scheduling.

2. You Want Integrated Log Management

Better Stack (through Logtail) offers log management that integrates with their uptime product. If you want logs and uptime in the same platform, Better Stack provides that.

Wakestack focuses on monitoring and status pages, leaving logging to dedicated tools.

3. You Only Monitor External Endpoints

If you only need to monitor public URLs and APIs without caring about server internals, Better Stack's focused approach works well. You won't use Wakestack's server monitoring features.

4. You're a Single-Person Team

Better Stack's per-seat pricing makes sense for solo operators. At $29/month for one seat, you get excellent uptime monitoring with incident management included.

Limitations of Wakestack (Honest Assessment)

• No on-call scheduling: You'll need PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or similar for rotation management.
• No log management: We don't collect or analyze logs—use Datadog, Logtail, or similar.
• Simpler incident management: Better Stack has more advanced incident features like postmortem templates and SLA tracking.

Feature Deep Dive

Server Monitoring

Status Pages

Incident Management

Pricing Comparison

For a 5-person DevOps team:

For a solo founder:

At the same price, Wakestack adds server monitoring. Better Stack adds on-call scheduling.

Migration Guide

1. Export your monitors from Better Stack
2. Sign up for Wakestack at wakestack.co.uk/signup
3. Recreate your monitors (HTTP, TCP, DNS, Ping)
4. Install the server agent on your infrastructure:

   curl -sSL https://wakestack.co.uk/install.sh | bash

5. Create your status page with the same components
6. Configure PagerDuty integration if you need on-call (optional)

Ideal Use Cases

Choose Wakestack if you:

• Run your own servers (VPS, bare metal, or cloud VMs)
• Need to understand infrastructure health alongside uptime
• Have a team larger than 2 people
• Want simpler, predictable pricing
• Can use PagerDuty or similar for on-call

Choose Better Stack if you:

• Only monitor external endpoints
• Need built-in on-call scheduling
• Want integrated log management
• Are a solo operator
• Prefer all-in-one incident management

Try Wakestack Free

See if Wakestack is the right Better Stack alternative for your infrastructure monitoring needs.

• 5 monitors included free
• Server monitoring agent included
• Status page included
• No credit card required

Start Your Free Trial →

Questions? Check our documentation or compare plans.

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