Sentry is the industry standard for error monitoring, but its pricing can sting fast. We tested the best alternatives under $50/month—Highlight, Better Stack, and Apache SkyWalking—to find which gives startups the most bang for their buck.
20× Sentry's free error allowance (100k/mo), session replay that shows exactly what users did before errors, and a $50/mo paid plan that's genuinely usable for growing teams.
Replaces uptime monitoring, log management, and status pages with one tool. Free tier includes 3 team members and 1 GB log retention.
Full APM with distributed tracing and topology maps for microservices. Completely free and open-source, but requires self-hosting.
Sentry is the default pick for error monitoring, and for good reason—it's powerful, well-documented, and everywhere. But if you're bootstrapping or pre-Series A, that $26/developer price tag adds up fast. Once you scale beyond the free tier's 5,000 errors, you're looking at a bill that can hit hundreds before you've even shipped your first real feature.1
The good news? A wave of modern alternatives has stepped up to offer the things actually worth buying for a fraction of the cost. We tested the top contenders under $50/month across three critical dimensions: error capture depth, session replay quality, and pricing transparency. Here's what we found.
Highlight.io is the closest you'll get to Sentry's feature set without the sticker shock. It combines error monitoring with session replay, giving you a video-like playback of exactly what the user did before things broke.2
Where Highlight really shines is its free tier: 100,000 errors per month, plus 500 session replays. That's 20× Sentry's free error allowance. Even if you outgrow it, the paid plan starts at $50/month for unlimited errors and 5,000 session replays—right at our cutoff and genuinely usable for a growing team.2
The session replay is the standout feature. You can watch a user's clicks, scrolls, and navigation alongside console logs and network requests. For debugging frontend issues, this is transformative—you stop guessing and start seeing.
Who it's for: Teams that need Sentry-level depth but can't justify the per-developer pricing. If session replay matters to you, this is the pick.
Better Stack started as a simple uptime monitor (you might know it as Better Uptime) and has grown into a full observability platform that now includes log management and incident response.3
For startups, the appeal is consolidation. Instead of paying separate vendors for uptime monitoring, log aggregation, and status pages, Better Stack bundles them into one clean dashboard. The free tier includes 3 team members, 10 heartbeat monitors, and 1 GB of log retention—enough to evaluate seriously.3
The log management is where it competes with Sentry. You get structured logging with live tailing, search, and alerting. It's not as deep on error-specific features (no session replay, no stack trace grouping), but for teams that want one tool instead of three, the trade-off is worth it.
Who it's for: Startups that want to replace multiple monitoring tools with one. If you need uptime + logs + status pages under one roof, this is your pick.
Apache SkyWalking is the wildcard: a full-featured APM (application performance monitoring) system that's completely free and open-source, designed for distributed systems and microservices.1
SkyWalking goes beyond error tracking into distributed tracing, service mesh observability, and topology maps. If you're running Kubernetes or a microservices architecture, it gives you visibility that Sentry doesn't even attempt—showing how requests flow across services, where latency spikes, and which service is the bottleneck.
The catch: you self-host it. That means DevOps overhead. But if you already have infrastructure experience, the payoff is enormous. No per-developer licensing, no error caps, no surprise bills. Just a powerful APM that scales with you.
Who it's for: Technical teams running microservices who prefer self-hosting. If you want the most capability per dollar and can manage your own infrastructure, this is unbeatable.
| Feature | Highlight.io | Better Stack | Apache SkyWalking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Error monitoring | ✅ Deep, with session replay | ✅ Basic, with log context | ✅ Full APM tracing |
| Session replay | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| Log management | ❌ No | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (via tracing) |
| Uptime monitoring | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
If you want the most direct Sentry replacement with session replay, Highlight.io is our top pick—it matches Sentry's core features at a fraction of the cost. If you're consolidating multiple tools into one, Better Stack offers the best bundled value. And if you're technical enough to self-host and need APM-grade observability, Apache SkyWalking gives you enterprise capability for zero licensing cost.
No matter which you choose, you're getting better value than Sentry's per-developer pricing. For startups watching every dollar, that's the thing actually worth buying.
Prices and features verified as of publication. Free tiers and plans are subject to change.
| Pick | Price | Error Allowance | Session Replay | Paid Start | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Highlight.io ▶ Pick | — | 100k/mo free | 500/mo free | $50/mo | Check price ↗ |
Better Stack best for combined uptime and log management | — | 1 GB logs free | Not available | $29/mo | Check price ↗ |
Apache SkyWalking best free, self-hosted apm | — | Unlimited (self-hosted) | Not available | Free | Check price ↗ |
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Each contender was provisioned on a clean cloud box and driven through its real workflow — the agent ran the official setup where one existed, then exercised the core features the way a new user would across a week of trials before scoring.
| ❌ No |
| Self-hosted | ❌ No | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Free tier errors | 100k/mo | 1 GB logs | Unlimited |
| Paid start | $50/mo | $29/mo | Free |
| Setup complexity | Low | Low | High |
