For most web and mobile teams, Sentry is still the best error tracking tool — it has the broadest SDK coverage, mature issue grouping, release tracking, performance monitoring, and built-in session replay. The right Sentry alternative depends on your stack, budget, and hosting rules: choose GlitchTip if you need open-source and self-hosting (it speaks Sentry's SDK protocol, so it is nearly a drop-in), Datadog Error Tracking if you already run Datadog, Bugsnag (now SmartBear Insight Hub) for mobile and release-health, Raygun for frontend real-user monitoring, Honeybadger for a simple predictable option with uptime checks, and Rollbar for developer-first grouping without a full telemetry platform.
That is the summary an AI overview gives you. What it can't give you is the part that actually decides the purchase: how each tool's pricing model behaves during a noisy deploy, which ones you can run on your own infrastructure, and what breaks in your triage workflow after you migrate. This guide is for developers, engineering managers, and security-minded operators comparing error tracking software before a new rollout, renewal, or cleanup of an observability stack that has grown too expensive.
Every price on this page was re-read from the vendor's own pricing page on 13 August 2026. Where a vendor no longer publishes a number, this guide says so instead of repeating a figure from an older comparison article. Two of the tools most commonly quoted with a "from $X/mo" price — Rollbar and Bugsnag — have stopped publishing paid-tier prices entirely, so any article still showing one is quoting a rate card that is no longer on the internet.
At a Glance: Sentry vs the Alternatives
| Tool | Open-source / self-host | Entry price (verified 13 Aug 2026) | Free tier | Retention | Session replay | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentry | Source-available self-host (FSL; Kafka + ClickHouse + Postgres stack) | Team $26/mo annual, Business $80/mo annual, then pay-as-you-go per event | 5k errors, 50 replays, 5M spans, 1 user | 30 days free, up to 90 days paid | Built-in | The safe default for most web + mobile teams |
| GlitchTip | Fully open-source, lightweight self-host (single small VPS) | Cloud $15/mo (100k events), $50 (500k), $250 (3M); self-hosted is your server cost only | 1,000 events/mo on cloud; uncapped self-hosted | Not published | No | Open-source, privacy, or budget teams wanting Sentry DX |
| PostHog | Source-available; cloud-first | First 100k exceptions/mo free, then $0.00037/exception falling to $0.000115 at volume | 100k exceptions/mo | Not published | Yes (product-analytics replay) | Teams that also want analytics, flags and replay in one bill |
| Rollbar | Proprietary SaaS (no self-host) | Not published — Essentials and Advanced show quotas but no price | 5k occurrences, 1k replays | 30 days free / 90 Essentials / 180 Advanced | Replays included in quota | Developer-first grouping + deploy tracking |
| Bugsnag (SmartBear Insight Hub) | Proprietary; on-prem for enterprise | Not published — Select and Preferred both list "starting at $0/month" | 7.5k events + 1M spans | 7 days free / 60 days paid | No (adds RUM + tracing) | Mobile + release-health / crash-free users |
| Honeybadger | Proprietary SaaS | Team $26/mo ($286/yr), Business $80/mo ($880/yr) | 5k errors, 50MB/day, 1 uptime monitor | 15 / 90 / 180 days by plan | No | Small teams wanting errors + uptime + cron check-ins |
| Raygun | Proprietary SaaS | Crash Reporting $40/mo annual per 100k errors ($60 monthly) | 14-day trial only | 180 days (crash), 60 days (RUM) | Via RUM/UX diagnostics | Frontend performance tied to error + user impact |
| Datadog Error Tracking | Proprietary SaaS (part of Datadog) | $25/mo annual for the first 50k errors ($30 month-to-month, $36 on-demand) | None | Datadog platform retention | Via Datadog RUM | Teams already standardized on Datadog |
| New Relic | Proprietary SaaS | 100 GB ingest/mo free, then $0.40/GB; Core users $49, Full Platform Pro $349/user annual | 100 GB + 1 full-platform user + unlimited basic users | Plan-dependent | Via New Relic Browser | Teams billing on data volume rather than seats |
Sources: each vendor's published pricing page, read on 13 August 2026. "Not published" means the vendor's pricing page shows plan features and quotas but no dollar figure for that tier.
