Does upstart not count as an alternative?

Upstart is older then systemd and it was mainly developed by Ubuntu who dropped it. After that is continued to exist as a project but its basically not used anywhere and id didn't continue to develop all that much.

I didn't mean to imply that it was built as a competitor to systemd, more that it exists as a different alternative. I'm aware of what happened with Ubuntu dropping it, and I think it's a shame, as I like it as a simple response to the problem.

Is upstart better in any way?

Upstart doesn't include implementations on NTP, DNS, DHCP, or anything that opens a network port. It does however allow parallel boots with dependency analysis for quick boots.

Systemd on the other hand seems to be trying to take over syslog, ntpd, dhcpd, named, and related with generally poorer implementations. Feature creep seems constant with systemd, for no particularly good reason.