The best stack options in 2023

Website toolsNatalie Birch • July 13, 2023 • Read 8 minutes

Created to meet the needs of IT teams, Better Stack is a popular infrastructure monitoring platform that detects system vulnerabilities, monitors the availability of specific components, and calls the right person on your team to resolve the issue quickly. This sector focuses on three main areas:

• Risk management may need to fix the root cause of the risk in order to provide the company with all corrective information.
• Hourly monitoring with screenshots of errors to clarify an issue immediately.
• Status pages to share work hours, communicate ongoing events, and get customers to sign up for email updates.

Moreover, it has a standard alarm variant with call schedules and dynamic notification options. The platform notifies the team via phone, SMS, email or push notification. If necessary, it can be combined with Slack and Microsoft groups.

When you dive deeper into Better Stack, you’ll also find these useful features:

• Quick 30-second checks subject to master plans.
• Easy monitoring of API, PING, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, DNS and other general network components.
• Screenshots and logs of API error messages are sent to the right person at the right time.
• Monitoring CRON jobs and serverless workers.
• Integration with popular platforms and services.

Better Stack provides all the tools you need in this space to accomplish your goals; However, pricing is one problem. It is expensive. For example, those just starting out pay at least $24 per month. This plan allows 50 monitors but does not allow integration with other services. Also, you cannot invite your colleagues to work on the same project.

This may be a good reason to consider the Better Stack options, which offer the same set of tools but at a lower price. Another good reason to explore alternatives is that Better Stack has flaws.

• When you have multiple teams on board, the interface can get complicated.
• Lack of support for other languages
• Limited integration options

So, if you’re thinking of switching because you’re looking for a better solution or if you’re hunting for the best value for the price, we recommend checking out our list of the best of the Better Stack alternatives in 2023.

Top Best Stack Options 2023

Heart beat

Heart beat It tops the list of best stack options. This relatively young yet powerful time tracking tool has earned a reputation as a trusted tool among some serious clients and IT teams across the globe.

Unlike its counterpart, it does not chase high income at all costs. Its mission is to help small and medium-sized companies monitor their website access and fix problems when they occur to improve overall system performance and keep their business running. Additionally, it prioritizes status pages, which are critical for businesses to keep their interactions with their customers safe and healthy.

As a result, the platform covers popular use cases at a low cost. Perfect for startups, e-commerce projects, SaaS and dev teams. Among its main competencies are the following.

• Monitor uptime, SSL certificate, response time, website speed and other aspects.
• Manage from multiple global data centers around the world.
• Provide advanced settings for setting questions and responses.
• Generating detailed regional data and comprehensive reports.
• Alert via phone calls, email, SMS, Slack and Telegram.
• Schedule maintenance windows.
• Use a collaborative environment.
• Hire localized status pages with custom domain, unique modern design, event history and option to get subscribers on board.
• Create password protected status pages and promote status badge on website.
• Allow quick 30 second checks.

Pulsetic offers the best value for money. For example, if you need 100 monitors, you pay only $39, three times cheaper than Pingdom. If you’re a startup or mid-sized business, you can enjoy a basic plan that will set you back just $19 a month. This allows five team members to monitor 50 websites with one-minute scan intervals from multiple global locations.

On top of that, it has a free tier that meets most of the needs of solopreneurs, freelancers, hobbyists, and those just starting out in this direction.

Freshness

Freshness It is popular for its simple yet effective time tracking solution. It won’t confuse you with tons of features, complex dashboards, and complex settings. It provides only the essentials for website monitoring, eliminating the hassles of complex platforms that are critical to streamlining and simplifying workflow.

It has earned a solid reputation in this space for over a decade. The collection of products provides the following capabilities.

• Advanced monitoring including HTTP/HTTPS, ICMP ping, TCP/UDP and DNS monitoring.
• Advanced reporting with response time graphs and response time metrics.
• Integrations with 3-party applications and platforms including Zapier, Webhooks, Freshdesk, Slack, Freshservice and Twilio.
• Ten international locations.
• Hosted public status pages with the ability to integrate custom domains and status badges into the website.

The main benefits of Freshping are that it provides free web monitoring and real-time alerts for up to 50 URLs with a one-minute monitoring interval. Additionally, users can print up to five official status pages. All they need is to create an account.

As for the premium plans, they also delight the masses with their flexibility. The service adheres to the “pay as you grow” ideology, offering companies to start with a free plan and upgrade to one of two premium options created to meet the company’s new goals.

For example, the basic plan is $11 per month for 60 checks, 12 months of data retention (including reports and data logs), basic authentication configuration, and standard alert options. Those who need it the most can opt for the plan to grow teams that dramatically expand the capabilities of the previous tier.

