Grafana
Sentry
| Feature | Grafana | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free / from $29/mo | Free / from $26/mo |
| Free Plan | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Rating | 4.6 / 5 | 4.5 / 5 |
| Best For | devops-teams, sre-teams, data-engineers, iot-monitoring | developers, frontend-teams, mobile-developers, startups |
| Founded | 2014 | 2012 |
| Dashboards | ✓ | ✗ |
| Data Sources | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alerting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Annotations | ✓ | ✗ |
| Plugins | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loki Logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tempo Traces | ✓ | ✗ |
| Mimir Metrics | ✓ | ✗ |
| Error Tracking | ✗ | ✓ |
| Performance Monitoring | ✗ | ✓ |
| Session Replay | ✗ | ✓ |
| Source Maps | ✗ | ✓ |
| Release Tracking | ✗ | ✓ |
| Integrations | ✗ | ✓ |
| Issue Triaging | ✗ | ✓ |
✓ Grafana Pros
- Connects to virtually any data source
- Beautiful and highly customizable dashboards
- Open-source with massive community
- Grafana Cloud includes Loki, Tempo, and Mimir
- Alerting across all data sources
✗ Grafana Cons
- Self-hosting requires DevOps expertise
- Dashboard creation has a learning curve
- Plugin quality varies
✓ Sentry Pros
- Excellent error tracking with full stack traces
- Source map support for minified code
- Session replay shows exactly what users experienced
- Open-source self-hosted option available
- Supports 100+ platforms and frameworks
✗ Sentry Cons
- Event quotas can be exceeded during incidents
- Alert fatigue if not properly configured
- Performance monitoring less mature than Datadog
The Verdict
Grafana is built for devops teams and sre teams, with a focus on dashboards and data-sources. Sentry targets developers and frontend teams and leads with error-tracking and performance-monitoring.
Pricing is close: Sentry starts at $26/mo versus $29/mo for Grafana — not a deciding factor on its own.
Both offer free plans, so you can test each with your real workflow before committing to a subscription.
This is a genuinely close comparison. If you can, sign up for both free trials (where available) and run a one-week test with your actual team tasks before deciding.