PagerDuty vs Better Stack for Incident Management (2026 Comparison)

PagerDuty has been the default choice for incident management since 2009. But Better Stack is challenging that position by bundling monitoring, incident management, status pages, and log management into a single, cheaper platform.

Should you pay for PagerDuty's mature, specialized incident management? Or get Better Stack's all-in-one platform at a fraction of the cost? This comparison breaks it down.

TL;DR: Quick Comparison

Feature	PagerDuty	Better Stack
Best For	Enterprise incident management	Teams wanting monitoring + incidents in one tool
Primary Focus	Incident response & on-call	Uptime monitoring + incident management
On-Call Scheduling	✅ Industry-leading	✅ Solid, covers most needs
Escalation Policies	✅ Advanced (multi-level, round-robin)	✅ Standard
Uptime Monitoring	❌ Requires integration	✅ Built-in (30s checks)
Status Pages	❌ Separate product (Statuspage)	✅ Built-in
Log Management	❌ Not available	✅ Integrated (Better Stack Logs)
Pricing	$21/user/mo+	$29/mo flat (includes team)
Free Tier	14-day trial	✅ Free plan with basic features
Integrations	700+	100+
AIOps	✅ ML-powered noise reduction	❌ Basic grouping
Postmortems	✅ Built-in templates	✅ Basic

Bottom line: PagerDuty is the better pure incident management tool — deeper features, more integrations, ML-powered noise reduction. Better Stack is the better value — you get monitoring, incidents, status pages, and logs for less than PagerDuty alone costs. Neither monitors third-party API dependencies — API Status Check fills that gap.

What is Better Stack?

Website: betterstack.com

Better Stack takes a different approach: instead of being a pure incident management tool, it bundles uptime monitoring, incident management, status pages, and log management into one platform.

Better Stack's philosophy is that monitoring and incident management shouldn't be separate products. When a monitor detects downtime, it automatically creates an incident, pages the on-call person, and updates the status page — no integration glue required.

Key capabilities:

• Uptime monitoring (30-second check intervals)
• On-call scheduling and escalation
• Beautiful status pages
• Log management (Better Stack Logs)
• Phone call, SMS, email, Slack, and Teams alerts
• Automatic incident creation from monitors
• Integration with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Splunk On-Call

Pricing: Free tier available. Paid plans from $29/month (flat, not per-user).

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Feature-by-Feature Comparison

On-Call Scheduling

PagerDuty:

• Multiple schedule types (daily, weekly, custom rotations)
• Schedule overrides and swaps
• Follow-the-sun scheduling for global teams
• Preview schedules weeks ahead
• On-call handoff notifications
• Multiple schedules per team

Better Stack:

• Standard on-call rotations (daily, weekly)
• Schedule overrides
• Basic follow-the-sun support
• On-call calendar view
• Less granular than PagerDuty for complex setups

Verdict: PagerDuty wins for complex, multi-team on-call setups. Better Stack covers 80% of use cases for most teams. If you have 5+ engineering teams with overlapping schedules, PagerDuty's scheduling is worth the premium.

Escalation Policies

PagerDuty:

• Multi-level escalation (up to 10+ levels)
• Round-robin assignment
• Time-based escalation rules
• Service-level escalation policies
• Dynamic routing based on alert content
• Auto-escalation with acknowledgment timeouts

Better Stack:

• Standard escalation chains
• Time-based escalation
• Team-based routing
• Acknowledgment timeouts
• Simpler configuration, fewer options

Verdict: PagerDuty's escalation engine is significantly more powerful. For enterprises with complex routing requirements (different teams for different services, time-of-day routing, severity-based escalation), PagerDuty is the clear choice.

Alert Intelligence

PagerDuty:

• ML-powered noise reduction (groups related alerts)
• Intelligent alert grouping across services
• Past incident context surfacing
• Automated diagnostics
• Impact analysis (which services/customers affected)

Better Stack:

• Basic alert grouping
• Manual incident correlation
• No ML-powered features

Verdict: PagerDuty wins decisively. Their AIOps features are genuinely useful for teams drowning in alerts. If your team gets 100+ alerts per day, PagerDuty's noise reduction alone justifies the cost.

