Sentry vs Highlight vs LogRocket

If you only need errors and stack traces, pick Sentry. If you need session replay plus errors plus logs in one full-stack tool (with an open-source option), pick Highlight.io. If your buyers are product managers and marketers who live in session replay, pick LogRocket. The single deciding question is whether "what broke" is enough, or whether you also need "what was the user doing when it broke."

This is a 2026 buying guide for the three most-named tools in the frontend observability space. We use all three across customer engagements, we have shipped integrations for all three, and we will be honest about where each one wins.

The 30-second answer

Most teams pick wrong because they conflate three jobs into one stack.

1. Error tracking is "an exception happened, here is the stack trace, here is the release it shipped in." Sentry built the category, the SDKs are everywhere, and the pricing scales down to free.
2. Session replay is "show me what the user clicked before the bug." LogRocket built that category around marketing and product teams. Highlight added it later, on top of errors and logs.
3. Full-stack observability is "show me the frontend session, the backend logs, and the error, in one timeline." Highlight pitches this hardest. Sentry has been bolting it on since 2022. LogRocket stayed focused on the frontend.

Pick by which job is your primary pain. If you cannot decide, default to Sentry. It is the cheapest to start with and the hardest to outgrow.

Sentry, in one screen

Sentry is the de facto standard for error tracking. It launched in 2008, went open-core, and now has SDKs for every language you care about (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java, .NET, PHP, Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, Unity, Unreal). The hosted product starts free for solo developers, then jumps to $26/month for the Team plan, with usage-based pricing on top for errors, performance events, replays, and attachments.

Where Sentry wins:

• SDK breadth. If you ship a stack that includes a Go backend, a React frontend, and a Swift mobile app, Sentry will instrument all three with first-party SDKs. Highlight and LogRocket are both web-first.
• Release health. Sentry ties errors to git releases and gates rollouts on crash-free session rate. This is the feature most teams underrate until they ship a regression.
• Source-map support. Sentry's source-map pipeline is the best in the category. Upload the maps in your CI, get readable stack traces forever.
• Open source. You can self-host the entire platform for free under the FSL license. The hosting bill is real (Postgres, Kafka, ClickHouse, Snuba, Relay), but the door is open.
• Cost floor. Hobby and side projects run at $0/month indefinitely. Most competitor floors are $50+.

Where Sentry loses:

• Session replay is the youngest module. Sentry added replay in 2022. It works, but the UI is rougher than LogRocket's and the rrweb-based capture has gaps on complex SPAs.
• Logs are an afterthought. Sentry's "Logs" product (launched late 2024) is functional but is not where the engineering investment lives. You will still use Datadog or BetterStack for serious log search.
• Bills surprise you. Usage-based pricing on six dimensions (errors, transactions, replays, profiles, attachments, cron monitors) means a viral week can ten-x your bill. Set quotas day one.

Highlight.io, in one screen

Highlight is the youngest of the three (Y Combinator W21) and the most ambitious. It pitches itself as "all-in-one frontend monitoring": errors, session replay, logs, traces, and metrics in a single open-source platform. The hosted product is $0 for 500 sessions and 1,000 errors monthly, then $150/month for the Pay-as-you-go plan with linear overage, then enterprise pricing for the rest.

Where Highlight wins:

• Open source, end to end. The entire backend (ClickHouse, Postgres, Kafka, otel-collector) is Apache 2.0 on GitHub. Self-host without buying anything.
• OpenTelemetry-native. Highlight is the only one of the three that built its backend around OTel from day one. If your backend already emits OTel traces, Highlight ingests them with no shim.
• Session replay plus logs in one timeline. This is the killer feature. You scrub a replay, hover an error toast, and the backend log line that fired during that exact click expands inline.
• Pricing predictability. One $150/month tier includes the whole product. No surprise replay add-ons or per-seat math.

