# Last9 vs Better Stack: A Better Stack Alternative for Telemetry at Scale > Last9 vs Better Stack compared on AI and MCP, what the AI costs and where it runs, pricing, metric cardinality, ingest-time control, deployment in your own cloud account, and what each product covers, with where each one fits. Source: https://last9.io/compare/better-stack/ Both have an AI SRE agent and a hosted MCP server. Last9 runs its agent on your model provider, with no charge per investigation, inside your own cloud account, on one licence, for telemetry at scale. Better Stack bundles logs, metrics, and traces with uptime monitoring, status pages, and on-call, on a published rate card that small teams can start on for free. - **Gartner Cool Vendor 2025:** Named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI for SRE and Observability, cited for its unified telemetry platform. - **Your model, your cloud:** The Last9 agent runs on your model provider, with no per-investigation charge, in your own cloud account. - **One licence:** No meter per GB ingested, per GB retained, per responder, or per AI token. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill. ## Last9 vs Better Stack at a glance The questions engineering teams ask when they compare the two. | | **Last9** | **Better Stack** | |---|---|---| | Does it have an MCP server for coding agents? | ✓ Yes, hosted, since March 2025, for any MCP client. An agent can act through it: add drop rules and edit dashboards | ✓ Yes, hosted, since September 2025. An agent can query telemetry and manage incidents, monitors, and status pages | | What does the AI cost? | ✓ No per-query or per-investigation charge | Billed by consumption, at per-model prices shown in the app | | Can the AI use our model provider, in our own cloud? | ✓ Yes. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider or inference endpoint, inside your own cloud account | No. You pick from Better Stack's model list, and Better Stack runs it | | How is it priced? | ✓ One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates | Separate meters for ingest, retention, metrics, responders, and AI, with a free plan | | How much metric cardinality can I keep? | ✓ No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name | No published series limit. Metrics bill per GB retained, so each new series adds to the bill | | Can I filter telemetry before I pay to store it? | ✓ Yes, for metrics, logs, and traces, with no code to write. Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate them at ingest, from the UI or Terraform | For logs and spans, in VRL code you write. Metrics have no ingest-time drop | | Can it run in our own cloud account? | ✓ Yes. Last9 runs in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you, including the AI | ✓ On Enterprise, on request: a custom cluster in your own VPC. Otherwise SaaS | | Are SSO and access controls included? | ✓ Yes. SSO and RBAC come with the one licence | Google SSO is included. Okta and Azure SSO cost extra per user, and SAML SSO is on Enterprise | | What does it cover beyond telemetry? | Synthetic HTTPS checks, Real User Monitoring, and exception tracking. Alerts route to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Zenduty | ✓ Uptime and heartbeat checks, status pages, on-call, incident management, error tracking, and session replay | ## AI on your model, in your cloud - **Last9:** One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE through MCP. It investigates, builds a diagnosis dashboard, and hands you the link. - **Last9:** The production agent, Last9, responds to pages with context from Slack, Linear, and PagerDuty. It runs on your model provider or inference endpoint and picks the model for each step. Customer data is never used for training. - **Last9:** Through MCP, an agent adds a drop rule and stops ingesting the noisy source it found. - **Last9:** Click a point on a chart, a table row, an alert, or an exception, and choose Ask Last9 AI. The investigation starts from that value, in its service context. - **Better Stack:** AI SRE investigates incidents from Slack and Microsoft Teams, starts when an incident opens, builds dashboards, and can open a pull request with a fix from the Errors page. It runs on models Better Stack hosts, billed by consumption. The hosted MCP server, since September 2025, reads and writes across incidents, monitors, status pages, dashboards, and alerts. ## One licence, every label, and control at ingest - **Last9:** One licence covers distributed tracing, profiling, custom metrics, custom dashboards, alerting, RBAC, and forward deployed engineers. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill, at your negotiated rates. - **Last9:** Labels like customer_id or tenant stay on the metric. No hard limit. 