What "starting at" hides
Two of the numbers above deserve a warning label. Sentry's $26/mo Team plan includes 50,000 errors, and Honeybadger's $26/mo Team plan also includes 50,000 errors — the headline prices match almost exactly, which is why "from $26" tells you nothing. What separates them is what happens at error 50,001: Sentry meters you into pay-as-you-go per event, while Honeybadger's plan selector moves you up a price step. Neither is worse; they fail in different directions, and the direction matters more than the entry price.
The second warning is about Rollbar and Bugsnag. Both were widely quoted at "from $99/mo" and "from $59/mo" respectively in comparison articles written a year or two ago. As of 13 August 2026, neither publishes a paid-tier dollar figure at all — Rollbar shows occurrence bands from 10K to 50M with no price attached, and Bugsnag lists both Select and Preferred as "starting at $0/month" with a volume selector. If a comparison table hands you a confident number for either, it is quoting a page that no longer exists. Get a quote and treat any published figure as folklore.
What 500,000 Errors a Month Actually Costs
Entry prices are marketing. The number that decides a renewal is what you pay at your volume, and for error tracking the dimension that bites is monthly event count, with retention a close second. Here is the same workload — 500,000 errors a month, one team, no replay — priced on each vendor's published rate card as read on 13 August 2026.
| Tool | How it prices 500k errors/mo | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| GlitchTip Cloud | Medium plan, flat, covers up to 500k events | $50 |
| PostHog | 100k free, then 225k × $0.00037 + 175k × $0.00014 | ~$108 |
| Sentry Team | $26 base (50k included) + PAYG: 50k × $0.0003625 + 400k × $0.0002188 | ~$132 |
| Sentry Business | $80 base + the same $106 of pay-as-you-go | ~$186 |
| Raygun Crash Reporting | Team $80 (200k) + 300k on-demand at $0.001, or Business $400 (1M), annual billing | ~$380–400 |
| GlitchTip self-hosted | No licence fee; you pay for the VPS and your own time | Your server bill |
| Datadog Error Tracking | Public list price covers the 1–50k band at $25/mo annual; higher bands are quoted | Not published |
| Honeybadger | $26 Team covers 50k; higher volumes move up the plan selector | Not published |
| Rollbar / Bugsnag | Quotas published, prices are not | Not published |
| New Relic | Bills on data ingest (100 GB free, then $0.40/GB), not on error count | Not comparable |
Two things fall out of that table that a feature checklist will never tell you.
Flat-rate plans win at steady volume, metered plans win at low volume. GlitchTip Cloud at $50 is less than half of Sentry Team at the same event count, purely because it stops charging you per event. Below about 50,000 errors a month the ordering reverses and Sentry's included quota makes it the cheaper option. The crossover is somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands, which is exactly the range most growing products pass through without renegotiating anything.
Now model the bad deploy. A frontend retry loop that emits 5 million errors in a month costs roughly $975 on Sentry Team and about $738 on PostHog under pay-as-you-go, while GlitchTip's largest published cloud plan ($250) tops out at 3 million events and a self-hosted instance costs the same as it did yesterday. This is the single most important pricing question in the category, and it is not "what does the plan cost" — it is "what does a mistake cost." Check spike protection, per-project rate limits, client-side sampling, and hard spend caps before you sign, because every metered vendor is happy to bill you for a loop.
Retention is the second lever
Two vendors at the same price can differ by a factor of eight on how long you can look back, which matters the first time a customer reports a bug that started three weeks ago.
| Tool | Free-tier retention | Paid retention |
|---|---|---|
| Bugsnag / Insight Hub | 7 days | 60 days |
| Honeybadger | 15 days | 90 days (Team), 180 days (Business) |
| Sentry | 30-day lookback | Up to 90-day lookback |
| Rollbar | 30 days | 90 days (Essentials), 180 days (Advanced) |
| Raygun | Trial only | 180 days crash reporting, 60 days RUM |
Bugsnag's free tier is the most generous on events (7,500 versus Sentry's 5,000) and the least generous on retention (7 days versus 30). If you are evaluating on a free tier, that difference decides whether you can investigate anything that did not happen this week.
Who Should Pick Which
- Most web and mobile teams, no unusual constraints: Sentry. Broadest SDK coverage, mature grouping, replay included, and the free tier is enough to prove the workflow. Accept that you are on a metered plan and turn on spike protection immediately.
