Originally published at devtoolpicks.com
If you were on Highlight and migrated to something new, you probably landed on one of three tools: Sentry, Honeybadger, or GlitchTip. If you are still evaluating, this post covers exactly what separates them at the budgets and team sizes most indie hackers actually work with.
The short answer: Sentry is the most capable but the hardest to predict billing-wise. Honeybadger is the best flat-rate option if you want error tracking, uptime, and cron monitoring in one place without surprises. GlitchTip is free if you self-host, $15/month if you want it managed, and uses the same Sentry SDKs you already have.
Quick verdict
| Tool | Best For | Starting Price | Billing Model | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentry | Full-featured monitoring, larger teams | Free (5K errors/mo) | Per event | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Honeybadger | Solo devs who want flat, predictable billing | Free (dev plan) | Per project tier | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| GlitchTip | Privacy-first teams, self-hosters | Free (self-hosted) | Per event (hosted) | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
Sentry: The most powerful option, with billing you need to watch
Sentry is the default choice for good reason. It has been around since 2010, supports 30+ languages and frameworks, and does more than any other tool in this comparison: error tracking, performance monitoring, session replays, cron job monitoring, uptime checks, and now an AI debugging agent called Seer.
Pricing
- Developer: Free forever. 5,000 errors per month, 1 user on the dashboard. The SDK works in any project, so your whole team can deploy with it, but only one person can triage issues in the UI.
- Team: $26/month billed annually ($29 monthly). 50,000 errors, unlimited users, 90-day retention, GitHub and Jira integrations.
- Business: $80/month billed annually ($89 monthly). 100,000 errors, advanced reporting, SSO, compliance features.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
- Seer AI: $40/month per active contributor (anyone who makes 2+ PRs to a Seer-enabled repo). This is on top of your plan price, not included.
The thing to understand about Sentry's pricing is that the plan price is the floor, not the ceiling. The Team plan at $26/month gives you 50,000 errors. If you enable performance monitoring, session replays, or cron checks, each uses a separate quota on top. A bad deploy that triggers an error loop can burn through your monthly quota in hours. Sentry has spike protection that throttles excessive ingestion, but the billing model rewards teams who know how to configure filters and sampling rates. If you just install the SDK and leave it running without tuning it, your costs will drift.
What Sentry does well
The depth of context per error is unmatched. You get a full stack trace, breadcrumbs showing what the user did before the error, request details, environment variables, and release tracking. When a user reports a bug, Sentry usually lets you see exactly what happened in the two minutes before it.
Performance monitoring is a genuine capability, not a checkbox feature. You can trace slow database queries, identify n+1 issues, and see where response time is going across your whole request lifecycle. For an app past the MVP stage, this starts to matter.
The integration ecosystem is wide. Sentry connects to GitHub (linking errors to commits), Jira (creating tickets), Slack (alerting), Linear, and most CI/CD tools. If you are using Make or n8n for automation, Sentry's webhooks fit into those workflows without custom code.
What Sentry does not do well
The free plan's 1-user limit is a real constraint for any project with more than one developer involved, even part-time. You either upgrade to Team or one person becomes the bottleneck for reviewing errors.
The event-based billing catches people out. A misconfigured tracesSampleRate or a bug that fires thousands of times creates an unexpected bill or, worse, silently drops errors after you hit the monthly limit. You need to understand the quota management before you rely on Sentry in production.
The UI is also genuinely complex. There is a lot in there, and it takes time to understand how issues, events, alerts, and performance are connected. For a solo developer shipping fast, the configuration overhead is real.
Who should not use Sentry
Solo developers who want to install something and not think about it. If you are not going to tune sampling rates, configure filters, and monitor your quota, you will either overpay or silently miss errors. Sentry rewards investment. If you are not prepared to make that investment, Honeybadger is a better fit.
Honeybadger: The best flat-rate option for solo devs
Honeybadger is bootstrapped, independent, and has been running since 2012. Unlike Sentry, it charges per project tier rather than per event. You pay a fixed monthly amount and Honeybadger processes up to 125% of your plan's limit before it stops. There is no surprise bill because one error fired in a loop.
Pricing
- Developer: Free for 1 user. Includes error tracking, uptime monitoring, and cron check-ins. The free plan is real and permanent, not a trial.
