Better Stack vs Gatus: A Complete Comparison for 2026

Gatus has over 11,000 stars on GitHub, and if you've spent any time in the self-hosted monitoring space, you've probably seen why. You define your endpoint checks in a single YAML file, commit it to Git alongside your infrastructure code, and get a status page that just works. No database, no web UI to click through, and a binary that idles at around 30 MB of RAM.

So why would you consider switching to Better Stack, or using it alongside Gatus? The short answer is scope. Gatus is built to tell you when an endpoint is down. Better Stack is built to tell you why, and to handle everything that happens between detection and resolution: log analysis, distributed traces, error tracking, on-call scheduling, AI-assisted investigation, and a status page that syncs automatically with your incident workflow.

This comparison covers both products honestly. If Gatus is the right fit for what you're building, you'll know by the end. If you're at the point where endpoint health alone isn't enough context, you'll know that too.

Quick comparison at a glance

Platform philosophy

Gatus is built around a clear principle: monitoring configuration should live in code, not in a database or a web UI. You get a single Go binary, a YAML config file, and a status page served from the same process. The whole thing idles at around 30 MB of RAM. When you want to add a new endpoint check, you edit the file, push a commit, and redeploy. If someone on your team changes a monitoring threshold, there's a Git diff to show for it.

That philosophy works well if you care about configuration drift and want your monitoring to follow the same review process as everything else in your stack. It also works well if you're self-hosting and want zero ongoing cost for the monitoring layer itself.

Better Stack approaches the problem from the other direction. The goal isn't just to keep configuration manageable, it's to eliminate the work of stitching together multiple tools. When something goes wrong at 3am, you want logs, traces, metrics, and the incident timeline in one place, not spread across Grafana, a log aggregator, PagerDuty, and Slack. The eBPF collector captures telemetry at the kernel level with no code changes, and everything lands in a unified data warehouse you can query with SQL or PromQL.

The real question is what you need after the alert fires. Gatus detects the failure and routes the notification. Better Stack takes you from detection through investigation to resolution, with all the context available in one interface.

Endpoint monitoring

Both tools cover the basics you'd expect: HTTP and HTTPS checks, TCP port monitoring, DNS resolution, SSL certificate expiry alerts, and configurable check intervals. That common ground is worth noting before getting into where they diverge.

Gatus

Gatus's standout feature in this category is its condition system. Instead of binary up/down checks, you write conditions against any part of the response, including the status code, response time, response body via JSONPath expressions, the IP address returned, and certificate expiration time. Here's what that looks like in practice:

endpoints:
  - name: api-health
    url: https://api.example.com/health
    conditions:
      - "[STATUS] == 200"
      - "[RESPONSE_TIME] < 500"
      - "[BODY].status == UP"
      - "[CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 72h"

You can also monitor gRPC services, WebSocket connections, SSH endpoints, and UDP ports, which puts Gatus ahead of most uptime tools on raw protocol coverage. Push-based monitoring for external heartbeat signals is available from the Premium tier.

Better Stack

Better Stack's uptime monitoring runs checks from 20+ global locations simultaneously, which means you know whether a failure is regional or universal. The minimum check interval is 30 seconds, and multi-step verification prevents false positives before an alert fires. Where Better Stack goes beyond what Gatus offers is in Playwright-based transaction monitoring: instead of pinging an endpoint, you run a real browser session through a complete user flow.

Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs and scheduled tasks is also built in:

And for API monitoring specifically:

If you're comparing the two purely on health check expressiveness, Gatus wins at the individual endpoint level. Better Stack's advantage is that those health checks connect directly to logs, traces, and incident workflows when something breaks.

Status pages

Status pages are Gatus's centerpiece, and both tools take meaningfully different approaches to what a status page should do.

Gatus

The managed plan publishes a status page at status.yourdomain.com automatically, fed by the same endpoint checks you've already configured. There's no separate sync step, no integration to set up. If your check fails, the status page reflects it immediately.

You get uptime badges you can embed in READMEs and documentation, announcement banners for incident updates on the Premium tier, and private pages with authentication. On Business and Enterprise tiers, you can add custom CSS, SSO for private page access, and multi-language support. The self-hosted path gives you complete control over the page markup and styling.

The limitation worth knowing about: subscriber notifications are email only. If you want to notify subscribers via SMS, Slack, or webhooks when something goes down, that's not available regardless of plan. That matters if you're expecting proactive outreach to be part of your incident communication.