- You need open source, self-hosting, or data residency: GlitchTip. It speaks the Sentry SDK protocol, so migration is a DSN change rather than a code change, and it runs on one small VPS instead of Sentry's Kafka-and-ClickHouse footprint. The trade-off is no session replay and you own the upgrades.
- Steady, predictable, mid-six-figure event volume and a tight budget: GlitchTip Cloud. At 500k events a month it is the cheapest published option by a wide margin and it removes spike risk from the bill.
- You also want product analytics, feature flags and replay on one invoice: PostHog. The 100,000 free exceptions a month is the largest free error allowance of any tool here by a factor of thirteen, and the metered rate falls fast at volume. The trade-off is that it is an analytics platform that added error tracking, not a developer-first exception inbox.
- Mobile apps where crash-free users is the KPI: Bugsnag / Insight Hub. Release health, staged rollouts and version adoption are the product's centre of gravity rather than an add-on. Budget for a sales conversation, because there is no published price.
- Frontend performance and error impact in one view: Raygun. It is the most expensive option in the table at 500k errors, and the reason to pay it is that crash reporting, RUM and APM share a data model — but note they are three separately priced products, so a full stack of all three multiplies the number above.
- You already live in Datadog all day: Datadog Error Tracking, at $25/mo annually for the first 50,000 errors. It is cheap to start and the value is context — errors next to traces, logs and dashboards. If you do not already run Datadog, this is the wrong door.
- Ruby or Rails shop that wants errors, uptime and cron check-ins in one small bill: Honeybadger. Same $26 entry price as Sentry, deliberately less product.
- Your bill is already measured in gigabytes: New Relic. 100 GB of ingest and one full-platform user free per month is a genuinely large free tier, and unlimited basic users at $0 changes the seat maths for large orgs. It is a data-volume bet, not an event-count bet.
How Error Tracking Tools Differ
Most error tracking tools promise the same broad outcome: fewer production bugs that linger unnoticed. The important differences show up in how they collect events, how they group noise, how much context they attach, and what they expect your team to do after an issue lands in the queue.
Classic error tracking starts with exceptions. Your application throws an error, the SDK captures the stack trace, the tool groups similar events, and the team gets a ticket-like issue with metadata: browser, release, environment, user, endpoint, and breadcrumbs. That model is still valuable. A clean stack trace with the exact release and affected customers is often enough to fix a bug quickly.
The market has expanded beyond that. Some tools now sit inside broader observability suites, where errors are connected to logs, traces, metrics, uptime checks, and infrastructure telemetry. That is useful when failures are distributed across services and the root cause is not obvious from one exception. The tradeoff is complexity and cost. A full observability platform can answer harder questions, but it also asks your team to manage more data, more dashboards, and more pricing dimensions.
Session replay is another dividing line. Session replay error tracking records enough frontend context to show what a user did before an error occurred. For product-heavy web apps, that can be more useful than a stack trace alone. You can see the broken click path, failed form submission, console errors, and network calls around the failure. For regulated environments, replay also raises privacy questions. You need masking, sampling, retention controls, and a clear policy for who can watch user sessions.
Open-source and self-hosted options differ again. They reduce vendor lock-in and can help with data residency, but they move operational work back onto your team. Running the tool is now part of your reliability surface. If the error tracking database fills up or the queue backs up during an outage, your incident context disappears at the worst possible time.
The practical decision framework is this: decide whether you need a dedicated developer-first error tracker, a frontend experience monitoring tool, or a broader observability platform. Then test pricing with your real event volume, not a best-case demo workload.
What to Look For
Language and framework support. Start with SDK quality for the code you actually run. A Rails, Django, Next.js, Laravel, or mobile app team should not have to fight the integration layer. Look for first-party SDKs, source map support, release tracking, deploy markers, and clear docs for background jobs, serverless functions, and edge runtimes if those matter to your stack.
Grouping and noise control. The value of error tracking software drops fast if every deploy creates hundreds of duplicate issues. Good grouping should combine equivalent failures without hiding distinct root causes. You also want ignored errors, inbound filters, rate limits, environment separation, ownership rules, and alerts that can distinguish a new production regression from old background noise.