Monitoring

PagerDuty:

• ❌ No built-in monitoring
• Relies on integrations (Datadog, CloudWatch, New Relic, etc.)
• Receives alerts, doesn't generate them

Better Stack:

• ✅ Built-in uptime monitoring
• 30-second check intervals
• HTTP, keyword, API, and heartbeat monitors
• Multi-region checks
• SSL certificate monitoring

Verdict: Better Stack wins by default. PagerDuty requires a separate monitoring tool, which means additional cost and integration complexity. Better Stack's monitoring directly feeds its incident management — zero integration needed.

Status Pages

PagerDuty:

• ❌ No built-in status pages
• Partners with Atlassian Statuspage ($29+/mo separately)
• Requires manual integration

Better Stack:

• ✅ Built-in status pages
• Custom domain support
• Automatic updates from monitors
• Subscriber notifications
• Beautiful, customizable design
• Password protection option

Verdict: Better Stack wins. Getting status pages bundled vs paying $29+/mo for Statuspage separately is a significant value difference.

Pricing

PagerDuty:

• Free: Up to 5 users, basic on-call (limited)
• Professional: $21/user/month — full incident management
• Business: $41/user/month — AIOps, analytics, stakeholder notifications
• Enterprise: Custom — event orchestration, full platform

Example costs:

• 5-person team (Professional): $105/month
• 10-person team (Business): $410/month
• 20-person team (Business): $820/month

Better Stack:

• Free: 10 monitors, basic on-call, status pages
• Starter: $29/month — 20 monitors, full on-call, 1-min checks
• Business: $79/month — 80 monitors, 30s checks, advanced features
• Enterprise: Custom

Example costs:

• 5-person team: $29/month (Starter covers the whole team)
• 10-person team: $79/month (Business)
• 20-person team: $79-159/month

Verdict: Better Stack is dramatically cheaper — especially for small-to-medium teams. A 10-person team saves $330+/month vs PagerDuty Business, while getting monitoring and status pages included.

True total cost comparison (10-person team):

• PagerDuty Business ($410) + UptimeRobot ($29) + Statuspage ($29) = $468/month
• Better Stack Business = $79/month

That's an 83% cost reduction with Better Stack.

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Pros and Cons

PagerDuty Pros

• ✅ Industry-leading incident management depth
• ✅ 700+ integrations
• ✅ ML-powered alert noise reduction (AIOps)
• ✅ Complex on-call scheduling and escalation
• ✅ Mature platform (15+ years, battle-tested)
• ✅ Service dependency mapping
• ✅ Postmortem and analytics features

PagerDuty Cons

• ❌ Expensive per-user pricing
• ❌ No built-in monitoring (requires separate tool)
• ❌ No built-in status pages
• ❌ Steep learning curve for setup
• ❌ Overkill for small teams
• ❌ Costs compound with team size

Better Stack Pros

• ✅ All-in-one platform (monitoring + incidents + status pages + logs)
• ✅ Flat pricing (not per-user)
• ✅ 30-second monitoring intervals
• ✅ Beautiful, modern UI
• ✅ Free tier to get started
• ✅ Replaces 3+ separate tools

Better Stack Cons

• ❌ Less mature incident management features
• ❌ No ML-powered alert intelligence
• ❌ Fewer integrations (100+ vs 700+)
• ❌ Simpler escalation policies
• ❌ Newer platform (less battle-tested)
• ❌ Limited for complex enterprise setups

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When to Choose PagerDuty

Choose PagerDuty if:

• You have 50+ engineers with complex on-call needs
• Alert noise is a major problem (100+ alerts/day)
• You need deep integrations with enterprise tools (ServiceNow, Jira, etc.)
• You already have monitoring tools and need pure incident routing
• Compliance requirements demand a mature, auditable platform
• You need ML-powered alert grouping and noise reduction

Best for: Enterprise engineering teams, large SaaS companies, organizations with dedicated SRE teams.

