Sentry vs Grafana: Issue-Centered Error Tracking Against a Dashboard and LGTM Stack
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Sentry is built for developers who want every application error grouped, assigned, and tied to a release. Grafana is the dashboard and query layer for metrics, logs, and traces, and Grafana Cloud bundles the open source LGTM stack behind it. They overlap on frontend errors and traces, but they answer different questions: "which bug do I fix next" versus "what is my system doing right now".
The Short Answer
Pick Sentry when your problem is application bugs: stack traces, regressions, who owns the failing code, and what a release broke. Pick Grafana when your problem is system behavior: infrastructure metrics, Loki logs, trace views, and dashboards that unite several data sources. If you have both problems, you can run both: Sentry's SDKs capture application errors while Grafana reads your infrastructure and log data.
Sentry vs Grafana at a Glance
How Sentry Charges
List prices on sentry.io/pricing, checked November 8, 2026: Developer is $0, Team is $26 per month, and Business is $80 per month when billed annually with default prepaid data. Team and Business include unlimited users and the same base quotas: 50k errors, 5 GB of logs, 5 GB of application metrics, 5M spans, and 50 replays. Beyond that, usage comes out of a pay-as-you-go budget you set. Sentry's docs say data that arrives after the budget is exhausted is dropped, with no charge.
Seer is a separate $40 per active contributor per month, counting anyone who makes two or more pull requests in a Seer-enabled repository.
How Grafana Charges
Grafana's pricing page lists a free plan with 14 days of retention and a Pro plan from $19 per month plus usage. Pro includes the free-tier allowances, then charges per signal. Metrics start at $6.50 per 1k active series, with 10k included. Logs start at $0.05 per GB processed, $0.40 per GB written, and $0.10 per GB retained. Frontend Observability starts at $0.75 per 1k sessions after 50k. Grafana Visualization starts at $8 per active user after three, and Assistant is $20 per active AI user including 40M tokens, then $2 per 1M tokens. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 annual commit and adds custom retention and Bring Your Own Cloud.
Worked example. Take ten engineers who all open the tool and 40 GB of logs a month, with no other signals. Grafana Pro: $19 platform fee, covering 3 active users and 50 GB of logs, plus 7 more active users x $8 = $56, for $75 per month. Sentry Team: $26 per month for unlimited users, with 5 GB of logs included and 35 GB over at $0.50 = $17.50, for $43.50. If five of those engineers want an AI agent: Grafana Assistant covers three AI users in the Pro platform fee and charges 2 x $20 = $40 for the rest, while Seer is 5 x $40 = $200 when each of the five makes two or more pull requests. These are list-price sums for narrow scenarios. Neither includes errors, traces, or metrics, which each vendor meters on its own.
What Each Tool Is Built Around
Sentry is organized around a bug. Its docs say events are grouped into issues by fingerprint, and your quota is consumed by events, not issues. The error monitoring page describes auto-assigning an issue to whoever committed the broken code, alerts in Slack when an error appears for the first time or regresses, and release health with crash-free sessions. Session Replay links a video-like reproduction to the error and trace.
Grafana is organized around a query. Loki indexes labels for each log stream rather than the full log text, and you read it with LogQL. Grafana the visualization tool pulls many sources into one dashboard, supports plugins, and lets you manage dashboards and alerts as code. Faro, Grafana's open source Web SDK, collects web vitals, unhandled errors, rejected promises, sessions, and logs, and Frontend Observability visualizes them next to backend data.
OpenTelemetry. Sentry's OTLP support covers traces and logs in open beta and not metrics, while Grafana's stack is built on Prometheus-style metrics, Loki, and Tempo. If your instrumentation is already OpenTelemetry-first, check which signals you need Sentry to accept.
When to Pick Sentry
- You want a bug triage workflow: owners, suspect commits, regressions, and release health.
- Many people need access, so unlimited users on a plan fee beats per-user billing.
