Sentry is the category standard and the right default — generous free tier, excellent stack traces, and it self-hosts. GlitchTip is the lightweight open-source option that speaks Sentry's protocol, so your existing SDK works. Bugsnag and Rollbar are the mature alternatives with stronger release-health framing. Honeybadger bundles error tracking with uptime and cron monitoring, which is the right shape for a solo maintainer. Highlight adds session replay to the error. The thing nobody tells you: error tracking without an alert policy just builds a queue you stop opening. Decide your noise budget before you pick the tool, because that is what you will actually live with.
Error tracking is easy to buy and hard to keep useful. Within a month most installations are generating more notifications than anyone reads.
How we compared
Free tier usefulness at low volume, quality of the stack trace and grouping, self-host option, what alerting looks like by default, and what it costs when a single bad deploy generates fifty thousand events. That last one is where the bills come from.
At a glance
| Tool | Self-host | Free tier | Also does | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentry | Yes | Generous | Performance, replay | Event volume pricing |
| GlitchTip | Yes | Open source | Uptime checks | Fewer features by design |
| Bugsnag | No | Limited | Release health | Priced per event tier |
| Rollbar | No | Limited | Deploy tracking | Similar volume model |
| Honeybadger | No | Limited | Uptime + cron monitoring | Smaller ecosystem |
| Highlight | Yes | Open source | Session replay | Newer project |
| Greta | Your deployment | 30 credits/mo (5/day) | Builds the app | Not an error tracker |
Pricing shapes checked September 2026 — event-based pricing changes often; verify live.
The tools, honestly
Sentry is the default for a reason: the stack traces are the best in the category, grouping is genuinely good, and the SDK exists for whatever you are using. It is also the one most likely to surprise you on cost, because a single crash loop can emit tens of thousands of events in an hour. Set a rate limit on day one, not after the invoice.
GlitchTip implements Sentry's ingest protocol, so you can point an existing Sentry SDK at it and self-host. That is a real option for a small app where the hosted bill is disproportionate, and the trade is a smaller feature surface.
Bugsnag and Rollbar both frame around release health — is this version worse than the last one — which is a more useful question than raw error count. Honeybadger is the best-shaped for a solo maintainer: errors, uptime and cron monitoring in one bill, so you are not assembling three tools to answer "is it up and did the nightly job run". Highlight puts session replay next to the error, which turns "cannot reproduce" into a video.
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The part that decides whether you keep using it
Alert policy. The default configuration on most of these notifies on every new issue, which is correct for week one and unbearable by week four. A workable policy for a small app: alert immediately on a new issue affecting more than one user, alert on any regression of a previously resolved issue, and digest everything else daily. Everything that does not meet the bar goes to a dashboard you check deliberately, not to a channel you mute.
The second thing: attach a release identifier to every event. Without it you cannot answer whether a deploy made things worse, which is the only error-tracking question that reliably changes what you do next.
Where this sits if you built the app with AI
An app generated from a description still throws exceptions at runtime, and the tracking story is identical — install an SDK, tag releases, set alert rules. Worth being plain: Greta builds and deploys the app, it does not replace an error tracker, and you should install one of the six above. What it does change is the fix loop, because a good stack trace plus the bug report template is exactly the input needed to describe a fix precisely. Free tier is 30 credits a month (5 a day); $20/month after ($5 with the current welcome offer).
FAQ
What is the best error tracking tool? Sentry for most people. GlitchTip if you want to self-host cheaply and your SDK already speaks Sentry. Honeybadger if you want uptime and cron monitoring in the same bill. Highlight if reproduction is your bottleneck.
Is Sentry's free tier enough? For a small app with a healthy error rate, often yes. It stops being enough exactly when you need it most — during an incident generating a flood of events — so configure client-side rate limiting regardless of tier.
Do I need error tracking and uptime monitoring? They answer different questions. Error tracking says something broke inside the app; uptime monitoring says nobody can reach it. An app can be fully up and broken for every user, and down with zero errors reported.
How do I stop alert fatigue? Raise the bar for immediate alerts to things affecting more than one user, alert on regressions, digest the rest. An alert channel everyone has muted is worse than no alerting, because it looks like coverage.
