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testcritic

Sentry vs Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

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 tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Event-volume pricing. A noisy application can consume the quota quickly, so filtering matters.

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

Free tier

Free developer plan with a monthly error and replay allowance.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

Open source

BSL / FSL

Apache-2.0 (agent)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlinDart
JavaScriptCodeless

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktop
WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Functional Software (Sentry) · since 2012

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

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.
  • Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
  • Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
  • Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.

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.
  • Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
  • Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
  • Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.

Best for

Essentially every engineering team — error tracking is the highest-value monitoring you can add first.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.

All of these integrate with: Slack, PagerDuty.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.