BetterStack vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

BetterStack Overview

BetterStack monitors your infrastructure. It checks your endpoints from around the world, alerts you when something goes down, aggregates your application logs, and gives you incident management tools. The status pages are clean and professional. The alerting supports Slack, email, SMS, and phone calls.

This is the tool that calls your phone at 2 AM because your server ran out of disk space. It's the tool that shows your users a nice status page when they wonder if the app is down for everyone or just them. And it's the tool you open to search through your logs when you're debugging why your API returned 500 errors for the last hour.

I run BetterStack on every production project. The free tier covers uptime monitoring for multiple endpoints, which is all most solo developers need to start.

Plausible Overview

Plausible tracks your website traffic. How many visitors, which pages they view, where they come from, what devices they use. All without cookies, all GDPR-compliant, all displayed on a single clean dashboard that loads instantly.

This is the tool you check in the morning to see if your latest blog post is getting traffic. It's the tool that shows you which referral sources drive real visitors. And it's the tool that confirms whether your marketing efforts are working or burning money.

I use Plausible instead of Google Analytics on all my sites. At $9/month (or free if you self-host), it gives me everything I need without the complexity, privacy concerns, or consent banners that come with Google Analytics.

Key Differences

Completely different tools. BetterStack and Plausible solve entirely different problems. BetterStack tells you if your site is working. Plausible tells you if anyone is visiting it. There is zero feature overlap between them.

What they monitor. BetterStack monitors infrastructure health. Response times, uptime percentage, server logs, error rates. Plausible monitors visitor behavior. Pageviews, bounce rates, referral sources, geographic data. You need both types of information, but for different reasons.

When they matter. BetterStack matters when something breaks. You get an alert, check the logs, fix the issue. It's reactive and critical. Plausible matters for strategic decisions. You see traffic patterns, identify popular content, and understand your audience. It's informational and ongoing.

Pricing. BetterStack has a free tier that covers basic uptime monitoring. Plausible starts at $9/month for the cloud version but can be self-hosted for free. Both are affordable for solo developers.

Privacy impact. Plausible is built entirely around privacy. No cookies, no personal data, no consent banners needed. BetterStack processes operational data (server logs, response times) which doesn't directly impact user privacy. Both are fine from a privacy perspective, but Plausible specifically helps you avoid GDPR headaches for analytics.

Setup time. Both are fast to set up. BetterStack takes about 15 minutes to configure uptime checks, alerts, and a status page. Plausible takes about 2 minutes. Add a script tag to your HTML and you're done.

When to Choose BetterStack

• You need to know immediately when your site or API goes down
• You want centralized log management for debugging
• A public status page adds value for your users
• Incident management and alerting are priorities
• You're running production infrastructure that needs monitoring

When to Choose Plausible

• You want to understand your website traffic and visitor behavior
• Privacy-friendly analytics without cookies is important
• You're tracking marketing effectiveness and content performance
• You want a Google Analytics replacement that doesn't require a law degree
• You need simple, clear analytics without the overwhelm of GA4

The Verdict

Use both. They're not competing products. They're different categories of tools that every solo developer project benefits from.

BetterStack tells you the system is healthy. Plausible tells you people are using it. You need both signals to run a solo project effectively.

If budget forces you to pick one, think about where your project is in its lifecycle. Early stage, still building, few users: BetterStack first. Uptime monitoring matters even with 10 users. You can check server access logs for basic traffic data.

Growth stage, marketing actively, need to understand traffic: Plausible first. You need to know which channels drive visitors and which content performs. Uptime monitoring matters less if you're not getting traffic yet (though it's still nice to have).

The ideal setup: BetterStack free tier for uptime monitoring plus Plausible at $9/month for analytics. Total cost of $9/month for both infrastructure monitoring and web analytics. That's a solid foundation for any solo project.