- Team: $26/month. Unlimited users, unlimited projects at the Team tier. Uptime monitoring, status pages, performance monitoring, log insights, and cron checks all included.
- Business: $80/month. SSO, advanced workflows, team management, higher retention.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, single-tenant or self-hosted options.
The key difference from Sentry: Honeybadger's Team plan at $26/month is a flat fee for your whole account. You are not paying per event or per seat. A busy month with twice your normal error volume does not change your bill.
What Honeybadger does well
The bundled monitoring is genuinely useful. Most indie hackers need three things: error tracking, uptime monitoring (is my site up?), and cron job checks (did my background job run?). Sentry requires you to configure and potentially pay separately for each of these. Honeybadger includes all three in the Team plan.
The billing model is the main reason solo developers prefer it. You know what you are paying every month. A bad deploy does not turn into a surprise invoice.
Setup is fast. The SDK for Laravel, Ruby, Python, Node.js, and other frameworks installs in minutes. There is less configuration to think about compared to Sentry. If you want something running in production today and never want to think about it again, Honeybadger is the right call.
The support is also consistently praised in reviews. Honeybadger is a small team and they respond like it. For an indie hacker who needs an answer quickly, that matters more than it sounds.
What Honeybadger does not do well
Performance monitoring is shallower than Sentry. You can see slow requests, but you cannot trace a slow database query through your whole request lifecycle the way Sentry's performance product can. For most solo developers shipping a SaaS product, this does not matter. For teams debugging complex distributed systems, it might.
The UI is functional but not polished. It gets the job done without the visual depth of Sentry's dashboard. If you want to explore errors with rich filtering and a modern interface, Sentry looks better.
Honeybadger also does not have session replay. Sentry's session replay shows you a video of what the user did before the error. Honeybadger gives you the error context but not the visual playback.
Who should not use Honeybadger
Teams that need deep APM, distributed tracing, or session replay. If your product is past the point where error tracking alone is enough and you need to trace performance issues across microservices, Sentry or Datadog is the right tool.
GlitchTip: Free if you self-host, $15/month if you do not
GlitchTip is open source, Sentry-SDK compatible, and built to be the simplest version of what most developers actually need from error tracking. The migration from Sentry is unusually easy: you change your DSN (the endpoint your SDK sends errors to) and that is it. No code changes. Your existing Sentry SDK works with GlitchTip without modification.
Pricing
- Self-hosted: Free. Download the Docker Compose file, point it at a Postgres database, and run it on a VPS. No ongoing cost beyond your server.
- Cloud hosted free tier: 1,000 events per month. Permanent free plan.
- Cloud hosted paid: Starts at $15/month for higher event volumes. Annual billing available with a discount.
- Self-hosted support plan: $15/user/month if you want official support for your self-hosted instance.
For an indie hacker running a Laravel or Node.js SaaS on a VPS, the self-hosted option is genuinely compelling. You already have the server. GlitchTip runs alongside your app with a standard Docker Compose setup. Your error data stays on your own infrastructure, your bill does not go up when you have a bad deploy, and you are not dependent on a third-party SaaS for a critical development tool.
What GlitchTip does well
Zero cost for self-hosters. If you are already comfortable with Docker and a VPS, self-hosting GlitchTip is a one-time 30-minute setup with no ongoing cost.
Sentry SDK compatibility means migration is fast. Any project already using the Sentry SDK takes five minutes to switch. Change the DSN in your environment config and errors start flowing to GlitchTip immediately.
The feature set covers what most solo developers actually use: error tracking with stack traces and breadcrumbs, uptime monitoring, performance monitoring for slow requests, and release tracking. It is less than Sentry but more than enough for an early-stage product.
Data ownership. For GDPR-conscious founders or anyone building for European users, self-hosting GlitchTip means your error data and user context never leaves your own server.
What GlitchTip does not do well
The UI has not had a major design refresh in several years. It works but it looks dated compared to Sentry or Honeybadger. The dashboard loads noticeably slower in the hosted version.
The cloud hosted free tier of 1,000 events per month is low. A real production app will hit this quickly. The self-hosted option solves this, but it requires server maintenance. Updating GlitchTip, backing up Postgres, and managing the Docker setup is ongoing work even if it is not much.
