Sentry vs Pingdom
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 $18 per month (10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, 50 SMS; $16.50 annual)
PaidWhat 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 a calculator rather than named tiers: 50 uptime checks run about $78/month and 100 about $149, so the per-check rate falls slowly with volume. Transaction checks and Real User Monitoring are priced separately from basic uptime checks and add up.
Free tier
Free developer plan with a monthly error and replay allowance.
30-day trial.
Open source
BSL / FSL
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Functional Software (Sentry) · since 2012
Widely used
SolarWinds · since 2007
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.
- Very large global probe network with a long operating history.
- Simple to set up for basic availability monitoring.
- Combines synthetic checks with real-user monitoring.
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.
- Feature development has been slow under SolarWinds ownership.
- Transaction-check authoring is dated compared to code-first alternatives.
- Pricing is no longer competitive against newer entrants.
Best for
Essentially every engineering team — error tracking is the highest-value monitoring you can add first.
Organisations wanting an established name for straightforward uptime monitoring.
All of these integrate with: Slack, PagerDuty.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.