Staxly

Better Stack vs Cloudways

Observability + uptime + incident management in one — modern alternative to Datadog
vs. Managed cloud hosting across DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud

Better Stack website ↗Cloudways website ↗

Pricing tiers

Better Stack

Pay-as-you-go
Ingest $0.15/GB, retention $0.08/GB/month. Metrics $0.75/GB/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free
10 monitors + heartbeats, 1 status page. 3GB logs @ 3-day retention. 30GB metrics. 100K exceptions/mo. 5k session replays.
Free
Telemetry — Nano
$30/mo ($25 annual). 40 GB logs/traces/metrics. 30-day retention.
$30/mo
Responder License
$34/mo ($29 annual) per responder. Unlimited phone + SMS alerts. Required for on-call.
$34/mo
Telemetry — Micro
$120/mo. 160 GB.
$120/mo
Telemetry — Mega
$250/mo. 340 GB.
$250/mo
Telemetry — Tera
$500/mo. 700 GB.
$500/mo
Better Stack website ↗

Cloudways

Autonomous — Free Trial
3-day free trial. 1 server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
Free
Flexible — DO Micro
DigitalOcean-backed. 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth. Starting tier.
$11/mo
Flexible — DO Medium
4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB, 5 TB bandwidth.
$88/mo
Autonomous — Growth
WordPress-optimized autoscaling. 1 baseline server, 20 GB disk, 150 GB bandwidth.
$100/mo
Autonomous — Scale
2 baseline servers, 50 GB disk, 250 GB bandwidth.
$200/mo
Flexible — DO 8XL
24 vCPU, 128 GB RAM, 2.56 TB storage, 11 TB bandwidth.
$342/mo
Autonomous — Plus
3 baseline servers, 100 GB disk, 1 TB bandwidth.
$400/mo
Enterprise
Custom autoscale, volume pricing.
Custom
Cloudways website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Better Stack vs auto-free-trial on Cloudways.

MetricBetter StackCloudways
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Better Stack · 13 features

  • Dashboards — SQL + chart-based dashboards.
  • Distributed Tracing — OpenTelemetry traces with span analysis.
  • Error Tracking — Sentry-style error capture per $0.000075/exception.
  • Heartbeats (Cron) — Dead-man-switch style alerts for cron/scheduled jobs.
  • Logs (formerly Logtail) — Centralized structured logging with live tail + SQL.
  • Metrics — Prometheus-compatible metrics ingest + visualization.
  • On-Call & Incidents — Schedules, escalations, incident response with postmortems.
  • Phone + SMS Alerts — Unlimited phone + SMS on Responder license.
  • Reporting & Analytics — +$5/member/month add-on.
  • Session Replay — Integrated with error events.
  • SQL Queries over Logs — ClickHouse-backed SQL on all ingested telemetry.
  • Status Pages — Hosted status pages with custom domain + brandable.
  • Uptime Monitoring — HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP, UDP monitors. Global checkpoints.

Cloudways · 17 features

  • Autonomous (WordPress) — Fully managed WordPress with autoscaling.
  • Backups — Automated daily + on-demand. Retention configurable.
  • Bot Protection — Cloudflare Enterprise bot filtering add-on.
  • Bot Scaler — Autonomous: auto-scale based on traffic patterns.
  • Breeze (WP cache plugin) — In-house WordPress caching plugin.
  • CloudwaysCDN — Built-in CDN add-on (StackPath-backed).
  • Flexible Plans — BYO-sized servers on any of 5 providers. Full control over stack.
  • Free Let's Encrypt SSL — 1-click cert install + auto-renewal.
  • Free Migration — 1 free app migration per plan. Cloudways team moves your site.
  • Horizontal Scaling — Auto-scale app servers (Autonomous plans).
  • Malware Protection — Add-on ($4/app/month). Scan + clean.
  • Object Cache Pro — Included on certain plans. Redis-backed object cache for WP.
  • SafeUpdates — Automated WordPress plugin/theme updates with rollback.
  • Staging Environments — 1-click staging clones with push-to-live.
  • Team Collaboration — Invite team members with granular role permissions.
  • Thunderstack (Optimized) — Apache + Nginx + Varnish + Redis + Memcached preconfigured for speed.
  • Vertical Scaling — Resize server specs without migration.

Developer interfaces

KindBetter StackCloudways
SDKlogtail-ruby, pino-logtail / winston transport, python-logtail—
RESTBetter Stack REST API, Telemetry APICloudways API
OTHEROTLP (OpenTelemetry), WebhooksCloudways Platform (web UI), Server SSH Access, SFTP
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Better Stack and Cloudways are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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