The best error monitoring software in 2026 is Sentry for stack traces, Rollbar for the cheapest paid plan ($9/month) and PostHog or Better Stack for the biggest free tier (100,000 exceptions a month each). GlitchTip is the open-source, Sentry-compatible pick, Honeybadger puts errors, uptime and cron checks in one bill, and BugSnag, Raygun and Airbrake round out the paid options. For a free plan, PostHog or Better Stack give the most volume and Sentry gives the best stack traces. For the cheapest paid plan, Rollbar Essentials starts at $9 a month and GlitchTip Small is $15 a month. Whichever you pick, decide your alert policy before you install it, because error tracking without one just builds a queue you stop opening.
Error tracking is easy to buy and hard to keep useful. Within a month most installations are generating more notifications than anyone reads.
If you built your app with Greta, you still need one of these: Greta builds and deploys the app, it doesn't catch its runtime errors. What it changes is the fix, because a clean stack trace from any tool below is exactly what you paste in to describe the bug and ship the patch.
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. Free allowances and prices were re-checked on each vendor's own pricing page on October 25, 2026, and are stated with their billing basis; event-based pricing changes often, so check before you budget.
Error monitoring software compared at a glance
| Tool | Self-host | Free tier (checked October 25 and November 5, 2026) | Entry paid price | Also does | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sentry | Yes (Fair Source licence) | 5,000 errors/month, 1 user, 50 replays | Team $26/month billed annually (50,000 errors) | Tracing, session replay, uptime and cron monitors | Event volume pricing |
| Rollbar | No | 5,000 occurrences/month, 1,000 session replays, unlimited users | Essentials from $9/month ($7.50 billed annually) | Session replay, deploy tracking | Hard stop at the limit by default |
| GlitchTip | Yes (MIT) | 1,000 events/month hosted | Small $15/month (100,000 events) | Uptime checks | Fewer features by design |
| BugSnag | Enterprise on-premises option | 7,500 events/month, 1 user | Select from $20/month billed yearly (50,000 events) | Performance monitoring, release stability | Priced per event tier |
| Honeybadger | No | 5,000 errors/month, 1 user, 1 monitor | Team $26/month ($286/year) | Uptime + cron check-ins, status page | Smaller ecosystem |
| PostHog | Cloud plan compared here | 100,000 exceptions/month | Usage-based above the free allowance | Session replay, product analytics | Usage pricing across products |
| Better Stack | No | 100,000 exceptions/month, 5,000 session replays | Usage-based per exception above the free allowance | Uptime monitors, logs, incident management | Bills several products together |
| Raygun | No | None (14-day free trial) | Basic $40/month billed annually per 100,000 errors ($60 monthly) | Real user monitoring, APM, AI error resolution | No free plan |
| Airbrake | No | None (free trial needs a card) | Dev $19/month (25,000 errors, 1 user; $17 billed yearly) | Performance monitoring, deploy tracking | One user on the entry plan |
| Greta | Your deployment | 5 credits a day | Starter $5/month welcome offer (normally $20/month) | Builds the app | Not an error tracker |
Highlight.io, which was on this list, no longer runs as a separate product. LaunchDarkly announced the acquisition in April 2025, Highlight deprecated its services on February 28, 2026 and directed users to LaunchDarkly Observability, and highlight.io now redirects to launchdarkly.com. If you want its successor, LaunchDarkly's free Developer plan lists 5,000 session replays and 5,000 errors a month.
Error monitoring vs error tracking: is there a difference?
Not in any way that should change what you buy. Vendors sell the same product as error tracking software or as error monitoring tools, and searchers use both phrases for the same thing. If you want to split hairs, error tracking is the capture side: each exception is recorded with its stack trace, grouped with others like it and tied to the release that shipped it. Error monitoring is the watching side: alert rules, error-rate trends and the dashboard that tells you whether today's deploy made things worse. Every tool on this list does both. Pick on free-tier volume, price at your volume and stack-trace quality, not on the label. If you only want to know when the site stops responding, that's uptime monitoring, which is a different job.
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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. The free Developer plan is one user, 5,000 errors, 50 replays and 30 days of history; Team is $26 a month billed annually with unlimited users and 50,000 errors. 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. Turn on spike protection, which applies a dynamic rate limit per project, and set a per-key rate limit on day one, not after the invoice. Self-hosting is free, but note the licence: Sentry describes itself as Fair Source under the Functional Source License, which is not OSI open source, and the self-hosted version has no spike protection and no dedicated support.
