Better Stack alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Better Stack, shown against it.

Better Stack Grafana Loki Sumo Logic Graylog
Vendor Better Stack, Inc. Grafana Labs Sumo Logic, Inc. Graylog, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based Free tier + paid plans Quote only Free tier + paid plans
Free tier Yes Yes No Yes
Deployment Cloud Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No Yes (AGPL-3.0) No Yes (SSPL (Graylog Open); proprietary (Enterprise/Security))
Best for Smaller engineering teams wanting straightforward log search plus uptime/on-call in one tool with published pricing. Teams already on Grafana/Prometheus who want cheap log storage without full-text indexing overhead. DevOps and SecOps teams wanting unlimited-ingest SaaS log analytics with a single credits pool across use cases. Teams wanting a free, self-hosted log management core with a clear upgrade path to SIEM features.
Pricing

Free tier includes 3GB/month logs and 10 uptime monitors; paid usage bills per-GB ingested/retained for logs and per-responder for incident management.

Free $0
Logs ingestion $0.10-$0.35/GB
Logs retention $0.05-$0.18/GB/month
Incident management responder $9/responder/month

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Free to self-host; Grafana Cloud's Pro tier charges a small platform fee plus per-GB rates for processing, writing and retaining logs.

Free (Grafana Cloud) $0
Pro (Grafana Cloud) $19/month platform fee + usage
Enterprise from $25,000/year

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Credits-based consumption model: unlimited ingest, but analytics activity draws down prepaid credits at a rate that varies by data tier; no flat public per-GB rate.

Essentials quote
Enterprise Suite quote

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Graylog Open is free with no volume cap; Enterprise and Security editions are licensed annually by daily processed-data volume (GB/day) or prepaid consumption units (GCU).

Graylog Open Free
Graylog Enterprise from $15,000/year
Graylog Security from $18,000/year

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • ClickHouse-backed log search and dashboards
  • SQL-based querying over logs and traces
  • Uptime and synthetic monitoring
  • On-call scheduling and incident management
  • Status pages with custom domains
  • Transparent, publicly listed per-GB pricing
  • Label-based indexing instead of full-text indexing
  • LogQL query language aligned with PromQL
  • Native integration with Grafana dashboards and alerting
  • Multi-tenant, horizontally scalable architecture
  • Object-storage-backed retention (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
  • Promtail/Grafana Alloy agents for log shipping
  • LogReduce pattern recognition across high-volume log streams
  • Cloud SIEM built on the same log platform
  • Unified logs, metrics and traces
  • Prebuilt apps for common cloud services
  • Real-time dashboards and alerting
  • Credits-based cost model decoupling ingest from query cost
  • Centralized log collection, parsing and search
  • Custom dashboards and alert definitions
  • Data tiering between hot/warm storage
  • Archiving and compliance reporting (Enterprise)
  • Anomaly detection and correlation rules (Security)
  • Self-hosted or Graylog-managed cloud deployment

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