Nobody argues about whether error tracking matters. An unhandled exception in checkout needs to land on an engineer's screen with a stack trace attached, full stop. What teams argue about is the invoice, because most hosted vendors meter raw event volume, and a single retry loop can burn a month of quota before lunch. I wrote a longer version of this comparison on DevToolLab with a full side-by-side table; here's the condensed version.
Two things reset the calculation in 2026. Sentry's Team plan is $26/month with annual billing for 50,000 errors, and every event past that is billed individually. Meanwhile Highlight.io, one of the better-funded open-source contenders, shut down on February 28, 2026, and told every customer to repoint their SDK at LaunchDarkly Observability inside 48 hours. Picking a tracker now is partly a bet on who is still around in two years.
Why teams actually leave Sentry
The complaints are consistent across teams. Billing is metered on events you don't control, so a noisy third-party script can inflate your bill without any real increase in bugs. Team and Business plans both include the same 50,000-error allotment; the extra $54/month buys features, not headroom.
Self-hosting is heavy too. Sentry's own docs ask for 4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM plus 16 GB swap, and a stack that includes Kafka, Redis and ClickHouse. And the self-hosted distribution ships under the Functional Source License: free to run internally, converts to Apache 2.0 after two years, but you can't resell it as a service. Fair source, not open source, and the distinction matters if compliance cares.
Drop-in versus platform swap
Two migration shapes exist here. Drop-in replacements speak Sentry's own ingestion protocol, so the official Sentry SDK stays in your code and only the DSN environment variable changes. GlitchTip and Bugsink both work this way.
Platform swaps replace the SDK and the mental model that goes with it. PostHog folds exceptions into the session replay it already records, SigNoz treats an error as one signal inside an OpenTelemetry trace, and Honeybadger and BugSnag are standalone products with their own SDKs. More setup, but more context once it's running.
GlitchTip: the closest thing to a straight swap
GlitchTip is MIT licensed end to end, the only tool on this list that's unambiguously open source, and it accepts events straight from the official Sentry SDKs. Point the DSN at it and you're done. Self-hosting runs on Postgres, Redis and Celery, nowhere near the Kafka/ClickHouse weight of Sentry itself, and hosted pricing undercuts Sentry at volume: $50/month covers 500,000 events versus Sentry's uncapped overage past 50,000. You give up performance monitoring and session replay in exchange.
Bugsink: error tracking on a $5 VPS
Bugsink takes the same Sentry-protocol compatibility and strips the operational surface down further: single Docker container, SQLite by default, no Redis and no queue to babysit. It captures the error, shows the stack trace with local variables, and groups duplicates, and that's the whole feature set. Read the license before standardizing on it though. It's PolyForm Shield 1.0.0, source-available rather than OSI open source, permitting self-hosting but forbidding a competing product built on top of it. The full DevToolLab post goes deeper on exactly where that license restriction bites.
Honeybadger, BugSnag, PostHog and SigNoz
Honeybadger bundles error tracking with uptime checks, cron monitoring and log management on one invoice, pricing mirrors Sentry almost exactly, and its overage runs to 125% of your plan before it stops processing rather than cutting you off mid-incident. It leans toward Ruby, Elixir, PHP and Python shops.
BugSnag, now under SmartBear, is the pick for mobile: its iOS, Android and React Native SDKs are more mature than most competitors, and its stability score gives release engineers a single number to gate a rollout on. Free tier is 7,500 events for one user; paid tiers scale on a quote, not a fixed list.
PostHog attaches every exception to the session replay and analytics it already captures, and its free tier is the most generous here: 100,000 exceptions a month with no credit card, then metered per event ($0.000370 up to 325K, cheaper above that). Self-hosting is MIT-licensed Docker Compose but officially unsupported and capped to free-tier features.
SigNoz is the pick if your real problem is four disconnected observability tools rather than the bill. It's OpenTelemetry-native and MIT licensed at the core, with self-hosting free and cloud starting at $49/month including usage. You trade a purpose-built error UI for a unified trace-plus-logs-plus-metrics view.
Do the math before you pick
Because Sentry and Honeybadger sell error quota, PostHog meters per exception, and SigNoz bills by ingested gigabyte, none of these pricing pages line up directly. The full article has a runnable Node script that takes your monthly event count and prints the cheapest published plan across all five vendors; at 250,000 events a month it puts GlitchTip and Bugsink at $50/month with a fixed quota while Sentry and Honeybadger simply stop publishing a price.
Picking one
Run GlitchTip for the smallest possible change plus a genuinely open license. Run Bugsink if you want error tracking on one box with nothing else to manage, and you're fine with the noncompete clause. If you already pay for PostHog, turn on its error tracking before evaluating anything else. Mobile release trains justify BugSnag's premium, Rails shops consolidating tooling fit Honeybadger, and SigNoz is the answer when the actual complaint is fragmented observability.
Most teams leaving Sentry are leaving over the 50,000-event ceiling or the 16 GB self-hosting floor, not missing features. The DevToolLab version has the full comparison table, the complete cost-calculator script, and a step-by-step migration checklist if you want the deeper cut.
References
- Best Sentry Alternatives in 2026: Open Source Error Tracking Compared - original article on DevToolLab
- Source Map Decoder - verify a source map resolves a minified frame before trusting your new tracker's stack traces
- HAR File Analyzer - inspect the request behind an exception your tracker just grouped
- GlitchTip
- Bugsink
- Honeybadger
- BugSnag
- PostHog error tracking
- SigNoz
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