Staxly

Better Stack vs Neon

Observability + uptime + incident management in one — modern alternative to Datadog
vs. Serverless Postgres with branching and bottomless storage

Better Stack website ↗Neon 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 ↗

Neon

Free
100 projects, 0.5 GB storage + 100 CU-hours each. Great for prototypes and preview envs.
Free
Launch
Usage-based, no minimum. Small production workloads. $0.35/GB-month storage, $0.106/CU-hour.
$0 base (usage-based)
Scale
Usage-based, higher compute tier + faster instances ($0.222/CU-hour). Up to 30-day PITR, 1,000 projects.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business
Usage-based with 99.95% SLA, HIPAA available. Private networking $0.01/GB.
$0 base (usage-based)
Neon website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Better Stack vs free on Neon.

MetricBetter StackNeon
branches per project—10 branches
cu hours per project—100 CU-hours/month
egress gb month—5 GB/month
pitr retention hours—6 hours
projects—100 projects
storage gb per project—0.5 GB
team members—3 users

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.

Neon · 14 features

  • Autoscaling — Compute scales CPU + memory between min and max CU in seconds based on load.
  • Branching — Git-like DB branches: copy-on-write snapshots of data + schema. Instant, cheap. …
  • Data API (REST) — PostgREST-compatible REST endpoint auto-generated from your schema. Uses Postgre…
  • IP Allowlist — Restrict DB access to specific CIDRs. Launch+.
  • Launchpad — One-click create-a-database link that can be embedded in OSS repos (DATABASE_URL…
  • Logical Replication — Publish changes to Snowflake, BigQuery, Kafka, or other Postgres. Subscribe from…
  • Monitoring — Built-in dashboards for CPU/RAM/connections/slow queries. Prometheus export on B…
  • Neon Auth — Stack Auth integrated: users table auto-synced into your Postgres (public.users_…
  • Point-in-Time Restore — Restore DB to any moment in the retention window (6h free → 30d Scale) via branc…
  • Private Networking — AWS PrivateLink / VPC peering. Business plan.
  • Read Replicas — Create a read-only compute endpoint on the same branch. Zero replication lag (re…
  • Scale to Zero — Compute suspends when idle — no charge for compute while paused. Cold-start ~300…
  • Schema Diff — Compare schema between branches — build PR checks and preview migrations safely.
  • SQL over HTTP — Serverless driver lets you query Postgres over HTTPS — works in edge runtimes (V…

Developer interfaces

KindBetter StackNeon
CLI—Neon CLI
SDKlogtail-ruby, pino-logtail / winston transport, python-logtail@neondatabase/serverless
RESTBetter Stack REST API, Telemetry APIManagement / Control Plane API, Neon Data API (REST), SQL over HTTP
MCP—Neon MCP Server
OTHEROTLP (OpenTelemetry), WebhooksPostgres Wire Protocol
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Better Stack and Neon are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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