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Migration guide · Error Tracking & Exception Monitoring

The 3 best free & open-source Sentry alternatives

Sentry is a widely-used error tracking and application monitoring platform. Developers drop a Sentry SDK into their app, and Sentry captures exceptions, stack traces, performance traces, session replays, and release health data, surfacing them in a hosted dashboard (sentry.io) or a self-hosted install. It supports dozens of languages and frameworks and is often the first observability tool a team adopts.

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Bottom line

GlitchTip is our top pick — A lightweight, fully open-source, Sentry-SDK-compatible error tracker. We compare all 3 options below, with honest trade-offs.

Jump to the full comparison →

The cost

Free Developer plan (1 user, 5K errors/mo); Team $26/mo (billed annually) with pay-as-you-go overages on errors, logs, spans, replays, and profiling hours; Business $80/mo; Enterprise custom. Overage pricing on the Team plan starts at roughly $0.0003625 per error above the included 50K/month, plus separate per-GB charges for logs and metrics.

Why people consider an alternative

Sentry's own code moved off an OSI-approved license: after Apache-2.0 (until 2019) and a Business Source License period, Sentry's current license is the Functional Source License (FSL) — 'Fair Source,' not OSI-approved, and it becomes Apache-2.0 only after a two-year delay per release. Self-hosting for your own organization's use remains permitted, but running it as a competing service is explicitly prohibited, and the self-hosted stack is heavy (ClickHouse, Kafka, Postgres, Redis — 16GB+ RAM recommended). Teams that want either a truly OSI-licensed codebase, a lighter self-hosted footprint, or predictable flat pricing at high event volume look for an alternative.

The verdict — at a glance

AlternativeLicenseSelf-hostPricingSovereignty
GlitchTip★MITYesFree to self-host; optional hosted plans from $0 (1K events/mo) to $250/mo (3M events/mo)93
HyperDXMITYesFree to self-host; hosted plan free up to 3GB/mo, then $20/mo for 50GB/mo plus $0.40/GB overage89
BugsinkPolyForm Shield 1.0.0 (source-available; free to self-host and use, restricts building a competing hosted product)YesFree to self-host; hosted plan also available, positioned as ~80% cheaper than Sentry at scale81
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Macrostack's top pick

GlitchTip

A lightweight, fully open-source, Sentry-SDK-compatible error tracker.

Every alternative, compared

#1★ TOP PICK

GlitchTip

A lightweight, fully open-source, Sentry-SDK-compatible error tracker.

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OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST

GlitchTip is a from-scratch Django reimplementation of Sentry's original open-source codebase, built to stay simple and stay open. It accepts Sentry's own SDKs unmodified — you only change the DSN — and runs comfortably on a small VPS with Postgres (Valkey/Redis optional for extra performance). It covers error tracking, basic performance/uptime monitoring, and releases, without chasing Sentry's full APM feature set.

Strengths

  • +Fully MIT-licensed, no Fair Source or field-of-use restrictions
  • +Drop-in for existing Sentry SDKs — swap the DSN, no code changes
  • +Runs on as little as 512MB RAM; Postgres is the only hard dependency
  • +Actively maintained with monthly releases as of mid-2026

Trade-offs

  • −Deliberately thinner feature set than Sentry — no full distributed tracing/profiling suite
  • −Smaller ecosystem and community than Sentry itself
  • −Frontend and backend live in separate repos, adding a small setup step
Free to self-host; optional hosted plans from $0 (1K events/mo) to $250/mo (3M events/mo)
WebsiteSourceDocs
#2

HyperDX

An OpenTelemetry-native observability app with error tracking, logs, traces, and session replay in one.

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OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST

HyperDX (built on ClickHouse, now part of ClickStack) unifies error tracking with logs, distributed traces, metrics, and session replay in a single self-hostable app, aimed at teams who want Sentry-style error visibility plus broader observability without stitching together several tools. It's fully MIT-licensed and OpenTelemetry-native, so instrumentation isn't tied to a proprietary SDK.

Strengths

  • +Fully MIT-licensed with no field-of-use restrictions
  • +One app covers errors, logs, traces, and session replay via OpenTelemetry standards
  • +Active project (multiple 2026 releases) with a real Discord community
  • +Data portability: OpenTelemetry data isn't locked to HyperDX's format

Trade-offs

  • −Heavier self-host footprint than a dedicated error tracker — ClickHouse plus supporting services
  • −Not a drop-in DSN swap for existing Sentry SDK code; requires OpenTelemetry instrumentation
  • −Broader scope means more surface area to operate than a single-purpose tool
Free to self-host; hosted plan free up to 3GB/mo, then $20/mo for 50GB/mo plus $0.40/GB overage
WebsiteSourceDocs
#3

Bugsink

A minimal, actively-maintained self-hosted error tracker built to be a drop-in Sentry replacement.

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SOURCE-AVAILABLEPolyForm Shield 1.0.0 (source-available; free to self-host and use, restricts building a competing hosted product)SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST

Bugsink is a Python/Django error tracker built specifically to be self-hosted and Sentry-SDK-compatible: point an existing Sentry SDK's DSN at Bugsink and it starts receiving events with no code changes. It defaults to SQLite for both the app database and its task queue (no Redis or Celery required), with Postgres/MySQL available for larger deployments, making it one of the simplest error trackers to run on a single small server.

Strengths

  • +Drop-in for Sentry SDKs — DSN swap, no application code changes
  • +SQLite-first defaults mean no Redis/Celery to operate for small deployments
  • +Very active (weekly-cadence releases as of mid-2026) with a responsive maintainer
  • +Local variable capture on stack traces out of the box, a genuine debugging strength

Trade-offs

  • −Not an OSI-approved open-source license — PolyForm Shield is source-available, not free software by OSI's definition
  • −Explicitly forbids using the code to build a competing hosted error-tracking service
  • −Smaller community and shorter track record than Sentry or GlitchTip
Free to self-host; hosted plan also available, positioned as ~80% cheaper than Sentry at scale
WebsiteSourceDocs

Questions people ask

▸ Isn't Sentry itself open source?

It used to be. Sentry was Apache-2.0 licensed until 2019, then moved to a Business Source License, and today ships under the Functional Source License (FSL) — a 'Fair Source' license that is not OSI-approved. Self-hosting for your own organization's use is still permitted and free, but the license explicitly forbids using Sentry's code to run a competing hosted offering, and each release only becomes fully Apache-2.0 after a two-year delay.

▸ What about Highlight.io as a Sentry alternative?

Highlight.io was a genuine open-source (MIT/Apache) fullstack monitoring platform, but it was acquired by LaunchDarkly in 2025 and is being wound down: LaunchDarkly announced Highlight.io will deprecate its standalone services on February 28, 2026, migrating customers to LaunchDarkly Observability instead. Because the product is being sunset rather than actively developed, we don't recommend adopting it new — existing Highlight users should plan their LaunchDarkly migration or move to one of the alternatives above.

▸ Which alternative is the easiest to run on a single small server?

GlitchTip and Bugsink are both built for lightweight self-hosting — GlitchTip needs only Postgres, Bugsink can run on SQLite alone. HyperDX's ClickHouse-based stack is more capable (logs, traces, session replay) but is a heavier operational footprint if you only need error tracking.

Compare them head-to-head

GlitchTip vs HyperDX→GlitchTip vs Bugsink→HyperDX vs Bugsink→

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Entry last verified 2026-07-09. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.

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