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When to Choose Better Stack

Choose Better Stack if:

• You're a startup or small-to-medium team (2-30 engineers)
• You want monitoring + incidents + status pages in one tool
• Budget matters — you'd rather pay $79/mo than $400+/mo
• You don't have existing monitoring and need everything at once
• Your on-call needs are straightforward (1-2 rotation schedules)
• You value modern UI and fast setup

Best for: Startups, SMBs, indie hackers, teams consolidating their monitoring stack.

Try Better Stack free — Monitoring, on-call, and status pages in one platform. Get started →

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The Missing Layer: Third-Party API Monitoring

Both PagerDuty and Better Stack focus on monitoring and managing incidents for infrastructure you control. But many incidents originate from services you depend on — Stripe, AWS, OpenAI, Twilio, GitHub.

When Stripe goes down, your payment errors spike. PagerDuty pages your on-call engineer. They investigate your code for 20 minutes before someone checks status.stripe.com. Sound familiar?

API Status Check monitors 120+ third-party APIs and alerts you instantly when providers have issues. Pair it with your incident management tool:

PagerDuty + API Status Check:

• API Status Check detects Stripe outage → sends webhook to PagerDuty
• PagerDuty creates incident with context: "Stripe API degraded"
• On-call engineer knows immediately — no investigation needed

Better Stack + API Status Check:

• API Status Check alerts on provider issues
• You correlate with Better Stack's internal monitoring
• Incident response includes: "Root cause: upstream provider, not our infrastructure"

Both scenarios save 15-30 minutes of wasted investigation per incident.

Start monitoring third-party APIs free →

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can Better Stack replace PagerDuty completely?

For most small-to-medium teams, yes. Better Stack's on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and alerting cover standard needs. You lose PagerDuty's AIOps, deep integrations, and complex routing — but most teams under 30 engineers don't need those features.

Does PagerDuty include monitoring?

No. PagerDuty is purely an incident management and routing platform. It receives alerts from monitoring tools (Datadog, CloudWatch, Better Stack, etc.) but doesn't monitor anything itself. You'll need a separate monitoring tool alongside PagerDuty.

Can I use PagerDuty with Better Stack?

Yes — and some teams do. Use Better Stack for monitoring and status pages, and route alerts to PagerDuty for on-call management. Better Stack has a native PagerDuty integration. This gives you Better Stack's monitoring with PagerDuty's superior incident routing — but at combined cost.

Which is better for a startup?

Better Stack, without question. The free tier gets you started, the flat pricing ($29-79/mo) doesn't scale with headcount, and you get monitoring + incidents + status pages bundled. PagerDuty's per-user pricing makes less sense when every dollar counts.

Is PagerDuty worth the premium?

For large enterprises (50+ engineers, complex routing, high alert volume): yes. PagerDuty's AIOps and integration depth are genuinely valuable at scale. For everyone else: Better Stack delivers 80% of the value at 20% of the cost.

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Final Verdict

PagerDuty is the BMW of incident management — premium, feature-rich, and worth it if you need the depth. Choose it for enterprise teams with complex needs and budget to match.

Better Stack is the Tesla — modern, efficient, and bundling everything into one package at a better price. Choose it if you want monitoring, incidents, status pages, and logs without paying for 4 separate tools.

API Status Check complements both — monitoring the third-party APIs neither tool tracks. When your Stripe or AWS dependency goes down, you'll know in seconds instead of minutes.

Team Size	Recommendation	Monthly Cost
1-5 engineers	Better Stack Free/Starter	$0-29
5-15 engineers	Better Stack Business	$79
15-50 engineers	Better Stack or PagerDuty Pro	$79-1,000+
50+ engineers	PagerDuty Business/Enterprise	$2,000+

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