Compare · RealUptime Status
RealUptime Status vs Better Stack
Better Stack combines uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call, status pages, logs, traces, metrics, error tracking, and more. Its documentation says monitors are checked from at least four locations by default. RealUptime Status is narrower on purpose and puts each region's reading directly on the public page, from every region your plan includes: four regions on Free, eight on Growth, all ten on Scale.
Multiple named regions shown together per check
Have
four named region readings by default, configurable down per monitor
Partial
at least four locations by default, not shown as named per-check regions
Incident confirmation
Have
state retained per region
Have
incident after failure from at least three locations
Product scope: monitoring plus status pages
Have
Have
plus on-call, incidents, and telemetry
Free tier
Have
1 page, 10 monitors
Have
1 page, 10 monitors and heartbeats
Free check interval
Have
1-minute minimum
Partial
3-minute checks
Free alert channels
Have
Slack and account email
Have
Slack and email
Public subscriber notifications
Have
every tier
Have
1,000 subscribers included
On-call and incident response
Have
escalation policies with acknowledgement and on-call rotations, on Growth and Scale; each escalation step pages a person (email plus their chosen channels, including SMS or phone call) or a channel: Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Zapier, SMS, phone call, or webhook
Have
built in, with paid responder licenses, including unlimited phone call alerts
Monitor types beyond HTTP(S)
Partial
TCP and TLS port checks, DNS record checks, ping, mail-server (SMTP) checks, multi-step HTTP journeys, heartbeat/cron push monitoring, and browser checks on Scale, plus HTTP(S) endpoints
Have
ping, DNS, TCP/UDP, email protocols, and more
Fastest check interval
Have
30 seconds on Scale
Have
up to 30 seconds
Status-page customization
Partial
custom domain with automatic TLS on Growth and Scale
Have
custom domain plus paid CSS, JavaScript, and white-label options
API and MCP access
Have
REST API on Growth and Scale; read-only MCP on every plan
Have
available across its broader platform
Is there a free tier?
RealUptime is free to start and never asks for a card. One signup turns on the free rung of every product: 10 monitors with a public status page, 5 server-agent slots, and 10,000 error events a month kept for 14 days. RealUptime Outages is free to read with no account at all.
Better Stack: 1 status page with 10 monitors and heartbeats free, on 3-minute checks, with Slack and email alerts.
Is it open source or self-hosted?
RealUptime's core is a hosted service and its source is not published, so there is no self-hosted edition of the platform itself. The parts that run on your side are open source at github.com/RealUptimeHQ: the CLI and the RealUptime Errors SDKs for JavaScript, Python, Go, PHP and Ruby are MIT-licensed, and the Grafana data source is Apache 2.0.
Better Stack: a hosted product that publishes no source and no self-hosted edition.
If self-hosting is a hard requirement, these are the open-source options in this category: Uptime Kuma (MIT), OpenStatus (AGPL-3.0), Healthchecks.io (BSD 3-Clause) and OneUptime (Apache 2.0).
Looking for a Better Stack alternative?
For the reasoning behind checking from more than one region at all, see why a status page can show all green during a real outage. Comparing more than just this one alternative? The status page tool checklist covers what to test before committing to any of them.