# Better Stack alternatives

> What else to look at if Better Stack is too much, too expensive or not the right shape, with prices from each vendor's own page.

URL: https://pagerless.dev/alternatives/better-stack
Updated: 2026-10-22

> Pagerless makes this page, and lists itself first. Every other vendor's facts come from their own pages, linked below.

## At a glance

| Tool | Free plan | Lowest paid | Phone and SMS |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [Pagerless](https://pagerless.dev/vs/better-stack) | You + 1 backup, 3 apps, no card | Team planned: per alert sent, no per-seat price (not open yet) | Phone calls through your own Twilio at Twilio's price; no SMS |
| [PagerDuty](https://pagerless.dev/vs/pagerduty) | Up to 5 users, 1 on-call schedule, 1 escalation policy, 3 months of history | Professional: $21 per user per month billed annually, $25 monthly | Free: 100 SMS or phone notifications a month. Professional: included, no monthly cap stated |
| [incident.io](https://pagerless.dev/vs/incident-io) | Basic: free, with 1 schedule, single-team on-call, 2 integrations and 1 status page | Team: $15 per user per month billed annually, plus $10 per user for on-call | Push, phone, SMS, email, Slack and WhatsApp paging; free-plan limits not stated |
| [Rootly](https://pagerless.dev/vs/rootly) | No free plan; a trial, and a startup program with discounts | On-Call: $20 per user per month (billing basis not stated) | Push, phone, SMS, email, Slack and Teams; per-plan limits not stated |
| [FireHydrant](https://pagerless.dev/vs/firehydrant) | Up to 10 responders and 2 runbooks; Signals on-call is listed on Pro and above | Pro: $25 per responder per month billed annually | SMS and voice available for purchase on Pro; prices not listed |
| [Grafana OnCall](https://pagerless.dev/vs/grafana-oncall) | Grafana Cloud Free: IRM limited to 3 active users a month | Pro: $19 a month platform fee including 3 active IRM users, then from $20 per active user | IRM: no extra cost for outgoing calls or SMS; whether the free tier includes them is not stated |
| [Squadcast](https://pagerless.dev/vs/squadcast) | No free plan on the current SolarWinds page; a 14-day trial | Pro: from $15 per user per month billed annually | Pro: 100 SMS and voice per user in the US, India and Brazil, 25 elsewhere |

## 1. Pagerless

Best for one person or a small team running an app, often built with AI. It wakes you only for what matters (four floors always do), explains what broke, and undoes a bad deploy with one tap on 20+ hosts. No schedules or rotations yet.

## 2. PagerDuty

An incident management and on-call platform with schedules, escalation policies and phone, SMS and push paging, plus a larger reliability platform sold in annual packages. Best for engineering and operations teams, from small teams to large enterprises.

## 3. incident.io

A Slack- and Teams-native incident response platform with an on-call product (schedules, escalations, mobile app, phone and SMS paging) and status pages. Best for software teams from startups to enterprises.

## 4. Rootly

A Slack-native incident response and on-call platform, sold as separate per-user products. Best for engineering and SRE teams at startups to enterprises.

## 5. FireHydrant

An incident management and reliability platform with Signals for on-call; Freshworks closed its acquisition of FireHydrant in January 2026. Best for engineering and SRE teams, with an enterprise focus. Acquired by Freshworks (agreement December 15, 2025; closed January 5, 2026).

## 6. Grafana OnCall

Grafana's on-call tool. The open-source edition was archived on March 24, 2026, and its cloud phone, SMS and push stopped; Grafana Cloud IRM is the hosted successor. Best for teams already on Grafana or Grafana Cloud. OnCall OSS: maintenance mode from March 11, 2025, archived March 24, 2026.

## 7. Squadcast

An on-call and incident response platform acquired by SolarWinds in March 2025; its pricing page now redirects to SolarWinds Incident Response. Best for SRE, DevOps and IT operations teams. Acquired by SolarWinds (announced March 3, 2025).

## Moving from Better Stack

1. **Step 1** Keep Better Stack uptime checks if you like them, and point a [Better Stack webhook](https://pagerless.dev/integrations/better-stack) at Pagerless.
2. **Step 2** Add Pagerless to the app with `npx pagerless connect` for in-app errors and floors.
3. **Step 3** Move phone paging to Pagerless.

## Questions

### What is the best free Better Stack alternative?

For a solo developer or a pair, Pagerless is free for you and one backup with up to 3 apps, and phone calls cost only Twilio's price on your own account. For bigger teams that need free schedules, compare the free plans in the table above.

### Which Better Stack alternative has phone calls?

Most on-call tools do. Pagerless calls through your own Twilio account; the table shows each vendor's phone and SMS terms from their pricing page.

Sources:
1. [Better Stack pricing](https://betterstack.com/pricing)
2. [PagerDuty pricing (incident management)](https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/incident-management/)
3. [incident.io pricing](https://incident.io/pricing)
4. [Rootly pricing](https://rootly.com/pricing)
5. [FireHydrant pricing](https://firehydrant.com/pricing/)
6. [Grafana: OnCall OSS maintenance mode](https://grafana.com/blog/2025/03/11/grafana-oncall-maintenance-mode)
7. [SolarWinds Incident Response pricing](https://www.solarwinds.com/it-incident-response-software/pricing)