Sentry vs LogRocket: Which is better for your stack?

If you’re building or maintaining digital products, you’ve likely heard of Sentry and LogRocket. Both platforms help development teams improve site quality and user experience—but they approach monitoring very differently. Sentry focuses on error monitoring and performance tracing, identifying bugs and bottlenecks with deep technical context. LogRocket specializes in session replay and product analytics, letting you watch real user sessions with dev-friendly network, console, and state data. The best fit for your stack depends on whether your pain points are debugging errors, understanding user actions, or both.

Key takeaways

• Sentry is purpose-built for error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance tracing; it now includes basic session replay and real user monitoring (RUM) options.
• LogRocket centers on session replay, capturing full user journeys, frontend monitoring, console/network traffic, and state changes.
• Sentry suits engineering teams needing deep error diagnostics; LogRocket excels for teams prioritizing user-centric troubleshooting and product analytics.
• While features overlap, most teams benefit from using each tool for its specialty rather than making one a direct replacement.

Quick summary table

What Sentry is

Sentry is a developer-centric monitoring tool with deep roots in error tracking. It provides real-time error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance tracing (APM) for web, mobile, and backend apps. Its features include stack traces, code context, release tracking, and alerting. Sentry also offers real user monitoring (RUM) and optional session replay, although these features are not as comprehensive as LogRocket’s. Sentry is used by engineering teams who need instant, actionable error diagnostics for fast-paced releases. It supports cloud and self-hosted deployments, appealing to organizations with stricter compliance or infrastructure preferences.

What LogRocket is

LogRocket is built around the concept of session replay and frontend monitoring. It records user sessions, giving developers pixel-perfect replays alongside network requests, console output, and (for React/Redux apps) state changes. This lets you see not just what failed, but exactly what the user did—and what the browser saw—as bugs occurred. LogRocket is popular with product teams, QA, and customer support, as well as developers focused on frontend reliability and user experience. It is a cloud SaaS tool, with web and mobile plans and no self-hosted option publicly specified.

Feature-by-feature comparison

Error monitoring & crash reporting

Sentry’s core strength is error monitoring. It captures errors across many programming languages with stack traces, breadcrumbs, and code owners—helping you triage proactively and fix quickly. Its SDKs cover frontend and backend (JavaScript, Python, Java, .NET, and more). By contrast, LogRocket only records basic JavaScript errors as part of its session recordings, with no deep backend support.

Performance/APM & tracing

Sentry’s performance and tracing features let you visualize transaction traces, track slowdowns, and monitor real user performance across releases. This is event-based and integrates directly with error events. LogRocket does not publicize APM capabilities. Its focus is on the events and context within the replayed session, not distributed tracing or backend bottleneck detection.

Noise reduction & alerting

Sentry supports alerting policies, custom notifications, and deduplication to minimize noise from repeated errors. Developers can hook alerts into Slack, email, PagerDuty, and more. LogRocket can flag sessions matching bug patterns or rage clicks, but is not designed primarily as an incident alerting tool.

Session replay / RUM

LogRocket’s standout feature is session replay with dev-focused context: you can view the complete user journey, console logs, HTTP requests, and even application state transitions (Redux). It is ideal for investigating “what led to this bug,” reproducing UI issues, or proof for support/customer success.

Sentry has a session replay feature built in, offered under its quotas for events, but it is less granular than LogRocket. Sentry also supports RUM metrics for user performance and frontend error analysis but does not match LogRocket on depth of interaction monitoring.

Pricing & data limits (events, retention, seats)

Sentry uses event-based pricing. You are charged based on the number of errors, transactions, replays, and other instrumented data ingested per month. It provides flexible quotas and retention tailored to usage tiers. LogRocket is session-based, with a free plan (limited sessions and retention) and higher-tier plans for more volume and advanced features. Pricing specifics for users/seats are not publicly detailed in available documentation from either vendor.

SDKs & integrations (languages, frameworks, ecosystem)

Sentry offers a broad range of SDKs: JavaScript (including React, Vue, Angular), mobile (iOS, Android), backend (Python, Node, Java, .NET), and many more. Its ecosystem includes integrations with alerting, deployment, and workflow tools. LogRocket integrates with widely used development and support tools, and captures frontend context like console logs, network requests, and Redux state, but its supported SDK coverage for backend and mobile is less emphasized and not fully detailed in public documentation.

Setup, hosting & maintenance (self-hosted vs cloud, SSO, RBAC)

Sentry supports both cloud SaaS and on-premise/self-hosted deployment, giving options for compliance and data control. Advanced plans offer SSO, RBAC, and audit logging. LogRocket is a cloud SaaS solution. No public documentation specifies on-premise/self-hosting, SSO, or fine-grained RBAC support.

Security & compliance (PII handling, SOC2, GDPR)

Sentry details compliance and security practices on its site. It offers configurable PII scrubbing, aligns with SOC2/GDPR, and enables advanced controls for customer data. LogRocket does not specify in its docs—but session recording products typically allow some masking/redaction and follow SaaS security norms. For strict regulatory or on-prem needs, check with the vendor directly.

When to choose Sentry vs when to choose LogRocket

• Choose Sentry if your top priority is catching backend/JS errors, tracking regressions across releases, or automating error alerting.
• Choose LogRocket if you need session-level UI playback, want to watch how real users encounter issues, or need product analytics combined with frontend monitoring context.
• Both may add value side by side: Sentry for error diagnostics, LogRocket for user behavior and frontend debugging. Most teams choose both if budget allows and want a full picture.

Migration notes & pitfalls

Moving between Sentry and LogRocket is rare because their niches do not fully overlap. If replacing one with the other, expect feature gaps: LogRocket cannot match Sentry’s error aggregation, while Sentry’s replay is less advanced than LogRocket’s. Plan for short periods running both if you are switching, and assess which core problems each tool is solving for you before migrating. Feature parity is not guaranteed.

Conclusion

Sentry and LogRocket have overlapping but distinct strengths. Sentry is best for error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance tracking at code and server layers. LogRocket is the go-to tool for frontend session replay, user journey analysis, and dev-supporting UI troubleshooting. For most B2B SaaS and product teams, using both unlocks their full complement of insights—but for budget-constrained projects, focus on the tool matching your most urgent troubleshooting use cases. For more head-to-head SaaS analysis, visit More SaaS comparisons or learn About SaaSvsSaaS.

FAQs

Do you need both Sentry and LogRocket, or just one?

If you need both deep error diagnostics and frontend/session replay, use both. Teams very focused on code health lean toward Sentry; teams troubleshooting UI/UX or product issues rely on LogRocket.

Is LogRocket a replacement for error monitoring tools?

No. LogRocket does record basic frontend errors, but it does not provide the comprehensive error monitoring, aggregation, and alerting found in tools like Sentry.

How does session replay help triage errors?

Session replay lets you watch a user’s actions and browser activity leading to an error. This can reveal what steps, clicks, or UI changes actually triggered bugs—reducing guesswork in debugging and helping you fix problems faster.