BetterStack vs Axiom for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

BetterStack Overview

BetterStack (formerly Better Uptime + Logtail) bundles uptime monitoring, log management, and incident handling into one platform. It answers the questions that keep solo developers up at night. Is my site up? What's in my logs? Who gets notified when something breaks?

The uptime monitoring pings your endpoints from multiple global locations. When something goes down, you get notified via Slack, email, SMS, or even a phone call. The status pages are polished and professional. Your users see a clean "All Systems Operational" page instead of wondering if the app is broken on their end.

I set up BetterStack in about 15 minutes. Added my endpoints, connected Slack for alerts, and had a public status page live before lunch. The log management side (Logtail) lets you ship application logs and search through them without maintaining your own log infrastructure. It's a practical, no-nonsense tool.

Axiom Overview

Axiom is built around a different philosophy. The idea is that you should be able to ingest and store all your event data without worrying about cost, then query it whenever you need answers. No sampling, no aggressive retention policies, no per-host pricing. Send your logs, metrics, and traces to Axiom datasets, and query them using APL (Axiom Processing Language).

The free tier is remarkably generous. 500 GB of ingest per month with 30 days of retention. That's enough to store every log line from a busy production app without paying anything. Axiom handles structured data well, so you can send JSON events, build dashboards, and set up monitors.

I started using Axiom when I needed somewhere to dump application logs cheaply. The query language (similar to KQL/Kusto) takes a bit of learning, but once you get it, searching through millions of log entries feels snappy.

Key Differences

Primary focus. BetterStack leads with uptime monitoring and adds logs. Axiom leads with log analytics and adds monitoring. If your first question is "is my site up?", BetterStack answers that immediately. If your first question is "what happened in my logs at 3 AM?", Axiom is built for that.

Status pages. BetterStack includes beautiful, customizable status pages. Axiom doesn't offer status pages. For user-facing projects where transparency matters, this is a meaningful difference.

Alerting channels. BetterStack offers SMS and phone call alerts for downtime. When your site goes down at midnight, getting a phone call can be the difference between a 5-minute outage and a 5-hour one. Axiom's alerting sends notifications through webhooks, email, and integrations, but doesn't do phone calls.

Log management scale. Axiom's free tier allows 500 GB of ingest per month. BetterStack's Logtail free tier is more limited. If you generate a lot of log data, Axiom gives you significantly more room before you need to pay.

Query power. Axiom's APL query language is more powerful than BetterStack's Logtail search for complex log analysis. If you need to aggregate, filter, and transform log data, Axiom gives you more flexibility. BetterStack's log search is simpler and works well for basic lookups but doesn't match Axiom's analytical depth.

Incident management. BetterStack includes on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and incident timelines. This is built into the product. Axiom focuses on data and alerting but doesn't offer incident management workflows.

When to Choose BetterStack

• Uptime monitoring with SMS/phone alerts is your top priority
• You want a public status page for your users
• Incident management with on-call schedules matters
• You prefer a simpler, all-in-one monitoring setup
• You want to get started in 15 minutes without learning a query language

When to Choose Axiom

• You need to store large volumes of log data cheaply
• Complex log analysis and querying are important to you
• The 500 GB/month free ingest tier matches your needs
• You're comfortable learning a query language for more powerful analysis
• You want to ingest metrics, logs, and traces into one platform

The Verdict

For most solo developers, BetterStack is the better starting point. Uptime monitoring is the most immediately valuable monitoring feature you can add to any project. Knowing your site is down before your users tell you is worth more than the most powerful log query language in the world.

Axiom is the better choice if your main pain point is log management. If you're generating lots of log data and need to search through it efficiently, Axiom's free tier is hard to beat. The 500 GB/month ingest allowance gives you room to log everything without worrying about costs.

My ideal setup for a solo developer: BetterStack for uptime monitoring and status pages (the stuff your users see), plus Axiom for log storage and analysis (the stuff you need for debugging). Both have solid free tiers, and together they cover monitoring and observability without breaking the bank.

But if I had to pick just one, I'd go with BetterStack. The combination of uptime monitoring, decent log management, and incident handling covers more bases for the typical solo project.