Who each tool is for
Better Stack
Engineering and operations teams that want uptime, on-call, escalation, heartbeats and browser transaction checks together, with unlimited phone and SMS alerts.
Beamfar
Web agencies and freelancers who look after client sites on retainers and want incidents explained by what changed just before, SEO regressions caught, and one monthly report per client. Beamfar is not an on-call tool. Individuals in the EU can buy it for their own sites too; individual plans are available in the EU for now.
Side by side
The Beamfar column describes what is built today. The Better Stack column is what its own pages say, read on 2026-10-28; where a page did not say, the cell says so.
| Topic | Beamfar | Better Stack | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Prices, from €19 to €249 a month, excluding VAT. Nothing can be bought yet. Plan limits: 10, 40, 100 or 200 client sites, and a Free plan for one site after the trial. | Free plan for personal projects ($0 a month: 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack and e-mail alerts). Responder licence $34 a month billed monthly or $29 billed yearly, with 10 uptime monitors included; each extra block of 50 monitors $25 monthly or $21 yearly. | Better Stack pricing |
| Trial | 14 days, no card, one per organisation. | A trial is not stated on the pages we read; a 60-day money-back guarantee is. | Better Stack pricing |
| Check interval | Every minute on Solo; every 30 seconds possible on Team and up (a choice per check); every 5 minutes on the Free plan; always from every enabled region. | Up to 30-second checks on paid plans; the free tier uses 3-minute checks. | Better Stack uptime page |
| How a site is called down | Two regions must agree. One region failing is a regional issue with no alert. Each alert lists what each region saw. | The page says “No false positives” and does not explain the confirmation rule, so we make no claim about it. | Better Stack uptime page |
| What changed before an incident | DNS records, the certificate, the final redirect URL and SEO signals are recorded on a timeline and marked when an incident follows within the next hour. | Not described on the pages we read: no timeline that attaches DNS, certificate or redirect changes to an incident. | Better Stack uptime page |
| SEO-risk alerts | Alert when a page becomes noindex, robots.txt starts blocking it, or its canonical moves to another host. | Not listed on the pages we read. | Better Stack uptime page |
| Other checks | Page, certificate, DNS, API and slowdown checks; TCP port, ping (TCP reachability, not ICMP), DNS blocklist and heartbeat (cron) monitors; and a plan-limited daily or weekly crawl for broken pages and links, mixed content and the sitemap. No Lighthouse or browser performance audits. | Web pages, APIs, ping, SSL, domain expiration, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, DNS, cron jobs, heartbeats and Playwright browser transaction checks. | Better Stack uptime page |
| Client reports | One monthly report per client, printable to PDF; your brand on it on the Agency and Agency Plus plans. | A per-client monthly report is not described on the pages we read. | Better Stack pricing |
| Status pages | 1, 10, 30 or 60 per plan (Solo, Team, Agency, Agency Plus; 1 on Free). Only confirmed incidents show (two regions for page checks, the ping receiver for scheduled tasks). The client’s own domain is built (a host name you verify with a DNS record, with a certificate) but not yet tested against real DNS and TLS. | 1 included. Extra public page $15 a month ($12 yearly); custom CSS and JavaScript $15 ($12); white label $250 a month ($208 yearly) per page. | Better Stack pricing |
| People | 1, 2, 10, 25 or 50 per plan (Free, Solo, Team, Agency, Agency Plus). | Priced per responder licence; the pricing page also lists unlimited phone call and SMS alerts and on-call features. | Better Stack pricing |
Where Better Stack is better
- On-call scheduling and escalation policies, and unlimited SMS and phone alerts, which Beamfar does not have. Beamfar lets the team acknowledge an incident and escalates once to a second channel (Team, Agency and Agency Plus), with no on-call schedules.
- Playwright browser transaction checks, on-call and many more monitor types (Beamfar has heartbeat and cron monitors, but no browser checks).
- Checks up to every 30 seconds on paid plans.
- It is on sale today with a 60-day money-back guarantee. Beamfar’s paid plans open soon.
Where Beamfar is better
- A what-changed timeline attached to each incident: DNS records, certificate, redirects and SEO signals.
- SEO-risk alerts for noindex, robots.txt blocking and a canonical moved to another host, after a second sighting.
- A monthly report per client and plan limits sized for agency portfolios, without per-page charges for each client’s status page branding on the Agency and Agency Plus plans.
- No price advantage can be claimed: Beamfar’s paid plans are not on sale yet.
When to choose which
Choose Better Stack when
You run services that need on-call rotation, escalation, phone alerts, heartbeats or browser transaction checks, or you want to buy today.
Choose Beamfar when
You look after client websites on retainers and want evidence and reports per client more than on-call tooling, and you can wait: Beamfar’s paid plans open soon.
Questions
Is Better Stack an on-call tool?
Its pricing page presents uptime, on-call and incident management under one responder licence. Beamfar is not an on-call or incident-response tool.
What does a white-label status page cost on Better Stack?
Its pricing page lists white label at $250 a month ($208 billed yearly) per page, on top of the licence.
Can I buy Beamfar today?
No. The 14-day trial is free and needs no card; paid plans open soon, and their prices may change before then.
Sources
Read on . Standards and vendor pages change; confirm the current text before you rely on it.
- Better Stack pricing (betterstack.com)
- Better Stack uptime page (betterstack.com)