GlitchTip is also a small open source project. Development is slower than Sentry's. There is no AI debugging agent, no session replay, and the performance monitoring is basic. It is the right tool for teams that want the essentials, not the teams that want the full observability stack.
Who should not use GlitchTip
Anyone who does not want to manage their own infrastructure, even at a light level. If the idea of maintaining a Docker container and a Postgres database alongside your app sounds like more work than it is worth, use the hosted version or pick a different tool. GlitchTip's self-hosted path suits developers who are already comfortable with VPS management.
Side-by-side comparison
| Feature | Sentry | Honeybadger | GlitchTip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes (5K errors, 1 user) | Yes (1 user, permanent) | Yes (1K events or self-hosted) |
| Billing model | Per event (variable) | Per project tier (flat) | Per event hosted / free self-hosted |
| Bill predictability | Low | High | High |
| Error tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Performance monitoring | Yes (deep APM) | Yes (basic) | Yes (basic) |
| Uptime monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cron job checks | Yes | Yes | No |
| Session replay | Yes | No | No |
| AI debugging | Yes (Seer, paid extra) | No | No |
| Self-hosted option | Yes (complex) | Enterprise only | Yes (simple Docker) |
| SDK compatibility | Sentry | Honeybadger-native | Sentry-compatible |
| Best for | Full-featured monitoring | Flat-rate solo dev monitoring | Self-hosters and budget-first teams |
How to choose
Choose Sentry if you need deep APM and session replay, you have a team of 3+ developers who will all use the dashboard, you are willing to configure sampling and quota management, or your app has complex performance issues you need to trace across services.
Choose Honeybadger if you want one flat monthly price with no billing surprises, you need error tracking, uptime, and cron monitoring bundled together, you are a solo founder who wants to install something and trust it, or you value support from a small team that responds quickly.
Choose GlitchTip if you are already using Sentry SDKs and want to self-host for free, you are cost-sensitive and comfortable with Docker on a VPS, you care about data ownership and EU hosting, or you want the minimum viable error tracker without the complexity.
If you are still evaluating more options, the Best Sentry Alternatives for Indie Hackers post covers five more tools including PostHog's free error tracking tier and Better Stack.
FAQ
Is GlitchTip actually free?
Self-hosted GlitchTip is free with no event limits. The hosted cloud version has a permanent free tier limited to 1,000 events per month. Paid hosted plans start at $15/month. For a production app with real traffic, self-hosting is the practical path to keeping the cost at zero.
Can I migrate from Sentry to GlitchTip without changing my code?
Yes. GlitchTip uses the same SDK wire protocol as Sentry. You change the DSN in your environment config to point at your GlitchTip instance and errors flow there immediately. No SDK changes, no code changes.
What happened to Highlight.io?
Highlight.io was acquired by LaunchDarkly in April 2025 and shut down on February 28, 2026. Existing customers were directed to migrate to LaunchDarkly Observability. If you want pure error tracking without feature flags, Sentry, Honeybadger, or GlitchTip are the cleaner alternatives.
Is Honeybadger really flat pricing or does it have hidden costs?
Honeybadger charges per project tier, not per event. The Team plan at $26/month covers your whole account at that tier. Honeybadger processes up to 125% of your plan limit before throttling, and you can optionally enable overage billing if you regularly exceed your quota. The base billing is flat.
Does Sentry's free plan work for a real production app?
For a very early-stage product with low traffic and a solo developer, yes. The 5,000 error limit per month is enough for an app with under 1,000 DAU if you filter out noise. The 1-user dashboard limit is the bigger constraint. Once you have a co-founder or a collaborator who needs to see errors, the free plan becomes a bottleneck.
The bottom line
For most indie hackers at the early-to-mid stage: Honeybadger.
The flat pricing means you know your bill on day one of every month. The bundled uptime and cron monitoring means one tool handles three things you would otherwise pay for separately. The free developer plan lets you test it properly without a clock running.
Sentry is the better tool if you genuinely need deep performance monitoring or session replay. At a small scale it is also free, but it rewards investment in configuration that not every solo developer wants to make.
GlitchTip is the right pick if you self-host and want zero ongoing cost. The migration from Sentry is the easiest of any tool in this space.
If you are migrating from Highlight.io and just want something working today, Honeybadger is the fastest path from zero to production-ready monitoring.
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