GlitchTip says it is "compatible with Sentry client SDKs", so you can point an existing Sentry SDK at it, and it is MIT-licensed if you want to self-host. The hosted free plan is 1,000 events a month (uptime checks count as events), and Small is $15 a month for 100,000. That is a real option for a small app where the hosted Sentry 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. BugSnag is owned by SmartBear; its free plan is one user and 7,500 events a month, and Select starts at $20 a month billed yearly for 50,000 events. Rollbar's free plan gives 5,000 occurrences and 1,000 session replays a month with unlimited users, and paid plans are Essentials (from $9 a month, or $7.50 billed annually, for 10,000 occurrences) and Advanced (from $13 a month). Honeybadger is the best-shaped for a solo maintainer: errors, uptime and cron check-ins in one bill, and its free Developer plan includes 5,000 errors a month plus one monitor (uptime check or check-in), so you are not assembling three tools to answer "is it up and did the nightly job run". PostHog puts the session replay next to the error, which turns "cannot reproduce" into a recording. Better Stack added error tracking to its uptime, logs and incident platform; it describes itself as "Sentry-compatible", its free plan includes 100,000 exceptions and 5,000 session replays a month, and it is the natural pick if you already use Better Stack for uptime and on-call.
Raygun and Airbrake are the two paid-only options worth knowing about. Raygun has no free plan, only a 14-day trial; its Crash Reporting Basic plan is $40 a month billed annually for 100,000 errors ($60 billed monthly), with unlimited apps and members and on-demand errors at $0.002 each above that. It suits a team that also wants real user monitoring and APM from the same vendor. Airbrake's Dev plan starts at $19 a month for 25,000 errors and one user ($17 billed yearly), and Basic at $38 adds unlimited users. It covers errors and performance monitoring at a flat price, but even the free trial needs a credit card, so it's not a tool to try on a whim.
Best free error monitoring and tracking tools
If the budget is zero, the free tiers are not equal. PostHog and Better Stack are the largest by volume (100,000 exceptions a month each on PostHog's and Better Stack's pricing pages, both with 5,000 session recordings). BugSnag gives 7,500 events, while Sentry, Rollbar and Honeybadger each give 5,000. Sentry and Honeybadger limit the free plan to one user; Rollbar's free plan has unlimited users. GlitchTip's hosted free plan is the smallest at 1,000 events, but its MIT-licensed self-hosted version costs nothing beyond the server you run it on. Raygun and Airbrake have no free plan at all, only trials. Pick on the volume your app actually produces in a bad week, not a good one.
Cheapest error tracking tools
If you need a paid plan (more volume, more users or longer retention), the entry prices on each vendor's pricing page (checked October 25, 2026, and November 5 for Raygun and Airbrake) rank like this:
| Rank | Tool and plan | Entry price | Included volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rollbar Essentials | $9/month ($7.50 billed annually) | 10,000 occurrences |
| 2 | GlitchTip Small | $15/month | 100,000 events |
| 3 | Airbrake Dev | $19/month ($17 billed yearly) | 25,000 errors, 1 user |
| 4 | BugSnag Select | From $20/month billed yearly | 50,000 events |
| 5 | Sentry Team | $26/month billed annually | 50,000 errors |
| 5 | Honeybadger Team | $26/month ($286/year) | 50,000 errors, 5 uptime monitors |
| 7 | Raygun Basic | $40/month billed annually ($60 monthly) | 100,000 errors |
Per event, GlitchTip is the cheapest hosted option on this list (100,000 events for $15), and self-hosting GlitchTip or Sentry costs only the server. PostHog and Better Stack have no fixed entry plan: you pay per exception once you pass the free 100,000, so a quiet app can stay at $0 for a long time. The cheapest tool on paper stops being cheap during a crash loop, so check what each does at the limit: Rollbar stops processing by default, GlitchTip throttles and then blocks at twice your limit unless you turn on capped on-demand billing, and Sentry applies spike protection.
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Production error tracking: what to set up
Installing the SDK is ten minutes. Making it useful in production is three settings: tag every event with a release (so you can tell whether a deploy made things worse), upload source maps or debug symbols (or your stack traces point at minified code), and set a rate limit before the first crash loop rather than after it. The alert policy below is the fourth.
Error tracking for web apps and React
For a web app, the front end is where most unreadable errors come from, because production JavaScript is minified. Sentry, Rollbar ("Source maps, symbolication, and ProGuard support"), BugSnag (source maps are among the mapping files it uses to deobfuscate stack traces) and Honeybadger all document source map support. Upload them as part of each deploy and tag the release, and a React error points at the component and line you wrote instead of a minified bundle. Sentry, Rollbar and PostHog also attach a session replay, which matters for front-end bugs that only happen after a specific sequence of clicks.