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name. - **Last9:** Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, from the UI or as code with the Terraform provider. Every rule is previewed against live data before you save it. - **Better Stack:** Logs and traces bill per GB ingested and per GB retained, metrics per GB retained, and each responder needs a licence. VRL transformations drop or redact logs and spans before they count toward usage, and you write them as code. For metrics, Better Stack advises removing labels before you send them. - **Matters most for:** Teams whose per-customer or per-tenant labels grow faster than their budget. ## Your cloud account, your access controls - **Last9:** Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you, including the AI. - **Last9:** SSO and RBAC come with the one licence. Last9 is SOC 2 Type II certified and PCI ready. - **Last9:** Support is a shared channel in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat, with forward deployed engineers who know your setup. - **Better Stack:** Better Stack runs as SaaS in a region you pick. A paid add-on stores logs and traces in your own S3-compatible bucket, and Enterprise customers can request a custom cluster in their own VPC. Generic SAML SSO is on Enterprise only. ## A reliability suite next to the telemetry - **Better Stack:** Uptime and heartbeat monitoring, Playwright transaction checks, status pages, on-call scheduling, incident management, error tracking, and session replay in the same product as the telemetry. - **Last9:** Synthetic HTTPS checks, Real User Monitoring for web and mobile, and exception tracking sit next to metrics, logs, traces, and APM. Alerts route to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Zenduty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat. - **Matters most for:** Teams that want status pages and on-call from the same vendor can keep Better Stack for those and send their telemetry to Last9. ## Which one fits your team? **Choose Last9 if:** - You want an AI agent on your own model provider, with no charge per investigation - Your metrics carry per-customer or per-tenant labels, and per-GB billing is the complaint - You want to drop, remap, and aggregate all three signals at ingest, with no code to write - You want the whole platform, including the AI, running in your own cloud account - You want SSO and RBAC on one licence, and forward deployed engineers on your account **Choose Better Stack if:** - You are a small team, and want to start free on a published rate card - You want uptime checks, status pages, on-call, and incident management in the same product as your telemetry - Your team writes ClickHouse SQL against its telemetry - You want Sentry-compatible error tracking and session replay in the same place ## Moving off Better Stack What the switch involves, and what Last9 does for you. - **Forward deployed engineers:** A Last9 engineer runs the move with your team. - **Keep your instrumentation:** Better Stack takes OpenTelemetry over OTLP and Prometheus remote write, and so does Last9. Services already on OpenTelemetry or Prometheus need only a new endpoint. - **Queries without ClickHouse SQL:** PromQL chart queries carry over. A Last9 engineer moves your dashboards and alerts with your team, and rewrites ClickHouse SQL queries in PromQL or LogQL. Anyone who does not write queries uses the builder or plain-English Ask Mode. - **Run both:** Keep Better Stack for status pages and on-call, and send your telemetry to Last9. The OpenTelemetry Collector can send the same data to both while you compare them on your own incidents. ## The objections we hear most Each one is a fair reason to hesitate. ### Better Stack already has AI SRE and an MCP server. Why switch for AI? The difference is the price, the model, and where it runs. AI SRE is billed by consumption, on models Better Stack hosts. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider in your own cloud account, with no per-investigation charge, and through MCP an agent can add drop rules and change what is ingested. ### Better Stack publishes its prices and has a free plan. Its meters stay: logs and traces bill per GB ingested and retained, metrics per GB retained, responders per licence, and AI SRE by consumption, so each new series and each investigation adds to the bill. Last9 is one licence, with no charge per label or metric name, and the infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill. ### We can keep our logs and traces in our own bucket. The bucket holds stored logs and traces, and the platform and AI SRE still run as Better Stack SaaS. Last9 