Where Highlight loses:

• Smaller SDK surface. Web (React, Vue, Angular, Next, Remix), Node, Python, Go, Ruby, Java, .NET. No first-party mobile (you can use OTel SDKs, but it is rougher than Sentry's native ones).
• Smaller community. Sentry has 38k GitHub stars and an enormous Stack Overflow corpus. Highlight has roughly 8k stars and you will sometimes be the first person to hit a bug.
• The "everything in one" pitch cuts both ways. Each module is good. None is the absolute best in its category. If you need world-leading session replay, LogRocket is still ahead.

LogRocket, in one screen

LogRocket is the session-replay specialist. It started in 2016, raised $33M, and built the slickest replay viewer in the market. Pricing starts at $99/month for 10k sessions on the Team plan, climbs to $350/month for Professional (25k sessions, 12-month retention), then enterprise.

Where LogRocket wins:

• Session replay UX. The viewer is the cleanest in the category. Network panel, Redux state diff, console logs, and DOM events on one timeline. PMs and designers can drive it without help.
• Funnel and conversion analytics. LogRocket builds product analytics on top of replay. You can chart conversion drop-offs and click into the replays of users who churned at each step.
• Heatmaps and rage clicks. First-party heatmaps and frustration signals (rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks). Useful for UX teams that would otherwise buy FullStory or Hotjar separately.
• Marketing and PM adoption. If your buyer is the product or marketing team, LogRocket is the easiest to demo. Sentry feels like a developer tool. LogRocket feels like Mixpanel with playback.

Where LogRocket loses:

• Error tracking is the weakest module. Errors get captured, but the workflow around them (triage, ownership, release gating) is thinner than Sentry.
• No serious backend story. LogRocket is frontend-first. The backend SDK exists but is not the primary use case.
• Cost floor is high. $99/month minimum means hobby projects and pre-revenue startups will pick something else. There is no free tier beyond a 14-day trial.

Head-to-head comparison

Factor	Sentry	Highlight.io	LogRocket
Free tier	Yes, indefinite	Yes, 500 sessions / 1k errors monthly	14-day trial only
Paid floor	$26/month	$150/month	$99/month
Open source	Yes (FSL)	Yes (Apache 2.0)	No
Session replay quality	Good	Very good	Excellent
Error tracking quality	Excellent	Very good	Adequate
Logs	Basic (2024+)	First-class	Console capture only
Backend SDKs	30+ languages	~8 languages	Node, Python (light)
Mobile SDKs	Native iOS, Android, RN, Flutter	OTel only	Web SDK on RN WebView
OpenTelemetry-native	Partial	Yes	No
Best buyer	Engineering	Engineering plus PM	PM plus marketing
Self-host option	Yes	Yes	No

When to choose Sentry

• You ship in a language other than JavaScript and need first-party SDKs.
• Your team is engineering-led and your primary observability question is "what broke."
• You want a free tier that lasts forever for side projects and OSS work.
• You ship mobile apps (iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter).
• You want release health, source-map ingestion, and crash-free session rate as first-class features.
• You have a budget under $50/month and need the lowest cost floor.

When to choose Highlight.io

• You want errors plus session replay plus logs in one tool, on one bill.
• Your backend already emits OpenTelemetry traces.
• You want the option to self-host the entire stack for free.
• Your team is small and you do not want to glue three vendors together with internal tooling.
• You are an engineering team that wants session replay without buying LogRocket-class UX.
• You are early enough that switching tools later is cheap.

When to choose LogRocket

• Your buyer or daily user is a PM, designer, or marketer.
• Session replay is the primary product, not a side feature.
• You want heatmaps, rage clicks, and funnel analytics in one platform.
• Your stack is heavily frontend (React, Vue, Angular) and the backend is someone else's problem.
• You already pay for Sentry or BetterStack for errors and you just need replay on top.
• Budget for observability is product-team budget, not engineering budget.

The realistic stack most teams ship with

We work with hundreds of founders shipping production apps, and the most common pattern we see is not "pick one." It is layered:

• Year 0 (pre-revenue): Sentry free tier only. Errors and basic performance. Skip session replay entirely.
• Year 1 (early traction): Sentry Team ($26/month) plus the cheapest session replay add-on, or Highlight free tier if you want both in one place.
• Year 2 (post product-market fit): Either Sentry + LogRocket (split tools, best-of-breed) or Highlight Pay-as-you-go ($150/month, one tool, less integration debt).
• Year 3+ (scale): Sentry Business plus Datadog or BetterStack for logs, with LogRocket for the product team. Or self-hosted Highlight if your data-privacy posture demands it.

