Staxly

Cloudways vs Better Stack

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

Try Cloudways (free trial) ↗Better Stack website ↗

Pricing tiers

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
Try Cloudways (free trial) ↗

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 ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

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

MetricCloudwaysBetter Stack
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

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.

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.

Developer interfaces

KindCloudwaysBetter Stack
SDK—logtail-ruby, pino-logtail / winston transport, python-logtail
RESTCloudways APIBetter Stack REST API, Telemetry API
OTHERCloudways Platform (web UI), Server SSH Access, SFTPOTLP (OpenTelemetry), Webhooks
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Cloudways and Better Stack may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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