In-depth: PostHog vs Sentry
Contents
PostHog and Sentry are multi-product platforms trusted by developers to help make their apps better. There is some overlap in how both manage to do that (we're both "telemetry" tools), but many features differ.
Sentry is an application monitoring tool with error and performance monitoring, session replay, code coverage, and more. It's built for engineers and devops teams.
PostHog is an all-in-one platform for building successful products. On top of error tracking, it includes product analytics, session replays, feature flags, surveys, LLM analytics, and more. It's built for engineers and product teams.
How is PostHog different?
1. We focus on user behavior
The core data each product cares about reveals a lot about their priorities:
- PostHog cares about events and people.
- Sentry cares about errors and code.
Broadly, PostHog is mostly a proactive tool that helps you make your product better. Sentry is mostly a reactive tool that helps prevent your product from getting worse.
2. We're free and usage-based
We pride ourselves on having a generous free tier and this shows when compared to Sentry. Our free tier offers 100 times more session replays and 20 times more errors.
Beyond our free tier, our pricing is usage-based and transparent. We also try to be as cheap as possible. Want to know how much we'll charge? See our pricing calculator.
Sentry also limits many of its features, including team collaboration, to its higher, paid tiers.
3. Flexibility and breadth
Sentry is much more focused and opinionated in how you use it. The tools are tailored for developers and devops teams to do error and performance monitoring.
PostHog offers more flexibility and breadth. It's built for developers but also used by marketing, growth, and data teams. Startups and scaleups use PostHog for tracking retention, running targeted A/B tests, booking user interviews, and more.
More examples of this flexibility include PostHog's simpler custom event capture, the ability to import and use data from external sources, and direct SQL querying.
Comparing PostHog and Sentry
Tracking exceptions in PostHog enables you to easily integrate with all of the other products we offer. You can easily create insights to track errors over time, watch replays of users encountering an exception, or target surveys when a user faces a bug.
Given PostHog already tracks context about your users, it is possible to understand the impact of exceptions more accurately. For example, you can filter issues affecting VIP user cohorts, debug errors by watching replays of their sessions, or find errors affecting the most amount of sessions.
Core features
The core of PostHog and Sentry are different. Sentry focuses on error and performance monitoring, while PostHog has error tracking along with a broader suite of tools to help developers build better products.
Sentry includes the ability to create and visualize custom metrics as you would do with product analytics, but its visualizations and customizability is limited compared to PostHog.
PostHog includes network performance tracking in session replay and web vitals tracking in web analytics. This helps you both analyze performance and requests for specific sessions and get an overview of web vitals and areas for improvement.
Platform
- Sentry's free plan is limited to 1 user, 5k errors, and 50 replays, along with several feature restrictions. PostHog has a free plan and a "pay-as-you-go" paid plan with a generous free tier, meaning you get to use all of the features for free.
Error and performance monitoring
Error and performance monitoring is the main focus of Sentry. Although PostHog has a full error tracking app, it's missing some of the tracing and monitoring features that Sentry offers.
Session replay
Replays enable you to watch how users experience your app, diagnose issues, improve support, and understand real user behavior. Both PostHog and Sentry have this as a core part of their offering.
Feedback and surveys
Feedback in Sentry is connected to errors and included as part of the price. It is built to capture feedback, bug reports, and crash reports.
Surveys in PostHog are a standalone product with more customization and targeting options.
Analytics
On the flip side to error and performance monitoring, analytics is a main focus of PostHog where it shines compared to Sentry.
Sentry does have some analytics capabilities but it is limited compared to PostHog's full suite of product analytics features. On top of this, many of Sentry's features like custom dashboards and insights are exclusive to their more expensive business plan.
An error in Sentry and an event in PostHog are relatively similar. Using this as a basis, PostHog has a 200x higher free tier (5k vs 1M).
Sentry only autocaptures errors. If you really wanted to use it to capture clicks and pageviews, you would need to do so manually.
Security and compliance
Integrations
Both PostHog and Sentry work with other tools, but PostHog can act more as a single source of truth for your product and user data. Sentry acts more as one of many producing data in your stack.
Frequently asked questions
How much does PostHog cost?
Every PostHog user gets a generous amount of free usage each month:
| Free usage per month | |
|---|---|
| Error tracking | 100k errors |
| Product analytics | 1 million events |
| Session replay | 5,000 recordings |
| Surveys | 1500 responses |
| LLM analytics | 100k events |
| Feature flags and A/B testing | 1 million API requests |
| Data warehouse | 1 million synced rows |
Beyond this, we have usage-based pricing with volume discounts. Startups can also qualify for free credits.
For all the details about how much PostHog might cost, see our pricing page.
How much does Sentry cost?
Sentry has three tiers:
- Developer: $0, 5k errors, 1 user
- Team: $26/m, 50k errors, unlimited users
- Business: $80/m, 50k errors, unlimited users
Each of these includes unlimited projects, 5M traces, 50 replays, 1 cron monitor, and 1GB of attachments. More errors, traces, replays, and attachments cost more.
Does Sentry or PostHog offer free trials?
Do you know what is better than a free trial? Being free forever. This is what we believe at PostHog and means you can get all of the features for free, no trial needed.
Sentry has a 14-day free trial for paid features.
How long does it take to implement PostHog?
You can get started with PostHog in less than 90 seconds using our AI install wizard. Once done, it begins autocapturing events and recordings. Feature flags, A/B tests, and surveys require a bit more setup to create and implement.
Can I use PostHog with a CDP?
Yes. You can use PostHog with Segment, Rudderstack, and more. See our docs on using PostHog with a CDP for more.
What are other error monitoring tool alternatives?
If you want a broader look at what's out there, take a look at our full roundup of the best error tracking tools available today. It compares different developer platforms side by side — from simple alerting tools to full observability suites — to help you find the right fit for your stack.
PostHog is an all-in-one developer platform for building successful products. We provide product analytics, web analytics, session replay, error tracking, feature flags, experiments, surveys, LLM analytics, data warehouse, CDP, and an AI product assistant to help debug your code, ship features faster, and keep all your usage and customer data in one stack.