Debugging context. Stack traces are table stakes. The better tools add breadcrumbs, request data, feature flags, logs, trace IDs, release versions, customer impact, and session replay. The point is not to collect everything. The point is to collect enough context that the person on-call can decide whether this is a hotfix, backlog bug, customer support issue, or harmless edge case.
Pricing model at scale. Error tracking costs usually grow with events, sessions, replays, seats, retention, or some mix of those. A plan that is cheap for 50,000 monthly events can become painful when a bad deploy emits millions of duplicate exceptions. Check overage behavior, sampling controls, spike protection, replay pricing, and whether non-engineering stakeholders need paid seats.
Privacy and compliance controls. Error events can contain emails, URLs, request bodies, tokens, form fields, and customer identifiers. Session replay can capture even more. Look for server-side scrubbing, client-side masking, PII controls, audit logs, role-based access, regional hosting, retention settings, and clear documentation on what the SDK collects by default.
Workflow integrations. Error tracking should fit the way bugs are fixed. GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Linear, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, and OpenTelemetry support all matter depending on your process. The best tool is not the one with the longest integration page; it is the one that creates useful work items without turning every exception into another ticket nobody triages.
Quick Takes on Each Option
Sentry is the dominant choice for a reason. It has strong SDK coverage, mature issue grouping, release tracking, performance monitoring, and session replay, making it the safest default for many web and mobile teams. The main complaints are pricing at high volume and the feeling that a once-simple error tracker has become a larger observability product.
Bugsnag, now SmartBear Insight Hub, is a strong Sentry alternative for teams that care about stability management and release health. It is especially credible for mobile and client-side applications where version adoption, crash-free users, and staged rollouts matter. Its free tier is the most generous on events here among the dedicated trackers — 7,500 events plus 1 million spans — and the least generous on retention, at 7 days. The Select and Preferred tiers now both display "starting at $0/month" with an event-volume selector rather than a published price, so budgeting requires a sales conversation.
Rollbar is straightforward, developer-friendly error monitoring with solid language coverage and practical workflows. It is a good fit for teams that want issue grouping, deploy tracking, and alerts without buying a full telemetry platform. Its free tier is 5,000 occurrences and 1,000 replays a month with 30-day retention, and the paid Essentials and Advanced tiers publish occurrence bands from 10K to 50M with 90- and 180-day retention but no dollar figure — you will need a quote.
PostHog added error tracking to what began as a product-analytics platform, and its free allowance is the outlier in this comparison: 100,000 exceptions a month at no cost, versus 5,000 to 7,500 from the dedicated error trackers. Beyond that it meters at $0.00037 per exception, falling to $0.000115 at high volume. It is the natural pick if you want errors, session replay, feature flags and analytics on one invoice; it is the wrong pick if you want a focused developer-first exception inbox with deep backend SDK maturity.
Datadog Error Tracking makes the most sense if you already use Datadog for logs, APM, infrastructure, or RUM. Connecting errors to traces, logs, dashboards, and service ownership can be powerful in microservice environments. It is now a distinctly priced SKU rather than a free add-on: $25 per month billed annually for the first 50,000 errors, $30 month-to-month, $36 on demand. That is cheap on its own, but it sits next to APM at $31 per host per month, RUM at $0.15 per 1,000 sessions, and log ingest at $0.10 per GB — the tradeoff is classic Datadog, where each dimension is reasonable and the sum needs active management.
New Relic is another observability-suite option where error tracking is part of a broader telemetry workflow. Its pricing shape is genuinely different from everything else here: it bills on data ingested rather than events or hosts, with 100 GB per month, one full-platform user, and unlimited basic users free, then $0.40 per GB ($0.60 with the Data Plus retention and compliance option). Paid seats are $49 for a core user and $349 per full-platform user annually on the Pro edition. That makes it hard to compare on an error count, and attractive for large organisations where read-only seats would otherwise dominate the bill. It is less compelling if your only need is a clean exception inbox for a small product team.
Honeybadger is a focused choice for teams that want error tracking plus uptime and check-in monitoring without a heavy platform feel. It has long been popular in Ruby and Rails circles, but it supports other stacks as well. Its published plans are Developer at $0 (5,000 errors a month, 15-day retention, one uptime monitor, one user), Team at $26 a month or $286 a year (50,000 errors, 90-day retention, five monitors, unlimited users), and Business at $80 a month or $880 a year (180-day retention). Note that Team and Business list the same base error quota — you are paying the difference for retention and Insights depth, not headroom, and the plan selector raises the price as you raise the volume. It is not trying to be a giant observability suite, which is exactly the appeal for many teams.
