Decision comparison
Sentry vs New Relic
Sentry wins on error-tracking quality and cost for error-tracking-only use; New Relic wins on full APM breadth, AI-driven insights, and broader integrations. Choose Sentry for SDK-first error investigation, stack-trace fingerprinting, release-to-owner context, and Seer-assisted fixes. Choose New Relic when microservice tracing, hybrid infrastructure monitoring, OpenTelemetry, cloud-cost visibility, and AI-application monitoring belong in one observability platform. Sentry’s Developer tier includes 5K errors monthly, while New Relic’s paid entry point starts at $19 per host monthly with additional usage and feature costs.
Architecture choice. These take different approaches to the same problem. Read the table as a fit question rather than a feature race.
These are different kinds of product — Error Tracking and Observability Platform.
Quick Comparison
| Decision factor | Sentry | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Best For | Best-in-category error tracking with developer workflows, using SDK-based monitoring in five lines and contextual Issue → Context → Fix debugging. | Full APM with AI-powered insights, covering cloud and datacenter applications, hybrid infrastructure visibility, AI applications, and real-time monitoring. |
| Pricing | Developer tier free with 5K errors/month. Team plan starts at $26/month, Business at $80/month, Enterprise custom. Event-based billing across errors, performance, session replay, and profiling. | Free tier available, paid plans start at $19/mo per host, additional costs based on usage and features |
| Error grouping | Stack-trace fingerprinting (category-leading), paired with automatic root-cause analysis and incident mapping to releases, pull requests, and owners. | Available in APM; less specialized UX, alongside logs in context and distributed tracing for investigating application issues across services. |
| Distributed tracing | Integrated Performance Monitoring, with errors, logs, replays, and metrics unified under a single trace for contextual debugging. | Full distributed tracing across microservices, supported by OpenTelemetry as a universal open standard for collecting every signal. |
| AI and workflow automation | Seer provides AI-powered debugging, root-cause analysis, code review, and pre-merge error detection; integrates with GitHub, Slack, Jira, Linear, and coding agents via MCP. | AI and Agentic Monitoring controls AI-stack behavior and token usage; SRE Agent supports automated remediation, while AI identifies session-replay friction. |
| Ecosystem and project signals | Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring repository: Python, NOASSERTION license, 44,741 GitHub stars, release 26.8.0, and last push 2026-09-07. | Supports 780+ Quickstart integrations and OpenTelemetry; repository uses Rust with NOASSERTION license, 9 GitHub stars, release 1.22.0, last push 2026-08-27. |
Sentry
- Best For:
- Best-in-category error tracking with developer workflows, using SDK-based monitoring in five lines and contextual Issue → Context → Fix debugging.
- Pricing:
- Developer tier free with 5K errors/month. Team plan starts at $26/month, Business at $80/month, Enterprise custom. Event-based billing across errors, performance, session replay, and profiling.
- Error grouping:
- Stack-trace fingerprinting (category-leading), paired with automatic root-cause analysis and incident mapping to releases, pull requests, and owners.
- Distributed tracing:
- Integrated Performance Monitoring, with errors, logs, replays, and metrics unified under a single trace for contextual debugging.
- AI and workflow automation:
- Seer provides AI-powered debugging, root-cause analysis, code review, and pre-merge error detection; integrates with GitHub, Slack, Jira, Linear, and coding agents via MCP.
- Ecosystem and project signals:
- Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring repository: Python, NOASSERTION license, 44,741 GitHub stars, release 26.8.0, and last push 2026-09-07.
New Relic
- Best For:
- Full APM with AI-powered insights, covering cloud and datacenter applications, hybrid infrastructure visibility, AI applications, and real-time monitoring.
- Pricing:
- Free tier available, paid plans start at $19/mo per host, additional costs based on usage and features
- Error grouping:
- Available in APM; less specialized UX, alongside logs in context and distributed tracing for investigating application issues across services.
- Distributed tracing:
- Full distributed tracing across microservices, supported by OpenTelemetry as a universal open standard for collecting every signal.
- AI and workflow automation:
- AI and Agentic Monitoring controls AI-stack behavior and token usage; SRE Agent supports automated remediation, while AI identifies session-replay friction.
- Ecosystem and project signals:
- Supports 780+ Quickstart integrations and OpenTelemetry; repository uses Rust with NOASSERTION license, 9 GitHub stars, release 1.22.0, last push 2026-08-27.
