BetterStack vs Grafana for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

BetterStack Overview

BetterStack gives you uptime monitoring, log management, and incident handling as a managed service. No infrastructure to maintain, no configuration to debug. Add your endpoints, connect your notification channels, and you have monitoring running in under 20 minutes.

The uptime checks run from global locations and alert you through Slack, email, SMS, or phone calls when something breaks. The status pages look great without any design work. The log management (Logtail) accepts your application logs and gives you search and filtering. The incident management includes on-call schedules and escalation policies.

It's the "just works" option. I set it up for a project on a Friday afternoon and forgot about it until it woke me up on a Saturday morning because my database had filled up. That alert saved me hours of downtime.

Grafana Overview

Grafana is the open-source dashboarding and visualization platform that powers monitoring stacks at companies of all sizes. At its core, Grafana connects to data sources like Prometheus (metrics), Loki (logs), and Tempo (traces) and lets you build custom dashboards to visualize anything.

You can self-host the entire stack for free or use Grafana Cloud, which bundles managed Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo with a generous free tier. 10,000 active metrics, 50 GB of logs, and 50 GB of traces per month. That's a real monitoring stack for $0.

The tradeoff is effort. Self-hosting Grafana means running Prometheus and Loki alongside your application. Even with Docker Compose, there's configuration involved. Grafana Cloud reduces this but you still need to instrument your app to send data. Building dashboards takes time, though community templates help.

I run a self-hosted Grafana stack on my server. It took an afternoon to set up, and the dashboards give me deep visibility into everything. But I enjoy that kind of setup work. Not everyone does.

Key Differences

Managed vs DIY. BetterStack is fully managed. You sign up and start monitoring. Grafana (self-hosted) requires you to deploy and maintain the infrastructure. Grafana Cloud reduces this, but you're still building dashboards and configuring data sources. If you value your time over customization, BetterStack wins. If you enjoy building monitoring stacks, Grafana is more rewarding.

Uptime monitoring. BetterStack has built-in uptime monitoring with global check locations, phone call alerts, and escalation policies. Grafana doesn't do uptime monitoring out of the box. You'd need an external tool like Uptime Kuma or a synthetic monitoring service alongside Grafana.

Status pages. BetterStack includes polished public status pages. Grafana dashboards can be shared publicly, but they're not designed as user-facing status pages. For showing your users that "everything is operational," BetterStack's dedicated status pages look more professional.

Dashboard flexibility. Grafana is unmatched here. You can visualize literally any data from any source. Want to show server CPU alongside PostgreSQL query times alongside your application's custom metrics? Grafana does that with drag-and-drop panels. BetterStack's dashboards are more limited and focused on its specific features.

Cost at scale. Self-hosted Grafana costs nothing beyond server resources. Even Grafana Cloud's free tier is generous. BetterStack's pricing scales with the number of monitors and log volume. For a solo developer with a single VPS, self-hosted Grafana is the cheapest option. Period.

Log management. Both offer log management. BetterStack's Logtail is simple and works well for searching recent logs. Grafana with Loki is more powerful for querying and correlating logs with metrics, but requires more setup. The depth vs convenience tradeoff applies here too.

When to Choose BetterStack

• You want monitoring set up in 15 minutes, not an afternoon
• Uptime monitoring with phone call alerts is important
• You need a public status page for your users
• You don't want to maintain monitoring infrastructure
• Incident management with on-call scheduling is useful for your workflow

When to Choose Grafana

• You already have a server and want to self-host monitoring for free
• You want full control over your dashboards and data visualization
• You need to correlate metrics, logs, and traces in custom views
• You enjoy the process of building and tuning monitoring dashboards
• Budget is a primary concern and self-hosting is worth the setup time

The Verdict

This comes down to how you want to spend your time.

BetterStack is the right choice if you want monitoring to be a solved problem. Set it up once, forget about it until something breaks, and let it handle the alerting. You trade customization for convenience, and for most solo developers, that's a good trade. Your time is better spent building features than configuring Prometheus scrape intervals.

Grafana is the right choice if you want deep, flexible monitoring and you're willing to invest the setup time. Self-hosting the Grafana + Prometheus + Loki stack gives you enterprise-grade observability for free. The dashboards are more powerful, the data retention is under your control, and there's no vendor lock-in.

If you're just starting out, go with BetterStack. Get monitoring running today and focus on your product. If you're more established, have your own infrastructure, and want to level up your monitoring game, consider migrating to a self-hosted Grafana stack. Either way, having monitoring at all puts you ahead of most solo developers.