The BetterStack alternative built around SSL monitoring

BetterStack is a broad platform. Alongside uptime monitoring it bundles incident management, on-call scheduling with escalations, hosted status pages, and log management — and it does those things well. That breadth is also its cost: the paid uptime plan starts at $29/mo, and the platform is more than most teams need if their goal is simply to know when a site is down and when a certificate is about to expire.

On SSL, BetterStack's certificate monitoring is an expiry check configured inside each uptime or keyword monitor. It tells you a certificate is approaching its expiry date, but it does not track Certificate Transparency logs. That leaves the two gaps CertFleet is built to close: a certificate renewed at the CA but never deployed to the server (the old cert keeps serving until it lapses), and an unexpected new certificate issued for your domain by a third party. CertFleet performs a real TLS handshake on every check, reads the X.509 certificate your server actually presents, and queries Certificate Transparency logs to fire an immediate alert the moment a new certificate is issued.

On the uptime side, CertFleet covers the core feature set: configurable HTTP method, full URL path, expected status codes, keyword match in the response body, pause/resume, check history, and uptime percentage. Alert channels include email, Slack, HMAC-signed webhooks and SMS, with signed webhooks included at the $15/mo entry tier. It also ships a no-login SSL checker for one-off diagnostics — no account required.

Choose BetterStack if you want a single vendor for incident management, on-call rotations, public status pages and centralized logs. Choose CertFleet if you want focused SSL certificate monitoring — live probing, CT-log alerts, staged 30/14/7/1-day thresholds, signed webhooks — combined with straightforward uptime monitoring at a lower price, without the surface area of a full observability suite.