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 | ✔ | ✔ |
Code context See the code related to the issue | ✔ | ✔ |
Tracing Track the path of a request across your system | ✖ | ✔ |
Profiling Monitor and visualize code performance | ✖ | ✔ |
Network performance Track network performance of sessions | ✔ | ✔ |
Cron monitoring Track scheduled job health | ✖ | ✔ |
Release tracking Track the performance of each release of your software | ✖ | ✔ |
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.
| PostHog | Sentry | |
Web Record sessions from web apps | ✔ | ✔ |
iOS Record sessions from iOS apps | ✔ | ✔ |
Android Record sessions from Android apps | ✔ | ✔ |
React Native Record sessions from React Native apps | ✔ | ✔ |
Flutter Record sessions from Flutter apps | ✔ | ✔ |
Sampling Choose what sessions you record | ✔ | ✔ |
Privacy Censor private or personal information | ✔ | ✔ |
Console Capture console logs, errors | ✔ | ✔ |
Canvas Record canvas elements | ✔ | ✔ |
Free allowance Free replays per month | 5,000 | 50 |
50k replays cost Cost per month of 50,000 replays | $173 | $172 |
100k replays cost Cost per month of 100,000 replays | $273 | $314 |
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.
| PostHog | Sentry | |
Text input Capture what users want to tell you | ✔ | ✔ |
Rating and selects Let users pick preset options | ✔ | ✖ |
Multi-part surveys Ask multiple questions | ✔ | ✖ |
Templates For NPS, CSAT, interviews, and more | ✔ | ✖ |
Triggers Trigger surveys on events and actions | ✔ | ✖ |
User targeting Target specific users or cohorts | ✔ | ✖ |
API Implement your own UI | ✔ | ✔ |
Customization Color, position, branding, delay | ✔ | ✖ |
Free allowance Free responses per month | 1500 | Included |
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.
| PostHog | Sentry | |
Custom events Capture any events anywhere | ✔ | ✔ |
Autocapture Capture errors, pageviews, and clicks automatically | ✔ | Errors only |
Graphs and trends Build custom insights and visualizations | ✔ | Trends only |
Funnels Track users through a sequence of events | ✔ | ✖ |
Retention Visualize which users stay, for how long | ✔ | ✖ |
Group analytics Track metrics at a company and account level | ✔ | ✖ |
Query editor Write your own queries in SQL | ✔ | ✖ |
Dashboards Combine visuals into shareable dashboards | ✔ | ✔ |
Web analytics A lightweight overview of your traffic | ✔ | ✖ |
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
| PostHog | Sentry | |
Audit logs Manage and view edits and related users | ✔ | ✔ |
GDPR-ready Can be compliant with GDPR | ✔ | ✔ |
HIPAA-ready Can be compliant with HIPAA | ✔ | ✔ |
SOC 2 SOC 2 Type 2 security certification | ✔ | ✔ |
2FA Enforce login with two-factor authentication | ✔ | ✔ |
SAML SSO Use SAML single sign-on authentication | Enterprise | ✔ |
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.
| PostHog | Sentry | |
Data warehouse Import and query data from external sources like S3 and GCS | ✔ | ✖ |
Exports Batch export data to external sources like S3 and BigQuery | ✔ | ✖ |
Segment Ingest events from Segment | ✔ | ✔ |
Slack Send alerts and reports to Slack | ✔ | ✔ |
Teams Send alerts and reports to Teams | ✔ | ✔ |
Postgres Sync and query data from your database | ✔ | ✖ |
Stripe Sync and query data from Stripe | ✔ | ✖ |
Zendesk Sync and query data from Zendesk | ✔ | ✖ |
Hubspot Sync and query data from Hubspot | ✔ | ✖ |
Project management Add issues to tools like Jira, Linear, and GitHub | ✔ | ✔ |
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. Starts 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: $29/m, 50k errors, unlimited users
- Business: $89/m, 50k errors, unlimited users
Each of these includes unlimited projects, 10M 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.