Better Stack

Better Stack's status pages integrate directly with the incident management layer, so when you declare an incident, the status page updates without you having to touch it separately.

Subscriber notifications go out via email, SMS, Slack, and webhooks when incidents are declared or updated:

Private pages support password protection, IP allowlisting, or SAML SSO depending on your access control needs:

Maintenance windows, multi-language support, and organizing services using the service catalog are covered in the advanced setup:

Pricing

The pricing models here are quite different, and which one works better for you depends mostly on whether you want to self-host and how much of the observability stack you actually need.

Gatus

Gatus is free if you self-host. There are no endpoint limits, no expiry, and no license to manage. You run a container, you get monitoring. For people who don't want to operate infrastructure, the managed SaaS tiers start at $10/month for the Standard plan and go up to $500/month for Enterprise.

The pricing structure is feature-gated rather than volume-gated. Higher plans unlock shorter check intervals, more endpoints, more integrations, and more team members. On the Standard plan, for example, you're limited to Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, and email for alerting. If you want to route alerts through PagerDuty, Twilio, or custom webhooks, you'll need Premium ($20/month) or above.

Better Stack

Better Stack prices on data volume rather than features. The free tier includes 10 monitors, 1 status page, and a meaningful allocation of telemetry data. The paid tier starts at $29/month for a single Responder license, which gives you unlimited phone and SMS alerts, on-call scheduling, and the full incident management workflow alongside the entire telemetry platform.

If you're running uptime monitoring only and comparing costs at 100 endpoints, Gatus Business at $50/month is straightforward. Better Stack at that scale costs $21/month for 100 monitors plus $29/month per responder for phone alerts. The numbers are close, but Better Stack includes structured log ingestion, distributed traces, metrics, and error tracking in that same bill.

The self-hosted path is Gatus's real differentiator on price. If running a Docker container is no trouble for you and you don't need the full observability stack, the cost is genuinely zero.

Alerting and integrations

Both tools connect to the collaboration platforms you're probably already using, but the way they handle what happens after an alert fires is quite different.

Gatus

Gatus covers 25+ alerting providers out of the box: Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Twilio, AWS SES, Pushover, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Mattermost, Gotify, and generic webhooks. One integration worth highlighting specifically is the GitHub provider, which automatically opens a GitHub issue prefixed with alert(gatus): when a check fails and closes it when the service recovers. For developer-first workflows where issues live in GitHub, that's a genuinely useful native integration.

All of this is configured declaratively in YAML:

alerting:
  slack:
    webhook-url: "https://hooks.slack.com/..."
    default-alert:
      failure-threshold: 3
      success-threshold: 2
      send-on-resolved: true

You can set a default alert configuration that applies to all endpoints, then override it per endpoint for services that need different thresholds. It keeps the config readable even at scale.

Better Stack

Better Stack's alerting is built into the incident workflow rather than being a separate notification layer. When an alert fires, it doesn't just send a Slack message. It creates an incident, pages whoever is on call, and opens a dedicated incident channel:

You can also create issues in Linear and Jira directly from an incident without leaving the workflow:

The core difference is that Gatus routes alert notifications to external tools, while Better Stack treats alerting as the start of an incident workflow that it manages end-to-end.

Incident management

Gatus

When Gatus detects a failure, it marks the endpoint as down, updates the status page, and fires an alert to whatever integrations you've configured. What happens next is up to you and whatever tools you've wired up. Who gets paged depends on your PagerDuty or OpsGenie configuration. Where the incident gets tracked depends on whether you're using a separate incident management tool. What the timeline looks like depends on whether you've set that up somewhere.

That's not a criticism of Gatus, it's just what a health monitoring tool does. The scope is detection and notification, not incident orchestration. If you're small enough that Slack plus PagerDuty handles everything, that's fine. Where it becomes a problem is when you're coordinating a response across multiple people and tools. By the time you've got the right person paged, the Slack channel going, the status page updated, and the incident documented somewhere, you've spent 10 minutes on coordination before you've even started investigating.

Better Stack

Better Stack handles the full lifecycle in one place. A monitor fires, an incident is created, the on-call person gets called, the Slack channel opens with investigation tools built in, and the status page updates automatically:

On-call scheduling with rotation management, timezone awareness, and automatic handoffs:

Multi-tier escalation policies for when you need more than a single on-call rotation:

Post-mortems generate automatically from the incident timeline, so you're not reconstructing what happened from Slack history after the fact:

Log management

Gatus doesn't collect or store logs. It probes your endpoints and reports on what comes back. What your services write to stdout, to disk, or to a log aggregator is outside what Gatus sees.

