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Better Stack and Maple both take OpenTelemetry in, track errors, replay browser sessions and charge nothing for people who only read telemetry. Better Stack grew out of uptime monitoring into an incident platform: checks, on-call, status pages and a Slack incident bot sit beside the logs and traces. Maple is the telemetry half only, with the source on GitHub and a version you can run yourself. Below: where the two diverge, where Better Stack is ahead, and what the same month costs on each.
Differences
Every cell is a sentence. The gutter says who has the edge on that row; rows where both tools do the same thing are collapsed into one line at the end.
| Topic | Maple | Better Stack | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where they differ | |||
| Source code | On GitHub under FSL-1.1, converting to Apache 2.0 two years after each release. | Closed. The platform's source is not published. | Maple |
| Self-hosting | Yes. The whole platform on your own infrastructure, your own ClickHouse, retention you set. | No. Enterprise plans offer a custom VPC deployment, and logs can live in your own S3 bucket for $250 a month. 1 | Maple |
| Local development | One binary with an embedded ClickHouse. `maple start` on a laptop, no containers, no account. | Cloud only. Local work still sends data to a source in a real team, with a token in your environment. | Maple |
| Pricing model | $39 a month with 100 GB per signal included, then $0.30 per GB. The same rate in the US and the EU, with 30 days of retention in the price. | Ingest plus storage, priced by region. Logs and traces cost $0.10 per GB plus $0.05 per GB a month stored in Europe, $0.15 plus $0.08 in the US, $0.35 plus $0.18 in Singapore. Metrics are billed only on stored size, from $0.50 per GB a month. Bundles from $30 a month prepay 40 GB of each signal. 1 | Even |
| Per-seat fees | No per-seat fees for anyone. | Members who only read telemetry are free. Anyone on call or working with uptime monitors needs a Responder license at $34 a month, $29 on a yearly plan. 1 | Even |
| Error workflow | Exceptions from OpenTelemetry become issues with an owner, a state, a severity and comments, each linked to its trace. A resolved issue that fires again reopens. | Compatible with the Sentry SDKs, with 100,000 exceptions a month free and 90 days of retention. Resolve, snooze, release tracking, and a prompt with the error's context for Claude Code or Cursor. 3 | Even |
| AI and agents | A hosted MCP server over the product's own queries, scoped to the org. Investigations run the diagnosis and write up what broke. | A remote MCP server that runs ClickHouse SQL over logs, spans, metrics, errors and replays, and an AI SRE agent in Slack billed at $5 per million tokens. 4 | Even |
| Where Better Stack is ahead | |||
| Price at high volume | $0.30 per GB at every volume past the allowance. Lower rates exist on Enterprise but are not published. | Lower than Maple's for logs and traces, storage included: $0.15 per GB held 30 days in Europe, $0.23 in the US. A terabyte of logs held 30 days is about $150 a month in Europe and $230 in the US, against about $309 on Maple. 1 | Better Stack |
| Retention | 30 days on the cloud plan at the flat rate. Longer on Enterprise, and your call when you self-host. | Billed as stored GB a month, so keeping data longer costs cents per GB rather than a plan change. Errors and replays keep 90 days, and archival to S3 is built in. 1 | Better Stack |
| Synthetic monitoring | Not available. Alerts evaluate real traffic only. | HTTP, TCP, DNS, SSL and ping checks every 30 seconds from multiple locations, Playwright transaction checks at $1 per 100 minutes, and cron heartbeats. Ten monitors are free. 1 | Better Stack |
| On-call | Alerts route to Slack, PagerDuty, Discord, Telegram, email and webhooks. No built-in schedules. | On-call schedules, escalations, unlimited phone and SMS alerts, and incident channels in Slack or Teams, included with each Responder license. 1 | Better Stack |
| Status pages | None. Maple has no public status page. | Hosted status pages on your own domain, fed by the monitors. One is included, more are $15 a month each. 1 | Better Stack |
| PromQL compatibility | No PromQL. Visual builder and SQL, one grammar across signals. | A drag-and-drop builder, SQL and PromQL. Prometheus queries carry over. 1 | Better Stack |
| Compliance attestations | SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification in progress. Maple Cloud runs in the US or the EU (Frankfurt) at the same price, and self-hosting keeps the data in your own audited environment. | SOC 2 Type II with the report under NDA, GDPR, ISO 27001 data centers, and a choice of Europe, the US or Singapore. No HIPAA. 5 | Better Stack |
Price
A reference workload priced on both at list price. Change the sliders underneath for your own numbers.
Reference workload Log volume 100 GB/mo · Trace volume 100 GB/mo · Metric volume 100 GB/mo
$39 per month
| Startup plan 100 GB per signal included | $39 |
|---|---|
| Team seats No per-seat fees | Free |
| Total | $39 |
$64 per month
| Logs 100 GB × ($0.10 + $0.05 retained) | $15 |
|---|---|
| Traces 100 GB × ($0.10 + $0.05 retained) | $15 |
| Metrics 100 GB retained × $0.50 (30 GB free) | $35 |
| Team members Telemetry-only members are free | Free |
| Total | $64 |
$25 less per month on Maple · $305 a year
Adjust for your usage
List prices checked September 2026. Sources at the foot of the page. Maple pricing based on the Startup plan ($39/mo with 100 GB included per signal (logs, traces, metrics), then $0.30/GB, billed per signal), metered on uncompressed (decoded OTLP) bytes. Better Stack is modeled on pay-as-you-go in its Europe region, its cheapest: logs and traces at $0.10/GB ingested plus $0.05/GB a month retained for 30 days, metrics at $0.50/GB a month retained, less the free tier. US rates are 50% higher and not modeled, which favors Better Stack. Bundles, query boost, Responder licenses for on-call and uptime, and the SSO and audit log add-ons are not modeled. Better Stack meters metrics by uncompressed stored size, mapped one to one onto Maple's decoded OTLP bytes.
Migration
Telemetry moves with one exporter change. Dashboards and alert rules don't cross vendors, so plan those as the real work.
Both platforms ingest standard OTLP, so SDKs, auto-instrumentation and semantic conventions carry over unchanged. Add Maple next to the Better Stack exporter and ship to both until the alerts you care about fire from Maple.
Maple does not replace monitors, schedules or status pages. Point a Maple alert at a Better Stack incoming webhook and it opens an incident there, so the on-call rotation stays as it is.
Dashboards and alert rules do not travel over OTLP. Both platforms expose an MCP server: Better Stack's reads what you have, Maple's creates it. Connect an agent to both and ask it to port everything, translating the SQL as it goes.
exporters: otlphttp/betterstack: endpoint: https://${env:BETTERSTACK_INGESTING_HOST} headers: Authorization: Bearer ${env:BETTERSTACK_SOURCE_TOKEN} otlphttp/maple: endpoint: https://ingest.maple.dev headers: x-maple-ingest-key: ${env:MAPLE_INGEST_KEY} service: pipelines: traces: exporters: [otlphttp/betterstack, otlphttp/maple] logs: exporters: [otlphttp/betterstack, otlphttp/maple] metrics: exporters: [otlphttp/betterstack, otlphttp/maple]Sources
Vendor facts on this page link to the vendor's own pages and carry the month they were last checked. If one is stale, tell us.
Compare
Open-source, no per-host billing
→ 02One platform, nothing to assemble
→ 03OTel-native, no per-user fees
→ 04Open source and self-hostable
→ 05Issues, session replay, one local binary
→ 06Issues, session replay, self-hosting
→ 07Session replay, self-hosting, price per GB
→
Point one exporter at Maple and run both for a week. The free trial needs a card, with no charge until it ends.