- You want session replay next to the error without running a separate tool.
- You want Seer to propose a fix as a pull request from the issue.
When to Pick Grafana
- You graph infrastructure, Kubernetes, or database metrics and need one dashboard over many data sources.
- You want an open source path: Loki is AGPLv3 and you can self-manage it or use Grafana Cloud.
- You need 13 months of metric retention on Pro, or custom retention and Bring Your Own Cloud on Enterprise.
- You want the Faro SDK for web vitals and sessions alongside backend telemetry in the same dashboards.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security that sits beside either tool. You can point a Sentry SDK at a Sazabi DSN while Sentry keeps its own copy, and Grafana Alloy can add an OTLP exporter for logs and traces next to your Loki and Tempo pipelines. Sazabi ingests OpenTelemetry metrics (Prometheus metrics through an OpenTelemetry Collector) and OTLP traces through the same intake as your logs. It stores each metric data point and each span as a log record that its agent queries alongside your logs, so there is no separate metrics store to run.
The agent investigates in Slack and opens issues, so it covers a different job than a dashboard or an error inbox. Compare Sazabi vs Sentry and Sazabi vs Grafana, read the Sentry alternatives and Grafana alternatives guides, or see the Grafana integration and pricing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Grafana an error tracker like Sentry?
Not by design. Grafana is a visualization and query layer, and Grafana Cloud adds Loki for logs, Prometheus-compatible metrics, and Tempo for traces. Its Faro Web SDK captures unhandled browser errors, and Frontend Observability charts them, but the center of Sentry is the grouped issue with an owner and a release, a different starting point.
Can Sentry replace Grafana dashboards?
Only partly. Sentry has custom dashboards, with 10 on Developer, 20 on Team, and unlimited on Business, but they chart Sentry data. Grafana connects to many data sources and treats a dashboard as the main workspace, so teams that graph infrastructure metrics usually keep it.
How do Sentry and Grafana Cloud charge for logs?
Sentry includes 5 GB of logs on every plan and charges $0.50 per GB beyond that from a pay-as-you-go budget. Grafana Cloud lists starting rates of $0.05 per GB processed, $0.40 per GB written, and $0.10 per GB retained, with 50 GB ingested included in the free tier and in the $19 monthly Pro platform fee.
Can I use Sentry and Grafana together?
Yes, and many teams do. Sentry takes application errors and traces from its SDKs, while Grafana covers infrastructure metrics, logs, and dashboards. Sentry accepts OTLP traces and logs in open beta, so a shared OpenTelemetry Collector can feed both.
Sources
- Plan prices, included quotas, log overage rate, retention lookback per plan, dashboards per plan, feature list (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Pay-as-you-go budget behavior, data dropped after quota, Seer price per active contributor (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Events grouped into issues by fingerprint, quota consumed by events not issues (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Ownership-based assignment, first-seen and regression alerts, release health with crash-free sessions (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Seer capabilities and the GitHub.com and GitLab.com requirement (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OTLP traces and logs in open beta, no OTLP metrics, Collector forwarding (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Session Replay for web and mobile, linked to errors and traces (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Free and Pro plan limits, $19 platform fee, logs and metrics rates, active user price, Assistant price, Frontend Observability price, Enterprise options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Loki AGPLv3 license, label-only indexing, LogQL, self-managed and Cloud Logs options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Faro Web SDK for real user monitoring, errors, logs and traces, and the LGTM stack components (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability, what the Faro SDK captures, alerts for errors and SLOs (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana as an open source visualization tool, plugins, dashboards as code (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sentry can be run by anyone under its Functional Source License and a self-hosted offering (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plan prices, included usage, overage rates and retention per plan (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sending Sentry SDK events to a Sazabi DSN, alone or alongside Sentry (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Forwarding logs and traces from Grafana Alloy to Sazabi, and the loki.source limitation (accessed Nov 8, 2026)