Sentry Error Tracking Review 2025: Features, Pricing & Alternatives

🔄 Updated December 2025 Link to heading
Major Changes Since 2019:
Platform Evolution:
- Performance Monitoring (APM) - Added in 2020, now mature (competes with Datadog APM)
- Profiling - Added in 2022, continuous profiling fo (100+ SDKs)**
- Filtering for Sensitive Data
- Session Replay - See user actions before crashes (2023+)
- Performance Monitoring - APM with transaction tracing (2020+)
- Profiling - CPU/memory profiling in production (2022+)
- Release Health Tracking - Monitor crash-free rates per release
- Cron Monitoring - Background job monitoring (2024+)
- Custom Metrics & Dashboards - Beyond just errors (2024+)
- Source Maps - Readable stack traces for minified code
- Distributed Tracing - Cross-service error tracking23, see actual user sessions when errors occur
- Cron Monitoring - Added in 2024, monitor scheduled jobs and tasks
- Metrics & Dashboards - Added in 2024, custom metrics and visualization
Pricing Changes:
- More sophisticated usage-based pricing
- Free tier expanded (better for small projects)
- Performance monitoring priced separately from errors
- Session replay add-on pricing
Why Sentry Still Stands Out in 2025:
- ✅ Best-in-class error tracking with source map support
- ✅ Session replay shows exactly what users did before crash
- ✅ Full-stack observability (errors + performance + profiling)
- ✅ 100+ SDKs and integrations (most comprehensive in industry)
- ✅ Still offers robust self-hosted option
- ⚠️ Can get expensive at scale with all features enabled
- ⚠️ Learning curve for optimizing costs
Summary: Link to heading
Sentry is a crash analytics reporting platform. Link to heading
Features: Link to heading
- SaaS-based or On-Premise Solutions
- Cloud Agnostic
- An Abundant amount of Languages & Frameworks Covered
- Filtering for Sensitive Data
Deployment: Link to heading
- Set up a Project in Sentry and choose your language or framework for simple step-by-step instructions.
- Add any additional instrumentation per instructions.
Usability: Link to heading
- Hands down this is one of the best bang for the buck tools out there for those of you interested in getting to the bottom of application crashes.
- For On-Premise, this is a pretty easy install, is entirely open-source, and is even offered as a Docker image.
- Your developers will find this very easy to implement within code and it provides a neat little workflow where you can assign crashes to team members. (2025 Update):
SaaS Pricing:
Developer - FREE
- 5K errors/month
- 10K performance units/month
- 1 user
- 30-day retention
- Great for personal projects/startups
Team - $26/month
- 50K errors/month
- 100K performance units/month
- Unlimited users
- 90-day retention
- Email support
- Session replay: $9/month add-on (500 replays)
Business - $80/month
- 100K errors/month
- 100K performance units/month
- Unlimited users
- Unlimited retention
- Priority support
- Session replay included (10K replays)
- SSO, custom integrations
Enterprise - Custom
- Custom error/performance quotas
2025 Comparison: Sentry vs Alternatives Link to heading
Sentry vs Datadog:
- Sentry: Better for pure error tracking, cheaper, session replay superior
- Datadog: Better for full observability stack (logs + metrics + APM + infra)
- Use both: Many teams use Sentry for errors, Datadog for infrastructure
Sentry vs Rollbar:
- Sentry: More features (APM, profiling, session replay), better free tier
- Rollbar: Simpler, focused on errors only, sometimes preferred by small teams
- Winner: Sentry for most use cases in 2025
Sentry vs New Relic:
- Sentry: Better error UX, session replay, cheaper for error-focused needs
- New Relic: Full observability platform, better for enterprise monitoring
- Consider: New Relic if you need complete observability, Sentry if errors/performance are primary concern
Sentry vs Bugsnag:
- Sentry: Better features, pricing, and community
- Bugsnag: Simpler mobile focus
- Winner: Sentry
2025 Recommendation: Link to heading
Choose Sentry if:
- You need best-in-class error tracking
- Session replay is valuable (debugging complex issues)
- You have multiple languages/frameworks
- Budget-conscious (great free tier and pricing)
- Want self-hosted option
Consider Alternatives if:
- Already all-in on Datadog (use their error tracking)
- Need enterprise-wide observability platform (New Relic, Datadog)
- Only doing mobile (Bugsnag might be simpler)
For most teams in 2025: Sentry remains the gold standard for error tracking with unbeatable value at every tier.
— SLA guarantees
- Dedicated support
- Advanced security features
- On-premise option available SaaS: https://sentry.io/
- Self-Hosted Documentation: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/
- Pricing Calculator: https://sentry.io/pricing/
- Documentation: https://docs.sentry.io Self-Hosted (Open Source):
- FREE - Unlimited everything
- Requires: Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, ~4GB RAM minimum
- Community support only
- You maintain and upgrade
Real-World Costs:
- Startup (100K req/day): ~$26-80/month
- Mid-size (1M req/day): ~$200-500/month
- Enterprise (10M+ req/day): $1000+/month
Cost Optimization Tips:
- Use sampling for performance monitoring (10-25% sampling is often sufficient)
- Filter out noisy errors (bots, known issues)
- Use quotas per project to control costs
- Self-host if you have DevOps capacity
List Pricing: Link to heading
- Developer Tier - Free (one project)
- Team - $26/100k events/mo
- Business - $80/100k events/mo
- On-Premise (self-hosted) - open-source
I’ve found Sentry to be an invaluable tool that provides great value to DevOps teams. I’ve run it on-premise and have used their SaaS platform. There is different pricing, depending on the number of events you expect to process per month.
Coverage: Link to heading
- Just about every language and a significant amount of popular frameworks are covered.
- There are also integrations for popular notification services.
Considerations: Link to heading
- It’s an excellent platform when you have a bunch of different languages to support in your stack.
- It’s also a great way to get developers out of silos and foster collaborative problem-solving.
- On-Premise is entirely free and has the added benefit of not having to worry about any sensitive information being logged in crashes; however, the SaaS solution also provides the ability to filter out sensitive info and does a very good job at this, so it isn’t exactly a deal-breaker.
- For a startup, at $26/mo, it is well worth going the SaaS route since you won’t need to keep up with a server or the maintenance involved with it.
- If your Sentry DSN is unavailable, or in the case of on-premise, is unavailable - you may have trouble loading your application, depending on how you load up raven on startup. Plan accordingly for this condition!
Contact: Link to heading
- On-Premise: https://docs.sentry.io/server/
- SaaS: https://sentry.io/welcome/