Papertrail vs Better Stack Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Papertrail | Better Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $5/mo | Custom |
| Number of plans | 1 | 1 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | hybrid |
Log Observability
- Intuitive Web-based log viewer
- Team-wide groups & searches
- Unlimited systems & users
- Encrypted logging
- Long-term archive
- REST API
- Search alerts
Free for personal projects
- 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page
- Slack & e-mail alerts
- 100,000 exceptions per month
- 5,000 session replays
- 3 GB logs retained for 3 days
- 3 GB traces retained for 3 days
- 30 GB metrics
- 3 GB web events retained for 3 days
Papertrail vs Better Stack FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Better Stack has a free plan. Papertrail doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Papertrail uses usage-based pricing, while Better Stack goes with hybrid. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Papertrail: At $5/GB, Papertrail sits on the affordable end of log management — well below Datadog's log pricing and competitive with entry-level Loggly. They're clearly targeting smaller engineering teams and startups who need simple, no-frills log aggregation without the complexity tax of full observability platforms. Better Stack: At $29/responder, they're undercutting PagerDuty and Opsgenie on incident management while bundling observability that Datadog charges a premium for separately. They're going after mid-market engineering teams who are tired of stitching together three tools and paying enterprise prices for the privilege.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Papertrail and Better Stack and let you know when something moves.