Comparison
Keel vs Better Stack
One does one thing for a two-line price. The other is an observability platform. Which one you want depends entirely on which of those problems you have.
The comparison
Better Stack's figures below are from their pricing page as of October 2026. Keel's are from ours. Both will drift; the shape of the difference won't.
| What you get | Keel | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Single-purpose uptime monitor. Nothing else. | Observability suite: uptime, incidents, on-call, status pages, logs, traces, metrics, error tracking, session replay. |
| Free tier | 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, webhooks, 30-day history. | 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack & email alerts; plus logs, metrics, and error tracking allowances. |
| Paid pricing | £5/month flat — 50 monitors, 60-second checks. No seats, no add-ons, no usage tiers. | $34/month per responder ($29 billed yearly). Telemetry, extra status pages, and incident workflows billed separately. |
| Check types | HTTP and HEAD, against a status code you choose. Redirects are not followed — a 3xx counts as down unless you set it as the expected code. | HTTP, keyword, browser-click-through, ping, port, DNS, and more monitor types. |
| Alerting | Webhooks only — down, up, or both, to any HTTPS endpoint. Payloads are plain JSON, so Slack, Discord, and curl work without adapters. Failed deliveries retry once. | Phone calls, SMS, push, email, Slack — built on on-call schedules and escalation policies. |
| Incident threshold | Two consecutive failures open an incident; one blip is ignored on purpose. | Configurable per monitor; first failure can escalate immediately through on-call and escalation policies. |
| Status pages | Not offered. | 1 included on every plan; extra pages $15/month, with white-label, SSO, and subscriber add-ons. |
| History | 30 days of every check — status, status code, latency, error text. | Uptime history kept indefinitely; logs, traces, and web events retained per plan. |
| Self-hosting | Not offered — hosted only. | Not offered — hosted only. |
When Better Stack fits
Most of the time, honestly.
You want one tool, not three
If your stack already produces logs, traces, and metrics — or you expect it to — a suite that ingests all of them next to your uptime checks is worth more than any single-purpose tool. Better Stack is built for that.
You need on-call and escalation
Schedules, escalations, phone calls at 4am, an iOS app, AI-assisted root-cause analysis — that's a real product category and Better Stack does it properly. Keel has none of it: your webhook is the escalation policy.
A public status page matters
Keel doesn't have status pages. If customers expect status.yourdomain.com, Better Stack includes one on every plan, subscribers and all.
You want phone, SMS, and push alerts
Keel's alerting is webhook-only by design. If you need the phone to ring, you need a tool with a voice pipeline — or a receiver on your webhook that makes it ring.
When Keel fits
When the answer to "do we need an observability platform?" is no.
You'd be paying for a suite to watch five URLs
Keel's Pro plan is 50 monitors at 60-second checks for £5/month flat — no seats, no add-ons, no usage tiers. There is no second number to model. Better Stack's responder seat costs $34/month on its own.
You already have a place alerts should go
Slack, Discord, a script, nc to a speaker — if the destination speaks HTTPS and JSON, Keel's webhook lands there with a readable summary plus the full monitor, check, and incident objects. No adapters, no marketplace of integrations to configure.
You don't want to babysit the monitor
No server to patch, no upgrades to schedule, no database to back up — the thing watching your site shouldn't be another service you run. Keel is hosted, and it stays up whether you look at it or not.
Webhooks are your alert pipeline
Down, up, or both — per channel. One blip never wakes you: incidents open after two consecutive failures, and a single passing check closes one. The alert always matches the history you can see.
Pick the small one on purpose.
If you need the suite, use the suite. If you need five URLs watched and a webhook fired, that's £5/month and about a minute of setup.