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 entirely on error and performance monitoring, while PostHog has error tracking along with a broader suite of tools to help developers build better products.
PostHog | Sentry | |
Error monitoring Track, debug, and resolve errors with context | ✔ | ✔ |
Performance monitoring Trace requests or queries and profile functions | Partial | ✔ |
Session replay Watch real users use your product | ✔ | ✔ |
Feedback Capture user feedback with surveys | ✔ | ✔ |
Product analytics Track events and conversion; analyze user behavior | ✔ | Partial |
Web analytics Simple dashboard of aggregated traffic, sources, campaigns, and session metrics | ✔ | ✖ |
LLM analytics Monitor and debug your LLM-powered features | ✔ | ✖ |
Feature flags Roll out features safely; toggle features for users or cohorts | ✔ | ✖ |
A/B testing Test changes and analyze impact | ✔ | ✖ |
Heatmaps Visualize where users click in your app or website | ✔ | ✖ |
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
PostHog | Sentry | |
API Access and edit data via an API | ✔ | ✔ |
Open source Publicly accessible code | ✔ | ✔ |
EU hosting Store data in EU | ✔ | ✔ |
Free plan Free forever | ✔ | Limited |
Alerting Alert when types of events happen | ✔ | ✔ |
SDKs SDKs for web, mobile, and server-side languages and frameworks | ✔ | ✔ |
Free team members Invite your team to your project for free | ✔ | ✖ |
- 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 product, it's missing some of the tracing and monitoring features that Sentry offers.
PostHog | Sentry | |
Exception capture Capture errors and exceptions including stack traces | ✔ | ✔ |
Free errors Free errors you can capture per month | 100k | 5k |
Issue management Monitor and manage issues |