BetterStack vs Highlight.io for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

BetterStack Overview

BetterStack monitors your uptime, aggregates your logs, and gives you incident management tools. It's infrastructure-focused monitoring that answers "is my stuff running?" and "what happened in my logs?"

The uptime monitoring checks your endpoints from multiple worldwide locations. If your site goes down, you get notified through Slack, email, SMS, or a phone call. The status pages are polished and ready to share with users. And the log management (Logtail) gives you a central place to search your application logs.

What I appreciate about BetterStack is how fast it goes from signup to value. Fifteen minutes and you have uptime monitoring, a status page, and log ingestion configured. No agents to install on your server for the uptime checks, just give it your URL and it starts pinging.

Highlight.io Overview

Highlight.io is an open-source observability tool focused on the user experience. It combines session replay, error tracking, and log management. When something breaks, you don't just see an error message. You watch a replay of what the user did, see the error in context, and check the corresponding logs all in one timeline.

The session replay is the standout feature. It records DOM changes, mouse movements, clicks, console output, and network requests. When a user says "your app is broken," you pull up their session and watch exactly what they experienced. No more "what browser are you using?" conversations.

Highlight.io is fully open-source. You can read the code on GitHub, self-host the entire platform, or use the hosted version. The free tier gives you 500 sessions per month and 1,000 errors, which is workable for small projects.

Key Differences

Monitoring perspective. BetterStack looks at your system from the outside in. Is the endpoint responding? Are the logs showing errors? Highlight.io looks from the user's perspective outward. What did the user experience? What errors hit their browser? These are complementary viewpoints, not competing ones.

Session replay. Highlight.io's core strength. BetterStack doesn't offer session replay at all. If debugging frontend issues and understanding user behavior are priorities, Highlight.io is the only choice between these two.

Uptime monitoring. BetterStack's core strength. Highlight.io doesn't do uptime monitoring. If knowing that your site is accessible from around the world matters (and it should), BetterStack handles this natively.

Status pages. BetterStack gives you clean, professional status pages that you can point your users to. Highlight.io doesn't have status pages. For public-facing transparency about your service health, BetterStack is the way to go.

Incident management. BetterStack includes on-call schedules, escalation policies, and incident timelines. Highlight.io focuses on debugging, not incident response workflows. If you're managing any kind of on-call rotation (even just yourself), BetterStack has the tooling.

Open source. Highlight.io is fully open-source and can be self-hosted. BetterStack is a closed-source SaaS product. For developers who value code transparency and want to avoid vendor lock-in, Highlight.io's open-source nature is a real advantage.

Error tracking depth. Highlight.io gives you rich error context tied to session replays. You see the error, the stack trace, and a video of what the user was doing when it happened. BetterStack's error visibility comes through log aggregation, which is useful but doesn't provide the same level of user-context debugging.

When to Choose BetterStack

• Uptime monitoring with phone/SMS alerts is your top priority
• You want a public status page for users to check service health
• Incident management with on-call scheduling matters to you
• You need infrastructure-level visibility through log aggregation
• You want a fully managed solution with no self-hosting required

When to Choose Highlight.io

• Frontend debugging with session replay is your biggest need
• You want to see exactly what users experience before and during errors
• Being open-source and self-hostable is important to you
• Your app is frontend-heavy and most bugs are UI/UX related
• You want error tracking with rich user context, not just log entries

The Verdict

These tools are genuinely complementary, not competitors. BetterStack tells you your site is down. Highlight.io tells you your users are having a bad time. Both are important, and using both makes your monitoring story more complete.

If I had to pick one first, I'd pick BetterStack. Knowing your site is down is more urgent than knowing a user hit a UI bug. Downtime affects everyone. A frontend bug affects the users who trigger that specific code path. The phone call alert at 2 AM when your server crashes is more valuable than a session replay of someone confused by a form layout.

But once your app is stable and you're focused on improving the user experience, add Highlight.io. The session replays will show you problems you'd never discover from logs alone. A user clicking a button six times because nothing seems to happen. A form that works in Chrome but breaks in Safari. An error that only appears when someone navigates from a specific page.

Both have free tiers that work for solo developers. My recommendation: set up BetterStack first for the uptime and status page, then add Highlight.io when you're ready to debug the user experience layer.