Sentry vs Checkly
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $26 per month (Team plan, indicative)
Free tierFrom $24 per month (Starter; Team is $64)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Event-volume pricing. A noisy application can consume the quota quickly, so filtering matters.
Priced by check runs; browser checks cost more than API checks, and frequency multiplies the bill. Team at $64 adds 75 monitors, 30-second frequency, all 22 locations and private locations.
Free tier
Free developer plan with a monthly error and replay allowance.
Hobby: 10 uptime monitors, 10k API and 1k browser check runs a month across 6 locations.
Open source
BSL / FSL
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Functional Software (Sentry) · since 2012
Widely used
Checkly · since 2018
Strengths
- Release and commit attribution tells you which deploy introduced the error, and often who to ask.
- Excellent SDK coverage across essentially every language and framework.
- Self-hosting is genuinely supported for teams that need it.
- One Playwright script serves as both an E2E test and a production monitor.
- Monitoring-as-code fits GitOps workflows and code review.
- Excellent developer experience and clear, published pricing.
Limitations
- Event-based pricing punishes noisy applications until you invest in filtering.
- The product has broadened a lot; some newer modules are shallower than the error core.
- Self-hosting is resource-hungry.
- Playwright-centric; teams on other frameworks get less benefit.
- Browser checks at high frequency across many locations get expensive.
- Not a full observability platform — no APM or log management.
Best for
Essentially every engineering team — error tracking is the highest-value monitoring you can add first.
Engineering teams already using Playwright who want production journeys monitored.
All of these integrate with: Slack, PagerDuty, Vercel.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.