Gatus vs Better Stack
Both are alternatives to Pingdom. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Better Stack vs Gatus — same comparison, one verdict.
Gatus
Monitoring as a YAML file, for people who already run everything from Git.
Gatus is a developer-first health-check service configured entirely in YAML, which means your monitoring lives in the repository, gets reviewed in pull requests, and is deployed like any other code. It handles HTTP, TCP, ICMP, DNS and TLS-expiry checks, evaluates rich conditions on responses — status code, body content, response time, certificate age — and ships a clean dashboard and status page. Apache-2.0, around 11.7k stars, actively developed. It is the natural pick for a team already doing GitOps, and the wrong one if a non-engineer needs to add a monitor.
Better Stack
Hosted monitoring with real on-call — when someone has to be woken up.
Better Stack combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling and log management in one hosted product. It is the option to consider when the requirement is not really monitoring but escalation: rotations, phone calls that keep ringing, acknowledgement tracking and post-incident timelines. None of the open tools here do that, and building it is not a weekend project. Proprietary and hosted with a free tier. Listed because for a team with a genuine on-call obligation it is a different category of answer, and pretending Uptime Kuma covers it would be misleading.
Side by side
| Gatus | Better Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 94 | 40 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Local-first | Yes | No |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. A single binary or container. | Free tier available; paid plans per monitor and per on-call seat. Checked 2026-08-01. |
Gatus edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Gatus
Strengths
- +Configuration is YAML in Git — reviewed, versioned and diffable
- +Rich condition evaluation, including response body and TLS expiry
- +Apache-2.0 with no enterprise carve-out
- +Very light: one small binary, minimal memory
Trade-offs
- −No UI for adding monitors — everything is a config change
- −Same blind spot as any self-hosted monitor: it can go down with you
- −Fewer notification integrations than Uptime Kuma
- −Not usable by non-technical team members
Better Stack
Strengths
- +Real on-call rotations and phone escalation, which nothing open here offers
- +Incident management and status pages in the same product
- +30-second checks and multi-region verification
- +Modern interface that teams actually adopt
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted — no self-host path at any price
- −Per-seat on-call pricing grows with the team
- −More product than most people needing an uptime check require
- −Your incident history lives in their system
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-01. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.