Grafana vs Sentry (self-hosted): which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Datadog. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Grafana | Sentry (self-hosted) | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Dev Tools | Monitoring, Logs & Errors |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | FSL-1.1 (pasa a Apache-2.0 a los 2 años) |
| GitHub stars | ~66k | ~9.5k |
| Tech stack | Go, React | Python, ClickHouse, Kafka |
| Replaces | Datadog | Bugsnag, Datadog |
Grafana has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
Grafana
Observability dashboards, a self-hosted alternative to Datadog.
Pros
- Dashboards connected to dozens of different data sources, with multichannel alerting
Things to consider
- You need Prometheus/Loki/Tempo separately for data collection
Sentry (self-hosted)
Production error tracking, the official self-hosted version.
Pros
- It's the original product, with no feature cuts
Things to consider
- Heavy stack: needs plenty of RAM and several services
Key features
Grafana
- Dashboards connected to dozens of data sources
- Multichannel alerting
- Logs and traces explorer
Sentry (self-hosted)
- Smart grouping of repeated errors
- Performance monitoring traces
- Official SDKs for all major languages
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