Sentry → GlitchTip
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Sentry bills by event volume and teams commonly land at $80–$500/month. GlitchTip self-hosted is a small VPS — $10–20 — and speaks the same protocol.
Moves cleanly
Your SDK integration entirely. GlitchTip implements Sentry's ingest API, so you change the DSN and nothing else.
You rebuild
Nothing, in the common case. This is one of the cleanest migrations here.
What Sentry costs you today
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.
What actually holds you in
SDKs use the open Sentry protocol (DSN-based ingestion), which is itself a strength for switching — most alternatives below are wire-compatible and only require changing the DSN, not application code. The lock-in is mainly economic (event-based billing that scales with traffic) and licensing (FSL, not OSI), not data-format.
What you are moving to
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.
Free to self-host; optional hosted plans from $0 (1K events/mo) to $250/mo (3M events/mo)
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
What you give up
- 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
The migration, step by step
- 1Deploy GlitchTip with docker compose and Postgres
- 2Create a project and copy the DSN
- 3Change the DSN in your application config — that is the migration
- 4Verify by deliberately throwing an error in staging
- 5Run both for a week, then cancel Sentry
The gotcha
GlitchTip covers error tracking, not Sentry's performance monitoring, session replay or profiling. If your team uses those, this is a downgrade rather than a migration, and the DSN swap makes it dangerously easy to discover that after cancelling.
When to stay on Sentry
You use performance monitoring, replay, or cron monitoring.
More Layer 3 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-09 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.