Better Stack vs Sentry
Observability + uptime + incident management in one — modern alternative to Datadog
vs. Application monitoring, error tracking, tracing, session replay
Pricing tiers
Better Stack
Pay-as-you-go
Ingest $0.15/GB, retention $0.08/GB/month. Metrics $0.75/GB/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free
10 monitors + heartbeats, 1 status page. 3GB logs @ 3-day retention. 30GB metrics. 100K exceptions/mo. 5k session replays.
Free
Telemetry — Nano
$30/mo ($25 annual). 40 GB logs/traces/metrics. 30-day retention.
$30/mo
Responder License
$34/mo ($29 annual) per responder. Unlimited phone + SMS alerts. Required for on-call.
$34/mo
Telemetry — Micro
$120/mo. 160 GB.
$120/mo
Telemetry — Mega
$250/mo. 340 GB.
$250/mo
Telemetry — Tera
$500/mo. 700 GB.
$500/mo
Sentry
Developer (Free)
Single user. 5k errors + 5M spans + 5GB logs + 50 replays + 1GB attachments per month.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
BSL-licensed. Docker-based deploy. Free for personal/internal, commercial requires license.
$0 base (usage-based)
Team
$26/mo annual ($29/mo). Unlimited users. 50k errors/mo. 20 custom dashboards. Third-party integrations.
$26/mo
Business
$80/mo annual. 90-day insights lookback, unlimited dashboards, anomaly-detection alerts, SAML + SCIM.
$80/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated TAM, premium support, single-tenant option.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Better Stack vs self-hosted on Sentry.
| Metric | Better Stack | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Better Stack · 13 features
- Dashboards — SQL + chart-based dashboards.
- Distributed Tracing — OpenTelemetry traces with span analysis.
- Error Tracking — Sentry-style error capture per $0.000075/exception.
- Heartbeats (Cron) — Dead-man-switch style alerts for cron/scheduled jobs.
- Logs (formerly Logtail) — Centralized structured logging with live tail + SQL.
- Metrics — Prometheus-compatible metrics ingest + visualization.
- On-Call & Incidents — Schedules, escalations, incident response with postmortems.
- Phone + SMS Alerts — Unlimited phone + SMS on Responder license.
- Reporting & Analytics — +$5/member/month add-on.
- Session Replay — Integrated with error events.
- SQL Queries over Logs — ClickHouse-backed SQL on all ingested telemetry.
- Status Pages — Hosted status pages with custom domain + brandable.
- Uptime Monitoring — HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP, UDP monitors. Global checkpoints.
Sentry · 16 features
- Alerts — Metric + issue-based alerts routed to Slack/PagerDuty/email/etc.
- Cron Monitoring — Check-in pings for scheduled jobs. Alert on missed/failed runs.
- Distributed Tracing — Performance monitoring spans across services. Connect frontend → backend → DB.
- Error Tracking — Capture exceptions with stack traces, breadcrumbs, tags, release info, user cont…
- Insights — Pre-built dashboards per domain: Frontend, Backend, Mobile, AI, Database, LLM, e…
- LLM Monitoring — Track OpenAI/Anthropic/etc calls, token usage, cost, errors.
- Logs — Centralized structured logging correlated with errors + traces.
- Profiling — CPU profiling for Python, Node.js, Go, PHP, Ruby, Android, iOS.
- Release Health — Adoption + crash-free rate per release version.
- Releases — Track deploys, commit hooks, source map upload, bisect.
- Seer (AI Debug) — Root cause analysis + fix suggestions for issues via AI.
- Self-Hosting — Docker-based self-host. Feature parity.
- Session Replay — Record DOM + network to replay user sessions that hit errors.
- Source Maps — Auto-symbolicate minified code. Upload via CLI or Webpack/Vite plugin.
- Uptime Monitoring — Synthetic checks for HTTP endpoints.
- User Feedback — In-app feedback widget tied to sessions.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Better Stack | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Sentry CLI |
| SDK | logtail-ruby, pino-logtail / winston transport, python-logtail | sentry-android, @sentry/browser, sentry-cocoa (iOS), sentry-dotnet, sentry_flutter, sentry-go, sentry-java, @sentry/node, sentry-php, @sentry/react-native, sentry-ruby, sentry-sdk (Python), sentry-unity |
| REST | Better Stack REST API, Telemetry API | Sentry REST API |
| MCP | — | Sentry MCP |
| OTHER | OTLP (OpenTelemetry), Webhooks | Webhooks (Alerts) |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Better Stack and Sentry are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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