Why engineering teams choose Last9 vs 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.
100+ native integrations, OpenTelemetry-first. A Last9 engineer runs the move with your team.
Named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI for SRE and Observability, cited for its unified telemetry platform.
The Last9 agent runs on your model provider, with no per-investigation charge, in your own cloud account.
No meter per GB ingested, per GB retained, per responder, or per AI token. The infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill.
At a glance
Last9 vs Better Stack at a glance
The questions engineering teams ask when they compare the two.
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
| Capability | 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 |
Differences
Where Last9 and Better Stack differ
Three places the two platforms take a different approach, with the tradeoffs stated.
AI on your model, in your cloud
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One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE through MCP. It investigates, builds a diagnosis dashboard, and hands you the link.
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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.
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Through MCP, an agent adds a drop rule and stops ingesting the noisy source it found.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Last9 runs single-tenant in your own cloud account, on AWS or GCP in any region, and manages it for you, including the AI.
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SSO and RBAC come with the one licence. Last9 is SOC 2 Type II certified and PCI ready.
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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
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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.
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.
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 fits you
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
Migration
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.
Talk to an engineerKeep 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.
See the integrationsQueries 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.
Objections
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.
67%
Average reduction in observability costs
2.5x
More telemetry retained without sampling
100+
Native integrations, OpenTelemetry-first
24x7
Support from forward deployed engineers
Customers
What do Last9 customers say?
With Last9, we just eliminated the toil. No more worrying about failing dashboards or alerts — we can finally use our metrics. It just works.
Last9 allowed us to offload the operational overhead of scaling so we could focus on business alerting rather than infrastructure management.
Frequently asked questions
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