Sentry vs GlitchTip
Sentry vs GlitchTip compared on hosted pricing, event quotas, self-hosting requirements, licence, SDK compatibility, tracing, replays, uptime and logs, with current 2026 plans.
Quick Answer
Sentry is the full product: errors, tracing, session replay, profiling, crons, uptime, logs and the Seer AI debugger, but self-hosting it needs 4 cores, 16 GB RAM plus swap and comes under the FSL. GlitchTip is an MIT-licensed, Sentry-SDK-compatible tracker that runs in 512 MB with PostgreSQL and costs $15 a month hosted for 100k events. Pick GlitchTip for cheap or self-hosted error tracking; pick Sentry when you need replay, profiling or the wider feature set.
Last updated October 25, 2026. Uses Sentry's current Developer, Team and Business pricing, self-hosted 26.10.0 (16 Oct 2026) requirements, and GlitchTip's current plans, install requirements and logs/uptime docs.
| Feature | Sentry | GlitchTip |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 (Fair Source) | MIT |
| Latest Release | Self-hosted 26.10.0 (16 Oct 2026) | v6.2.6 tag (Aug 2026), active development |
| Free Hosted Plan | Developer: 1 user, 5k errors, 30-day lookback | Hobby: up to 1,000 events/month, 30-day retention |
| Entry Paid Plan | Team $26/month annual, $29 monthly | Small $15/month |
| Included Events (Entry Paid) | 50k errors, 5M spans, 50 replays, 5 GB logs | 100k events (500k on $50 Medium) |
| Data Retention | Up to 90-day lookback on paid plans | 90 days on paid plans; configurable when self-hosted |
| Self-Host Minimum | 4 cores, 16 GB RAM + 16 GB swap, 20 GB disk | 512 MB RAM recommended, PostgreSQL 14+ |
| Client SDKs | Sentry's own SDKs | Sentry open-source SDKs (Sentry API compatible) |
| Performance / Tracing | Yes, spans and distributed tracing | Performance monitoring |
| Session Replay | ||
| Uptime Monitoring | 1 monitor included, more as add-on | Ping, GET, POST and heartbeat monitors |
| Cron Monitoring | 1 monitor included, $0.78 per extra | Heartbeat monitors |
| Logs | 5 GB included, $0.50/GB after | Structured logs via Sentry SDKs |
| AI Features | Seer AI debugger (paid add-on, SaaS only) | MCP server for AI assistants |
Pricing at a glance
Entry prices and free tiers as listed on TechLogHub for Sentry; the other tool is not listed in the directory yet.
| Tool | Free tier | Starts at | Billing | Plans listed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentry pricing | Yes | — | — | Free tier with unlimited events, basic dashboards, and community support · Paid tier includes advanced analytics, SLOs, integrations, and priority support |
Prices as written by the maker on their listing; medians and context on each tool's pricing page. See the 2026 pricing report for the directory-wide picture.
Sentry
Application monitoring platform built around error tracking, with tracing, session replay, profiling, cron and uptime monitors, logs and the Seer AI debugger. Available as SaaS or as a self-hosted Docker Compose install under the Functional Source License.
Sentryon TechLogHub: reviews, pricing & alternativesPros
- The widest feature set in this category: errors, tracing, session replay, profiling, crons, uptime monitors, logs and metrics in one product
- First-party SDKs for almost every language and framework, which GlitchTip and other tools also reuse
- Team plan includes unlimited users, 50k errors, 5M spans, 50 replays and 5 GB of logs from $26 a month billed annually
- Self-hosted gets Business-plan features with no software limits and no licence fee
- Monthly self-hosted releases (26.10.0 on 16 Oct 2026) track the SaaS codebase
Cons
- Self-hosting needs at least 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM plus 16 GB swap and 20 GB disk, with 32 GB RAM recommended
- FSL-1.1 is source-available, not OSI open source: you cannot offer it as a competing service, though code converts to Apache-2.0 after two years
- Seer, spike protection and other AI/ML or billing-linked features are not available self-hosted
- The free Developer plan is limited to one user and 5k errors
- Seer costs extra on top of Team or Business, and add-on rates make bills harder to predict
Best For
Product teams that want errors, tracing, replay and profiling in one tool and are happy to pay for SaaS, or larger teams with the ops capacity to run a heavy self-hosted stack.
GlitchTip
MIT-licensed, Sentry-API-compatible error tracking platform with performance monitoring, uptime checks and logs, available as a hosted service or as a small self-hosted Django app on PostgreSQL.
Pros
- Works with Sentry's open-source client SDKs, so switching is usually a DSN change
- MIT licence with no restrictions on how you run or offer it
- Recommended 512 MB RAM, minimum 256 MB in all-in-one mode, needing only PostgreSQL 14+ with Valkey/Redis optional
- Hosted Small plan is $15 a month for up to 100k events with 90-day retention and unlimited members
- Uptime monitors (ping, GET, POST, heartbeat) and structured logs from Sentry SDKs in the same app
- Logs can tier to DuckDB/Parquet cold storage on S3 or disk while staying searchable
Cons
- Session replay and profiling are not among its documented features
- Much smaller project: about 360 GitLab stars on the backend versus Sentry's ~45k on GitHub
- Free hosted tier is only 1,000 events a month
- Hosted uptime checks count toward your event quota
- Fewer integrations and docs; the error-tracking guide documents email and webhook alerts only
Best For
Small teams, side projects and self-hosters who want Sentry-compatible error tracking on a cheap VPS or a low flat monthly price.