Raygun combines crash reporting, real user monitoring, and user experience diagnostics. It is worth a look for teams that want to connect errors with frontend performance and customer impact. Price it carefully, because those are three separately metered products: Crash Reporting starts at $40 a month annually per 100,000 errors, RUM at $80 a month annually per 100,000 sessions, and APM at $80 a month annually per 100,000 traces, with monthly billing running 50% higher across the board and on-demand overage at $0.001 per error and $0.002 per session or trace. Crash retention is a category-leading 180 days. It can feel more product-experience oriented than pure backend error monitoring, which may be either a strength or a mismatch.
Airbrake is a long-running error monitoring tool with a simple model and broad framework support. It is usually considered when teams want something lighter than Sentry or already have historical usage. The product is practical, but it is not the most exciting option if you want modern replay, deep tracing, or an aggressively polished UI.
GlitchTip is the standout open-source, self-hostable option. It is Sentry API compatible, so your existing @sentry/* SDKs keep working when you point the DSN at your own server. It deliberately implements the core Sentry features most teams use — error tracking, release tracking, uptime monitoring, and alerting — and skips the heavier observability stack, so it runs on a single small VPS instead of the Kafka-and-ClickHouse footprint self-hosted Sentry demands. If you would rather not operate it, the hosted plans are the most legible pricing in the category: free up to 1,000 events a month, $15 for 100,000, $50 for 500,000, and $250 for 3 million, flat, with no per-event metering behind them. It does not offer session replay, and self-hosting means you own upgrades, backups, and scaling.
GlitchReplay is a newer entrant focused on connecting errors with replay context. That can be useful when a stack trace does not explain what a user actually experienced. Because it is newer, evaluate SDK maturity, retention controls, privacy masking, and integrations carefully before making it your primary production error tracker.
OpenReplay is an open-source session replay platform that can also help debug frontend errors. It is attractive for teams that want replay control or self-hosting, especially when privacy and data ownership matter. It is not a drop-in replacement for every Sentry use case, so compare the error grouping and alerting workflow before switching.
Elastic Observability is strongest for organizations already invested in the Elastic Stack. Errors, logs, traces, and metrics can live together, and self-managed deployments are possible. The cost is operational complexity; this is usually a platform decision, not a quick Sentry replacement.
Common Pitfalls
Choosing by event quota instead of failure mode. Many teams compare plans by monthly events and miss the real question: what happens during a noisy deploy? If a frontend loop emits the same error 2 million times in an hour, you need sampling, rate limits, grouping, and alert controls. A cheap plan with weak spike protection can become useless during the incident it was supposed to explain.
Treating session replay as automatically safe. Replay is valuable, but it can capture sensitive workflows if configured badly. Mask password fields, payment fields, tokens, internal admin screens, healthcare data, and customer secrets before production rollout. Also decide who can access replays. A support agent may need a sanitized replay; they probably do not need raw request bodies.
Buying a full observability platform for a small error tracking problem. Datadog, New Relic, Elastic, and similar platforms are powerful when you need correlated telemetry across many services. They can be expensive and distracting if your actual problem is that a five-person app team needs clean exception alerts and release regression tracking.
Ignoring ownership and triage process. Error tracking tools do not fix bugs. Someone must decide which issues matter, assign owners, close stale noise, and connect customer impact to engineering priority. Without that process, every tool becomes a graveyard of unresolved exceptions.
Conclusion
The best error tracking tools make production failures easier to understand without flooding the team with noise. Use the picker above to narrow the Sentry alternatives by stack, replay needs, hosting preferences, and budget, then trial the top two with real production traffic before committing.
One last piece of advice that follows directly from re-checking every rate card on this page: do the arithmetic yourself, against your own event volume, on the vendor's own pricing page, on the day you buy. Two of the nine tools compared here have stopped publishing paid prices since the last widely cited comparisons were written, one has restructured error tracking into a standalone SKU, and the pay-as-you-go bands that decide your real bill are not on the plan-comparison page at all. Anyone quoting you a confident "from $X per month" — including this article, six months from now — is quoting a snapshot. All prices above were read from vendor pricing pages on 13 August 2026.