The trap is buying LogRocket at year 0 because the demo is shiny, then realizing you also need Sentry, and now you pay $26 + $99 minimum without using either fully. Start with errors only. Add replay when a real customer-support ticket would have been solved by it.

The "what to do" section

Pick one of the three based on your dominant question this quarter.

1. If you cannot finish a customer-support ticket because you have no stack trace, install Sentry today. Free tier, ten minutes, done. See our piece on hourly vs weekly billing for engineers for the analogous "pick the floor that matches the question" framing.
2. If you keep asking your support team to repro bugs and they cannot, install LogRocket. Session replay solves this problem better than any other product on the market.
3. If you want one tool, one bill, and an OSS option, install Highlight. Set a $150/month cap and forget it.

If the instrumentation work is the blocker (most teams say "we will install Sentry next sprint" and then do not for six months), this is a perfect 1-week scope for a Mid engineer at $1,000/week: wire the SDK into every service, set release tagging in CI, configure alert routing in Slack, document the runbook. Every engineer on Cadence is AI-native, vetted on Cursor and Claude Code fluency before they unlock bookings, which matters here because boilerplate observability code is exactly the work that LLMs accelerate the most.

Stuck on which tool to pick or the integration work itself? Cadence ships vetted engineers in 2 minutes with a 48-hour free trial. Book a Mid for the integration sprint or a Senior for the architecture call, pay weekly, replace any week.

FAQ

Can I run Sentry and LogRocket at the same time?

Yes, this is the most common combination we see at growth-stage startups. Sentry owns errors and release health; LogRocket owns session replay and product analytics. You will pay for both, but the workflows do not overlap. Be careful with PII: dedupe your masking config across both SDKs so you do not leak the same field twice.

Is Highlight actually open source or is it open-core?

Fully open source under Apache 2.0, including the backend (ClickHouse, Kafka, Postgres, otel-collector). There is no "Enterprise edition" with locked features. The cloud product is a hosted convenience, not a feature gate. This is more open than Sentry's FSL license, which restricts SaaS-of-the-software competition.

Which one is cheapest at scale?

Self-hosted Highlight or self-hosted Sentry, by a wide margin, if you have an infra engineer who can run ClickHouse and Kafka. On hosted plans, Sentry usually wins at small scale (under 100k errors/month) and Highlight wins at medium scale (under 50k sessions/month). LogRocket gets expensive fast: 100k sessions on the Professional plan is roughly $1,400/month.

Does Sentry have session replay now?

Yes, since 2022. It is functional and improving, and if you are already on Sentry it is the cheapest way to add replay (around $29/month for 50 replays/day on the Team plan). The viewer is a step behind LogRocket and the rrweb-based capture struggles with heavy SPAs (complex shadow DOM, canvas, WebGL). For most apps it is fine. For Figma-class UIs it is not.

What about Datadog RUM, New Relic, or Grafana Faro?

Datadog RUM is excellent if you already pay Datadog and want unified APM plus frontend. It costs roughly 3 to 5 times what Sentry costs for comparable volume, and the UI is overkill for a small team. New Relic Browser is similar. Grafana Faro is the OSS dark horse: free if you self-host the Grafana stack, but you assemble the experience yourself. For a 5-person startup, Sentry or Highlight is the right answer.

Can I migrate from LogRocket to Highlight (or vice versa) later?

Yes. Both capture data through SDKs and store sessions on their own backends, so the migration is "swap the SDK and stop paying the old vendor." Historical sessions do not transfer, but no one re-watches sessions from 6 months ago in practice. Budget half a day to swap SDKs and reconfigure your masking rules. See our writeup on Clerk vs WorkOS for a parallel on how to think about lock-in versus switching cost.