runs the whole platform in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, including the AI agent on your model provider. ### Better Stack also does uptime monitoring, status pages, and on-call. Better Stack bundles status pages, on-call scheduling, and heartbeat checks with its telemetry. Last9 runs synthetic HTTPS checks, Real User Monitoring, and exception tracking, and routes alerts to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Zenduty. Teams can keep Better Stack for status pages and on-call, and send their telemetry to Last9. ### Is Last9 proven at our scale? Last9 regularly handles 500M+ events a minute and 60M+ concurrent users, and has monitored 12 of the world's 20 largest streaming events. It is SOC 2 Type II certified and PCI ready, with SSO and access controls. Teams across fintech, healthcare, gaming, media, and commerce run it in production, including Replit, Pine Labs, Tata 1mg, and Housing.com. ## FAQ ### Is Last9 a good Better Stack alternative? Better Stack fits small teams that want logs, metrics, and traces in one product with uptime monitoring, status pages, and on-call, on a published rate card with a free plan. Last9 fits teams that want an AI agent on their own model provider with no per-investigation charge, the platform in their own cloud account, high-cardinality metrics with no charge per label, and control of all three signals at ingest. ### How does Last9's MCP server compare with the Better Stack MCP server? The Better Stack MCP server is hosted, since September 2025, and lets an agent query telemetry and manage incidents, monitors, status pages, dashboards, and alerts. Last9's MCP server is hosted, since March 2025, works with any MCP client, and lets an agent add drop rules and edit dashboards, so it can change what is ingested. ### How does Last9's AI compare with Better Stack AI SRE? Better Stack AI SRE investigates incidents from Slack and Microsoft Teams, builds dashboards, and can open a pull request with a fix. It runs on models Better Stack hosts and is billed by consumption. The Last9 agent runs on your model provider or inference endpoint inside your own cloud account, picks the model for each step, and has no per-query or per-investigation charge. ### How does Last9 billing compare with Better Stack pricing? Better Stack pricing is a published rate card with a free plan: logs and traces bill per GB ingested and per GB retained at rates that differ by region, metrics per GB retained, responders per licence, and AI SRE by consumption. Last9 is one licence that covers tracing, profiling, custom metrics, dashboards, alerting, RBAC, and forward deployed engineers, with the infrastructure on your own cloud bill. ### How does Last9 compare with Better Stack on metric cardinality? Better Stack publishes no series limit and bills metrics per GB retained, at about 1,000 series per GB, so each new series adds to the bill. Last9 has no hard limit on metric cardinality: 20M series per metric per day by default, raised on request, with no sampling and no charge per label or metric name. ### Does Last9 have uptime monitoring like Better Stack? Better Stack sells uptime and heartbeat monitoring, Playwright transaction checks, status pages, and on-call next to its telemetry. Last9 runs synthetic HTTPS checks, with Real User Monitoring and exception tracking, and routes alerts to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Zenduty. Teams that want status pages and on-call from one vendor can keep Better Stack for those and send telemetry to Last9. ### Is there a Better Stack self hosted alternative that runs in our cloud account? Better Stack has no self-hosted option. It runs as SaaS, and Enterprise customers can request a custom cluster in their own VPC. Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and Last9 manages it for you, including the AI. ### Can Last9 replace Better Stack APM? Better Stack builds traces and service maps from OpenTelemetry and its eBPF collector. Last9 covers service discovery, dependency maps, database and external calls, Apdex, exceptions, and trace correlation, from OpenTelemetry, on the one licence. ### Can Last9 run alongside Better Stack? Yes. Both take OpenTelemetry over OTLP, so the OpenTelemetry Collector can send the same data to both. Keep Better Stack for status pages and on-call, and a Last9 engineer plans the split with your team. ### How do I migrate from Better Stack to Last9? Better Stack takes OpenTelemetry and Prometheus remote write, so services already sending them need only a new endpoint, and PromQL chart queries carry over. A Last9 engineer moves your dashboards and alerts with your team, and rewrites ClickHouse SQL queries in PromQL or LogQL.