This is the clearest gap between the two products. If your API starts returning 500s at 2:47am, Gatus tells you it's returning 500s. It can't tell you which database query timed out, which upstream dependency stopped responding, or what error message appeared in your application logs right before the failures started. For that, you need a separate tool, and you need it to already have the data from before the incident.

Better Stack

Better Stack's log management is part of the same platform as its uptime monitoring, so when a monitor fires, you can jump directly from the alert into the relevant log stream without switching tools. Every ingested log is indexed and immediately searchable with no tiering decisions to make.

You can query logs with SQL directly, which most people already know how to read:

Saving common queries as presets means you're not rewriting the same filters every time an incident occurs:

Pricing works out to $0.10/GB ingestion plus $0.05/GB/month for retention. A service generating 100GB a month costs $15 total, and every byte of it is searchable.

Metrics and infrastructure monitoring

Gatus

Gatus does export metrics in Prometheus format at /metrics, which includes endpoint health status, response times, and certificate expiry data. If you're already running Prometheus and Grafana, you can scrape that endpoint and build dashboards on top of it. There's even a community Grafana dashboard (ID 24379) you can import directly.

That integration is genuinely useful if you already have Prometheus and Grafana in your stack. The catch is that you're the one running those tools. Gatus provides the metrics source; what you do with it is up to your existing infrastructure setup.

Better Stack

Better Stack is a full metrics platform rather than a metrics source. You get Prometheus-compatible ingestion, native PromQL support, and a built-in dashboard builder without needing to operate anything separately.

Build charts with PromQL directly if that's what you're used to:

Or skip writing queries entirely with the drag-and-drop builder:

Retention costs $0.50/GB/month. There are no per-host fees, no cardinality-based charges, and no premium tier for high-cardinality metrics.

Distributed tracing (APM)

Gatus monitors endpoints from the outside. It has no visibility into what happens inside your services between receiving a request and returning a response. Distributed tracing is not something Gatus does at any plan level.

Better Stack's APM is built on eBPF, which captures traces at the kernel level without requiring you to install SDKs in each service or make any changes to your application code. Once you deploy the collector to Kubernetes or Docker, HTTP and gRPC traffic between services is traced automatically. Database queries to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB are picked up the same way.

If you already have OpenTelemetry instrumentation in place, you can point it at Better Stack directly:

And if you're running an existing data pipeline through Vector, that integrates directly as well:

When your API starts responding slowly and endpoint health alone doesn't explain it, traces are what show you whether the bottleneck is a database query, a downstream service call, or something in your own code. Gatus will tell you the API is slow. Better Stack will show you exactly where the time went.

Error tracking

Error tracking is another area where Gatus simply doesn't play. It monitors service availability and response characteristics, but it has no concept of application exceptions, stack traces, or error grouping.

Better Stack's error tracking accepts Sentry SDK payloads, which means if you're already using Sentry instrumentation in your application, you can point it at Better Stack without rewriting anything. Exceptions are priced at $0.000050 each, roughly 6x cheaper than Sentry, with 100,000 exceptions included in the free tier and a 90-day retention window.

Each error comes with a pre-built prompt you can copy into Claude Code or Cursor. Instead of manually reading through a stack trace and reconstructing context, you paste the prompt and let your AI coding assistant start from a full picture of what happened:

Real user monitoring

Gatus has no real user monitoring capability, whether you're on the self-hosted open-source version or any of the managed SaaS plans. Frontend performance, Core Web Vitals, session replays, and user behavior analytics are outside what it does.

Better Stack's RUM sits in the same data warehouse as your backend telemetry, which means you can trace a slow page load from the initial frontend request all the way through your microservices and database calls without switching tools. You're not correlating data across two separate products manually; it's all in one interface with one query language.

Session replay shows you how users actually interacted with your product, at 2x speed with automatic pause-skipping, filtered by rage clicks, dead clicks, or errors. Core Web Vitals including LCP, CLS, and INP are tracked per URL with alerting when performance drops. Website analytics covers referrers, UTM campaigns, entry and exit pages, and real-time traffic source data.

