Better Stack vs ClickStack

Better Stack combines incident management, on-call, uptime monitoring, status pages, telemetry, error tracking, and real user monitoring. Its Slack-native AI SRE agent investigates incidents using logs, metrics, traces, errors, and web events. Logs and traces can be transformed with VRL and queried through drag-and-drop controls, PromQL, or SQL. Uptime checks cover HTTP(S) keywords, TCP/UDP ports, SSL, and DNS, and can run as often as every 30 seconds. Integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, PagerDuty, Jira, Zapier, and Google Calendar; iOS and Android apps can receive notifications. The free plan includes 10 monitors and heartbeats, one status page, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB of logs and traces retained for three days, and 30 GB of metrics. Responder costs $29 a month per license when billed annually. Better Stack says it is SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR compliant, but not HIPAA compliant. It also describes encryption at rest and in transit, automated backups, and redundant storage where appropriate.

ClickStack is an open-source observability stack for OpenTelemetry that brings logs, metrics, traces, session replays, and errors into one system. Its HyperDX interface provides Lucene-style search, SQL access, dashboards, alerts, event deltas, and event patterns. A bundled OpenTelemetry Collector handles native collection, while non-OTel wide event data can be used when it has a timestamp field. ClickStack stores data in ClickHouse and is designed for high-cardinality telemetry, with the product site describing sub-second queries even on petabytes of data. It supports self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud deployment. Managed ClickStack runs on ClickHouse Cloud with operations, scaling, upgrades, backups, reliability, authentication, and user management included. The managed offer advertises indefinite retention and storage below one cent per GB. An MCP server connects observability workflows with coding tools, collaboration services, runbooks, and custom agents.