GlitchTip vs Bugsink
Both are free/open-source alternatives to Sentry. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
GlitchTip
TOP PICKA lightweight, fully open-source, Sentry-SDK-compatible error tracker.
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.
Bugsink
A minimal, actively-maintained self-hosted error tracker built to be a drop-in Sentry replacement.
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.
Side by side
| GlitchTip | Bugsink | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 93 | 81 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | PolyForm Shield 1.0.0 (source-available; free to self-host and use, restricts building a competing hosted product) |
| Pricing | Free to self-host; optional hosted plans from $0 (1K events/mo) to $250/mo (3M events/mo) | Free to self-host; hosted plan also available, positioned as ~80% cheaper than Sentry at scale |
GlitchTip is Macrostack's recommended Sentry alternative, so it's our pick here.
GlitchTip
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
Bugsink
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
More Sentry head-to-heads
Facts verified 2026-07-09. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.