For 5 million web events and 50,000 session replays per month, Better Stack comes in at around $102. The comparison to Gatus here isn't really about cost; it's that RUM isn't available from Gatus at any price point.

AI SRE and MCP server

Gatus has no AI layer. Alerts fire according to the conditions you've defined and the integrations you've configured. Figuring out what caused the failure is on you.

Better Stack

Better Stack's AI SRE activates automatically when an incident fires. It works through your service map, queries the relevant logs, checks recent deployments, and gives you a root cause hypothesis before you've had time to orient yourself. At 3am, that head start matters.

The Better Stack MCP server connects Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI client directly to your observability data. You can ask it to find HTTP 500 errors from the last hour, check who's on call, acknowledge an incident, or build a dashboard query, all through natural language without copying anything into a chat window.

Setup is adding the server config to your AI client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "betterstack": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.betterstack.com"
    }
  }
}

The MCP server is generally available to all Better Stack customers. You can allowlist specific tools for read-only access or blocklist destructive operations like removing dashboards.

Deployment model

Gatus

Gatus's self-hosted path is where it stands out most. A single Docker run command, a YAML config file, and you have a monitoring tool that uses about 30 MB of RAM. No database to provision, no web UI dependencies, nothing to babysit. Your entire monitoring configuration lives in one file you can track in Git:

docker run -p 8080:8080 \
  -v /path/to/config.yaml:/config/config.yaml \
  --name gatus \
  twinproduction/gatus:stable

On Kubernetes, a Helm chart deploys Gatus as a workload alongside your services. The experimental remote-instances feature can aggregate multiple Gatus instances into a single central dashboard if you're running multiple clusters.

The trade-off is that multi-location monitoring from external vantage points requires either multiple self-hosted instances or upgrading to the managed SaaS plan. And you're responsible for upgrades, persistence configuration, and keeping the container running.

Better Stack

Better Stack is fully managed. The telemetry collector deploys via a single Helm chart and runs as a DaemonSet across your Kubernetes nodes, but everything else, including storage, querying, dashboards, alerting, and on-call infrastructure, is operated for you.

It's also worth noting that these tools aren't mutually exclusive. If you like the Gatus configuration-as-code model and want to keep endpoint checks in YAML alongside your infrastructure code, you can run Gatus for that while sending logs, metrics, and traces to Better Stack. Some people find that combination gives them the best of both approaches.

Enterprise readiness

Gatus

Gatus's Enterprise managed plan at $500/month covers 1,000 endpoints, 30 status pages, unlimited team members, 30-second check intervals, and priority email support. SSO is available from the Business tier at $50/month, though it applies to status page access rather than the Gatus configuration interface. Audit logs are available on all plans with retention ranging from 14 days on Standard to 90 days on Business and Enterprise.

One gap worth flagging if you're going through a procurement process: the Gatus website doesn't publish SOC 2 compliance documentation, GDPR compliance information, or formal security certifications. If your security or legal team requires a SOC 2 report as part of vendor evaluation, that's something to investigate directly with Gatus.

Better Stack

Better Stack is SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant, with data stored in DIN ISO/IEC 27001-certified data centers in the EU. Encryption is AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit. Third-party penetration tests run regularly, and the reports are available to enterprise customers under NDA. SSO works via Okta, Azure, and Google. SCIM provisioning, role-based access control, and team-level isolation are available for enterprise accounts. HIPAA compliance is not currently offered.

Final thoughts

Gatus is a well-built tool that does exactly what it claims to do. If you want external endpoint monitoring with expressive health check conditions, a clean status page, and the discipline of keeping monitoring configuration in Git alongside your infrastructure code, it's hard to argue against it. The self-hosted path is genuinely free, the YAML model is clean, and the protocol coverage is broader than most comparable tools.

The point where you outgrow Gatus is when you need to understand why something failed rather than just that it failed. When your API starts returning errors and you want to know which database query was slow, which error appeared in the logs, or which service in the distributed trace was the bottleneck, you're reaching for a different category of tool. Gatus will tell you the endpoint is down. Better Stack will show you the full picture and page the right person while you're looking at it.

If you're currently running Gatus and finding yourself pulling context from Grafana, a separate log aggregator, and PagerDuty every time something breaks, that coordination overhead is what Better Stack is designed to eliminate.

Better Stack's free tier lets you start without decommissioning anything. You can run Gatus alongside it while you get a feel for whether having logs and traces connected to your uptime monitoring changes how you investigate incidents.

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