Hosted pricing: errors versus events
Sentry's Developer plan is free for one user with 5k errors, 5M spans, 50 replays, one uptime and one cron monitor and a 30-day lookback. Team is $26 a month billed annually or $29 monthly, and Business is $80 annually or $89 monthly. Both paid plans include 50k errors, 5M spans, 50 replays, 1 GB of attachments and 5 GB each of logs and application metrics, with unlimited users and up to 90 days of lookback. Extras are billed per product: $0.50 per GB of logs or metrics, $0.78 per extra cron monitor, $1 per extra uptime alert, and profiling by the hour. Seer is a separate paid add-on. GlitchTip prices everything as events. Hobby is free for up to 1,000 events a month with 30-day retention. Small is $15 for up to 100k events with 90-day retention and unlimited members, Medium is $50 for 500k and Large is $250 for 3 million, with on-demand events past the limit. Uptime checks also count against the quota. For a team that only needs error tracking, GlitchTip Small buys twice Sentry Team's error allowance for about half the price. Sentry's price buys the replay, profiling and tracing allowances that GlitchTip does not try to match.
Self-hosting: one small container versus a full stack
This is the biggest practical difference. Sentry's self-hosted docs ask for Docker 19.03.6+ and Compose 2.32.2+, 4 CPU cores, 16 GB of RAM plus 16 GB of swap and 20 GB of free disk, and recommend 32 GB of RAM and fast storage. The install runs Sentry's full SaaS architecture in Compose, and Sentry is clear that it comes with no guarantees or dedicated support. Releases arrive monthly in CalVer form; 26.10.0 shipped on 16 October 2026. GlitchTip recommends 512 MB of RAM and an x86 or arm64 CPU. In all-in-one mode, where the worker runs inside the web process, it can start with 256 MB, and the docs say careful tuning gets it to 128 MB plus swap. The only hard dependency is PostgreSQL 14 or later; Valkey or Redis 7+ is optional for larger instances. The docs estimate around 30 GB of disk for a million events a month. On a typical 4 GB VPS that already runs a few apps, GlitchTip fits and Sentry does not. If you have a dedicated machine with 16 to 32 GB of RAM and someone to own upgrades, Sentry's requirements matter less.
Licence and what you can do with it
GlitchTip is MIT-licensed. You can run it internally, modify it, or offer it to customers as a service. Sentry's main repository is under FSL-1.1 with an Apache 2.0 future licence, which Sentry calls Fair Source. Its docs say you can deploy it anywhere, including inside a company, but you cannot sell a self-hosted instance as an offering or use the code to compete with Sentry. Each release converts to Apache 2.0 two years after publication. For most companies running it for their own apps this changes nothing; for an agency or hosting provider that wants to resell error tracking, it rules Sentry out. Some Sentry features are not in the self-hosted build at all. The docs list Seer and other AI/ML features as closed source, spike protection and spend allocation as tied to billing, and limited support for some mobile symbolication and console platforms. Self-hosted Sentry is otherwise described as the Business plan without software limits, so features such as replay and tracing are there if your hardware can carry them.
SDK compatibility and switching between them
GlitchTip does not ship its own SDKs. It implements the Sentry API and tells you to use Sentry's open-source client SDKs, so moving from Sentry to GlitchTip usually means creating a project and swapping the DSN. Logs work the same way: enable enable_logs in sentry_sdk or enableLogs in @sentry/browser and they go to the same endpoint. GlitchTip does not accept a raw OTLP exporter, so OpenTelemetry users go through the Sentry SDK integration. Source maps are supported; GlitchTip's docs recommend its beta CLI to inject debug IDs and upload them. Alerts are frequency-based, with email to the project team by default and webhook recipients as the documented extra. The gaps show up in the newer Sentry products. Session replay and profiling are not documented GlitchTip features, so those SDK integrations will not give you anything to look at. Moving the other way, from GlitchTip to Sentry, is the same DSN swap and gains you those features. Because the SDK code in your app is identical, you can start on GlitchTip and move later without rewriting instrumentation.
Verdict
Choose GlitchTip if what you need is error tracking with alerts, source-mapped stack traces, basic performance data and uptime checks, and you care about cost or want to self-host: it runs next to your other containers on a small VPS, uses the same Sentry SDKs, and its hosted Small plan is $15 a month for 100k events. Choose Sentry SaaS if you need session replay, profiling, deep distributed tracing, cron monitoring at scale or Seer, or if many developers live in the tool daily; the Team plan's unlimited users make it fair value for a product team. Self-host Sentry only if you have a box with 16 GB of RAM or more and someone who will own monthly upgrades; otherwise self-hosted GlitchTip gives you most of the day-to-day value for a fraction of the resources.