Session-based error monitoring
Some tools attach a recording of what the user did to the error itself. Sentry links errors, traces and console logs to the replay timeline (50 replays a month on the free plan). PostHog says "every issue comes with the affected user's session replay" (5,000 recordings free). Rollbar's free plan includes 1,000 session replays. LogRocket is replay-first and prices by sessions, with error events unlimited on its plans. Better Stack's free plan includes 5,000 session replays alongside its 100,000 exceptions. GlitchTip, BugSnag and Honeybadger do not list session replay on the pricing pages we checked. Replay matters most for front-end bugs that only happen in a specific click sequence; for a backend job that fails at 3am, the stack trace is the evidence.
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PostHog vs Rollbar, Honeybadger and Better Stack
PostHog comes up against each of these because its free allowance is large and it already runs product analytics for many small teams.
- PostHog vs Rollbar: PostHog's free plan is 20 times larger (100,000 exceptions against 5,000 occurrences) and puts errors next to analytics and replays. Rollbar is the more focused error tracker, with deploy and version tracking, unlimited users on the free plan and a predictable fixed price from $9 a month.
- PostHog vs Honeybadger: pick Honeybadger if you also want uptime monitoring, cron check-ins and a status page in the same bill; pick PostHog if reproduction is the bottleneck and you want each error tied to a recording.
- PostHog vs Better Stack: both give 100,000 exceptions and 5,000 session replays free. Better Stack fits if you already need uptime monitoring, logs and on-call; PostHog fits if you already need product analytics and feature flags. Better Stack says it accepts Sentry SDKs, so you can switch to it from Sentry without changing your instrumentation.
If you are leaving Rollbar, the usual alternatives are Sentry (better stack traces and tracing), BugSnag (release stability scores) and GlitchTip (cheaper per event, self-hostable).
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.
Most of those alerts end up as tickets. If you're choosing where the tickets live, our Jira alternatives roundup compares Linear, GitHub Issues, GitLab, Shortcut and others on free plans and price.
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 trackers 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. The free tier is 5 credits a day; Starter is a $5/month welcome offer (normally $20/month).
In the weeks right after launch, reading every new error each day is one line of a first-month operating plan, next to a restore you've actually tested, an uptime check and shipping fixes one at a time so each new error can be traced to a release. Error tracking tells you something broke inside the app; an uptime monitor tells you nobody can reach it, and you want both. If a webhook handler is the thing throwing, the webhook tools guide covers replaying the events it dropped, and when an error turns into an outage, the incident handoff template keeps the fix and the follow-up in one place.
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FAQ
What is the best error monitoring software? 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. PostHog if reproduction is your bottleneck and you want replay attached to each error.
What is the best free error tracking tool? For volume, PostHog or Better Stack (100,000 exceptions a month free on each). For the best stack traces on a free plan, Sentry's Developer plan (5,000 errors a month, one user). For a team on a free plan, Rollbar (5,000 occurrences a month, unlimited users). Sentry, BugSnag, Rollbar, Honeybadger, GlitchTip, PostHog and Better Stack all have a free tier; Raygun does not (it offers a 14-day trial), and neither does Airbrake (its trial needs a credit card).
What is the cheapest error tracking tool? For a fixed paid plan, Rollbar Essentials at $9 a month ($7.50 billed annually) for 10,000 occurrences. Per event, GlitchTip Small is cheaper: $15 a month for 100,000 events. If your volume fits a free tier, PostHog and Better Stack cost nothing up to 100,000 exceptions a month.
Which error tracking tools track releases? All of the main ones. Sentry (releases), Rollbar (deploy and version tracking, including on the free plan), BugSnag (release stability scores) and Honeybadger (deployment tracking) let you tie errors to a release, so you can see whether a deploy made things worse.
Is Sentry's free tier enough? For a small app with a healthy error rate and one developer, often yes. It stops being enough exactly when you need it most, during an incident generating a flood of events, so turn on spike protection and rate limits regardless of tier.
Is Sentry open source? Not in the OSI sense. Sentry describes itself as Fair Source under the Functional Source License, which converts to Apache 2.0 after two years. If you need an MIT-licensed tracker that accepts Sentry SDKs, GlitchTip is the usual choice.
What happened to Highlight.io? LaunchDarkly acquired Highlight in April 2025, and Highlight deprecated its services on February 28, 2026. Former users were directed to LaunchDarkly Observability.
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.