Public signals
Verified factual signals only. Bars appear only for like-for-like metrics with five weekly assessments for every tool; missing evidence stays explicit. These signals do not establish enterprise adoption, product quality, or total cost.
| Metric | Sentry | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub commits, 90d(Product adoption) | 4.8k | Not available |
| GitHub stars(Product adoption) | 44,000+ | Not available |
| Search interest(Market interest) | 30 | 4 |
| Hacker News mentions, 90d(Community interest) | 0 | 1 |
| npm weekly downloads(Developer adoption) | 26.0M | 894.3k |
| PyPI weekly downloads(Developer adoption) | 28.0M | 817.2k |
| Stack Overflow questions(Community interest) | 1.5k | 1.5k |
| GitHub commits, 90d(Developer adoption) | Not available | 303 |
| GitHub stars(Developer adoption) | Not available | 9 |
| Product Hunt comments(Community interest) | Not available | 1 |
| Product Hunt reviews(Community interest) | Not available | 0 |
| Product Hunt votes(Community interest) | Not available | 16 |
As of September 14, 2026 — updated weekly.
Health & risk evidence
Observed public-source checks for mapped package versions and repositories.
Sentry
September 14, 2026Package vulnerabilities
npm · @sentry/node@10.74.0 · PyPI · sentry-sdk@2.68.1
0 vulnerabilities
across 2 packages
Repository security score
Not available
New Relic
September 14, 2026Package vulnerabilities
npm · newrelic@14.4.0 · PyPI · newrelic@13.5.0
0 vulnerabilities
across 2 packages
Repository security score
Not available
Interface Preview
Sentry
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Sentry | New Relic |
|---|---|---|
| Error Tracking & APM | ||
| Error grouping | Stack-trace fingerprinting (category-leading) | Available in APM; less specialized UX |
| Distributed tracing | Integrated Performance Monitoring | Full distributed tracing across microservices |
| Auto-instrumentation | SDK-based per-language | Auto-instrumentation agents for major languages |
| Profiling | Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, others | Available via integrations |
| Platform Breadth | ||
| Infrastructure monitoring | Not verified | Native with hybrid visibility |
| Session replay | Native with PII scrubbing | Not available natively |
| AI-driven insights | Seer AI for code review and debugging | AI and Agentic Monitoring across telemetry |
| SDK / integrations | 100+ languages and frameworks | 780+ quickstart integrations |
| Deployment & Pricing | ||
| Self-hosted option | Yes, open source under Apache 2.0 | Limited; primarily SaaS |
| GitHub integration | Native: suspect commits, PR links | Via integration |
| Billing model | Per-event (errors, spans, replays, profiles) | Per host + usage (data ingest, users) |
| Free tier | Developer: 5K errors/month, 1 user | 100 GB/month data, 1 full user |
Error Tracking & APM
Error grouping
Distributed tracing
Auto-instrumentation
Profiling
Platform Breadth
Infrastructure monitoring
Session replay
AI-driven insights
SDK / integrations
Deployment & Pricing
Self-hosted option
GitHub integration
Billing model
Free tier
Which approach fits
Sentry wins on error-tracking quality and cost for error-tracking-only use; New Relic wins on full APM breadth, AI-driven insights, and broader integrations. Choose Sentry for SDK-first error investigation, stack-trace fingerprinting, release-to-owner context, and Seer-assisted fixes. Choose New Relic when microservice tracing, hybrid infrastructure monitoring, OpenTelemetry, cloud-cost visibility, and AI-application monitoring belong in one observability platform. Sentry’s Developer tier includes 5K errors monthly, while New Relic’s paid entry point starts at $19 per host monthly with additional usage and feature costs.
When each approach fits
Choose Sentry if:
Choose Sentry when error tracking quality is the primary criterion and you already have APM elsewhere. Its free Developer tier includes 5K errors monthly, and Seer connects issues to code review, releases, PRs, and owners.
Choose New Relic if:
Choose New Relic when full APM with AI-driven insights matters more than best-in-category error tracking UX. It provides distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry support, hybrid infrastructure visibility, and 780+ Quickstart integrations.
Choose Sentry if:
Run both when budget allows: Sentry for error tracking, New Relic for APM and infrastructure. Use Sentry’s contextual issue workflow for developer remediation and New Relic for cross-service tracing, cloud costs, and operational visibility.
These scenarios reflect the available product evidence. Your requirements, existing stack, and team expertise should guide the final decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use Sentry and New Relic together?
Yes, and some teams do. The common pattern is New Relic for APM and infrastructure monitoring; Sentry for application error tracking with its superior grouping UX. Both tools accept events from the same application SDKs, so instrumentation overhead is minimal.
Does New Relic have error grouping by stack trace?
Yes, as part of APM. It groups errors by stack trace fingerprint similarly to Sentry. The grouping works well for common cases, but the triage and issue-management UX is less specialized than Sentry's purpose-built interface.
Which is cheaper for small teams?
The supplied evidence does not support a like-for-like total-cost comparison with Sentry. New Relic describes its full-stack observability pricing as usage-based, with pricing that can vary by edition, users, data ingest, and optional add-ons, so a fixed monthly per-host minimum is not supported here.
Can I self-host Sentry or New Relic?
Sentry, yes, fully open source under Apache 2.0. Self-hosted requires Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and ClickHouse plus the Sentry services. New Relic is primarily SaaS with limited self-hosted options requiring enterprise contracts.