Website Pulse

As a small but powerful web-based Better Stack alternative, Website Pulse It provides a complete solution for startups and mid-sized businesses to proactively detect and resolve website performance issues, monitor the availability of their projects periodically, and schedule call actions to reach IT and support teams in a timely manner.

The platform offers a variety of tools including:

• Website and web application monitoring
• Server monitoring
• Browser monitoring
• Network monitoring
• Web marketing monitoring
• SSL certificate monitoring

It allows custom monitors, detects vulnerabilities, checks for blacklists, generates detailed real-time reports, and provides a multi-user collaboration environment. It also has a versatile and fully customizable alarm system. It can send multilevel environmental notifications, prevent false alarms, receive alerts for specific error types, and create custom dependency rules for each target.

It is important to note that the platform does not have a status page and a badge maker. So if this functionality is important to you, this platform may fall short of your expectations.

Website Pulse has a flexible pricing structure that lets you pay for what your team needs and uses right now, choosing monitoring intervals, specific monitoring locations, and other features to meet their goals. Compared to other Better Stack alternatives, their fees are expensive. For example, monitoring just one website every 10 minutes from an international location costs $9 per month. However, you may request a custom price.

Hexometer

Designed to support eCommerce projects and empower agencies to monitor client websites across all platforms; Hexometer Better Stack is an option with a very important feature that uses the power of AI technologies to monitor the 24/7 availability of the website and notify the IT team about outages, errors or crashes.

The platform goes against the previously mentioned Better Stack options as it covers six huge areas that are important to keep the system healthy and improve the overall performance of the project. This includes user experience, SEO, health and safety.

When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, the platform offers these capabilities to teams:

• Time tracking to check any URL, email server, DNS, CDN, SMTP, POP3, RADIUS or third party service.
• Standard SSL certificate checks
• Alerts via email, SMS, Telegram, Discord, Slack and Trello
• Integrate with 1000’s of apps via Zapier, Integrately, SyncSpider or Pabbly Connect integrations

In addition to advanced capabilities, it also provides basic functionality to monitor website availability.

The main obstacle of the solution is the price. You won’t find a clearly created standard for infrastructure monitoring. Teams must pay to access the entire arena. So, if you’re up to the hour tracking, you still have to pay for some premium features like user experience tracking or SEO tracking.

On the bright side, as far as Better Stack options go, it’s the Hexometer that gives you more information about system health.

Network monitoring

ManageEngine OpManager is a fully supported network monitoring solution to gain visibility into all components involved in your system environment, from monitoring access points and wireless routers to monitoring storage devices such as Fiber channel switches or Storage arrays.

This amazing product suite has a dedicated network monitoring tool, making it one of the best stack options in 2023. It efficiently identifies outages, anticipates potential problems, and proactively resolves network issues. It monitors the performance of any IP based device and network service and displays the system performance.

Among the major capabilities in this sector are:

• Monitoring the availability of the website and pinging all monitored devices at certain intervals
• Notify the group by email or text message
• Find and troubleshoot CPU and server bottlenecks
• Generating reports based on network performance
• Offering customizable dashboards and various viewing options

Unlike the Better Stack options mentioned above, this product comes as a desktop application that the team has to configure themselves, which can be a problem for non-tech-savvy entrepreneurs and some beginners in eCommerce and SaaS departments.

The good news is that you can try the product using the free version, which allows you to control three devices, or request a free 30-day trial period.

For those who have already decided on this option, there are two premium plans. The first is targeted at companies and agencies that need to monitor no more than 1,000 devices from a single server. It costs $345 for a one-time fee.

The second premium tier allows monitoring of up to 10,000 devices or 100,000 interfaces. Pricing starts at $11,545 for a one-time payment.

Conclusion

Better Stack is the best choice for agencies and large companies. It has time tracking, risk management tools and status page templates. However, this set of products requires a very high price. In addition, it comes with some disadvantages. Although, no worries. The web is flooded with solutions that can offer the same equipment but at a lower price.

If you’re looking for a better stack option with the same functionality but at an affordable price, Heart beat It is a suitable option. It efficiently meets your IT team’s real-time monitoring and risk management reporting needs by providing an effective collaboration environment and an extremely feature-rich and modern status page and badge maker. In addition, the prices are the best in the hall.

As long as it’s the cheapest solution and you’re willing to sacrifice some functionality, you should consider Freshping. It offers the most important features yet charges a pocket-friendly fee.

For those looking for better stack capabilities and more so when it’s time to expand control over other areas of system health, Website Pulse, Hexometer, and Network Monitoring will do the job with more monitoring capabilities. Expect to pay more for them though.