Status page software has one job during an incident: give the right audience accurate information when your normal product and support channels are under pressure. The best choice depends on page type, subscriber scale, editorial control, monitoring integration, and whether your team wants to host the page itself.
This guide uses official sources checked on August 10, 2026.
Start with the audience
Choose the page type before comparing designs:
- Public: anyone can see service status and incident history.
- Private: authenticated employees, partners, or customers see internal information.
- Audience-specific: different customer groups see only components and incidents that affect them.
- Self-hosted: your team owns the page, database, email delivery, upgrades, and availability.
A public page with 100 subscribers and an audience-specific page with thousands of mapped customers are different products and price bands.
What to evaluate
Component and incident model
Check component groups, partial outages, dependencies, maintenance, templates, backdated incidents, postmortems, and history. During a trial, publish investigating, identified, monitoring, and resolved updates from a phone or chat tool.
Monitoring integration
A status page is communication, not proof of monitoring. Decide whether components update automatically from monitors, require manual editorial control, or use both. Automatic updates reduce delay but can publish a false positive; require confirmation before a public incident opens.
Subscribers and delivery
Price email, SMS, webhook, Slack, and Teams subscribers separately. Verify double opt-in, unsubscribe, suppression, bounce handling, regional privacy requirements, and export. “Unlimited notifications” does not necessarily mean unlimited subscribers or every channel.
Domain and independence
Use a domain and hosting path that can survive the product’s own outage. If status.example.com depends on the same DNS, identity provider, CDN, or deployment as the app, the page may fail exactly when needed.
Access and governance
For internal or segmented pages, verify SSO, SCIM, IP allowlists, audit logs, roles, approval workflow, and API controls. Enterprise governance often determines the tier more than component count.
Current product shapes
Atlassian Statuspage: mature communication at scale
Atlassian Statuspage pricing lists a free public plan with 100 subscribers, 25 components, two team members, two metrics, email notifications, and API access. Paid public pages start at $29/month. Audience-specific pages start at $300/month for 500 users, 10 groups, 25 team members, and 30 metrics.
Choose it for mature public, private, or audience-specific communication and Atlassian workflows. It does not replace the monitoring tools that detect failures.
Instatus: flat-rate status, monitoring, and on-call
Instatus pricing lists Starter with 15 monitors, two-minute checks, one public page, and 200 subscribers; Pro at $20/month adds 30-second checks, custom domain, and 5,000 subscribers. Private, select-audience, Business, and Enterprise tiers expand page type and governance.
Choose it when status communication is central and flat plan pricing is attractive. Confirm page type, subscriber, team, and log-retention boundaries.
Better Stack: status pages beside telemetry and incident response
Better Stack pricing combines status pages with uptime, responder licensing, and optional telemetry. The free offer includes one page and monitoring; additional pages and advanced page capabilities can be separate components.
Choose it when logs, metrics, traces, uptime, and on-call should share a platform. Calculate responders and page add-ons, not only the free allowance.
Cachet: open-source and self-hosted
Cachet is free, open-source status-page software you host. Its 3.x documentation says the line is under active development and some features remain incomplete.
Choose Cachet for source control and hosting ownership. Budget for infrastructure, backups, upgrades, security, email, and a monitoring source that updates the page.
Webalert: monitoring-led status pages
Webalert status pages are connected to external monitors and incident workflows. Current pricing includes one page on Free, two on Starter, and five with custom domain on Business; features documents automatic monitor updates and incident capabilities.
Choose it when outside-in monitoring and a customer page should share one focused product. It is not an audience-specific enterprise communication system.
Pricing questions that expose the real bill
- How many public, private, and audience-specific pages?
- How many components, team members, subscribers, and customer groups?
- Which notification channels are included?
- Is custom domain, white-labeling, custom email domain, SSO, or audit logging extra?
- How much incident and metric history is retained?
- Are monitoring, on-call, and telemetry separate products?
- What happens when a subscriber or component limit is exceeded?
Migration checklist
- Export components, groups, incidents, metrics, templates, team roles, integrations, and subscribers.
- Review subscriber consent and whether the destination supports the same channels.
- Build the new page on a temporary domain and connect monitors.
- Publish a test incident and scheduled maintenance; verify every notification.
- Archive historical incidents if they cannot be imported.
- Lower DNS TTL, switch the custom domain, and keep the old page reachable during propagation.
- Update product, support, runbook, and social links.
Never delete the old page before the new domain, subscriptions, and incident workflow have been tested.
Bottom line
Choose Atlassian Statuspage for communication scale and audience targeting, Instatus for a status-led flat-price bundle, Better Stack for telemetry and incident consolidation, Cachet for self-hosting control, or Webalert for monitoring-led status pages. The strongest page is independent of the product, easy to update under pressure, and honest about what the monitoring signal actually proves.