The question behind this comparison is usually whether Sentry is still worth paying for once Grafana is in place. Grafana is visualization and observability: dashboards over any data source, free to self-host, with a plugin for nearly everything. Sentry is error monitoring: full stack traces, source map support so minified frontend JavaScript resolves back to your own code, and AI-suggested fixes through Autofix. There is overlap on paper, since both handle alerting and dashboards, but the shapes differ. Grafana shows you that the error rate rose at 14:02 and lets you correlate it against everything else you collect. Sentry tells you which exception, in which release, on which line.
Run both if you can. They sit at different layers and the cost of keeping them separate is low. If budget forces a single choice, decide by what you debug most. Teams shipping a lot of application code get more per dollar from Sentry, because a stack trace tied to a release beats reading a graph and guessing. Teams running infrastructure that mostly needs watching get more from Grafana, which self-hosts for free and connects to what you already have. Two caveats. Sentry pricing jumps quickly at volume and its alerts need tuning or people start ignoring them. Grafana is free to license and not free to operate; the setup and ongoing maintenance is real work for someone.
Open-source observability and data visualization
Pricing: Open source free, Cloud from $0 (scalable usage-based)
Founded: 2014
Best for: Engineers, SREs, Data Teams
Application error monitoring and performance management
Pricing: Developer (Free - 5k errors), Team from ~$26/mo, Business from ~$80/mo
Founded: 2012
Best for: Developers, Frontend Teams, Backend Engineers
6 of 18 capabilities separate these two. Those come first.
| Feature | Grafana | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| Where they differ (6) | ||
| Synthetic Monitoring | Grafana: yes | Sentry: no |
| API & Browser Testing | Grafana: yes | Sentry: no |
| Multi-Location Checks | Grafana: yes | Sentry: no |
| SSL Monitoring | Grafana: yes | Sentry: no |
| Open Source | Grafana: yes | Sentry: no |
| Incident Management | Grafana: yes | Sentry: no |
| Both tools have (10) | ||
| Real User Monitoring | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| AI-Powered | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| Uptime Monitoring | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| Alerting | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| Slack Integration | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| CI/CD Integration | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| On-Premise / Self-Host | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| Free Tier | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| API Access | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| Dashboards | Grafana: yes | Sentry: yes |
| Neither tool has (2) | ||
| Self-Healing Tests | Grafana: no | Sentry: no |
| Status Page | Grafana: no | Sentry: no |
Pros
Cons
Pros
Cons
Grafana is open-source observability and data visualization, while Sentry is application error monitoring and performance management. Grafana adds Synthetic Monitoring, API & Browser Testing, and Multi-Location Checks on top of the shared feature set.
Grafana pricing: Open source free, Cloud from $0 (scalable usage-based). Sentry pricing: Developer (Free - 5k errors), Team from ~$26/mo, Business from ~$80/mo. Evaluate against your check volume and team size; entry pricing rarely reflects total cost at scale.
Grafana is designed with Engineers, SREs, and Data Teams in mind, whereas Sentry targets Developers, Frontend Teams, and Backend Engineers. If your team matches the former profile, Grafana is usually the closer fit.
No. It does a different job. Error trackers tell you an exception fired. They can't see the failures that never throw: a checkout that silently breaks, an expired SSL certificate, a page that returns 200 and renders blank. ObserveOne monitors those user-facing journeys in production; teams run it alongside an error tracker, not instead of one.
Error trackers tell you an exception fired. They can't see the failures that never throw: a checkout that silently breaks, an expired SSL certificate, a page that returns 200 and renders blank. ObserveOne monitors those user-facing journeys in production; teams run it alongside an error tracker, not instead of one. The free tier covers enough to try it on one critical journey.
Each tool has its own alternatives page too, not just this matchup.