Visibility in this ranking can be paid for. Payment gives a vendor more visibility, higher up on the review pages; it never adds a vendor, and it never changes a word of the review. The largest vendors in error tracking software
cannot hold places 1 to 3. Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands in a category,
wherever the category has them; the established names follow from place 4 in their ranked order. How it works: placement disclosure ·
editorial process.
The 12 tools, reviewed
#1 AppSignal
Application monitoring from an Amsterdam company · Netherlands · appsignal.com
Dutch company Predictable bill Unlimited users
AppSignal is the pick for a European team that cares where its vendor sits and how the bill behaves.
- Pricing: Per request / month. Free plan with 30K requests, 1 GB logging and 5-day retention. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: European teams on Ruby, Elixir or Node
- Strengths: Error tracking; Performance monitoring; Host monitoring.
Where it falls short
AppSignal's language coverage is narrower than Sentry's, and its error workflow is less elaborate than Rollbar's, with simpler triage and fewer integrations for issue trackers beyond the common ones.
Wrong for
A mobile-first team with native iOS and Android apps should look at Bugsnag or Bugfender, which are built around crash and device data.
Visit AppSignal →
#2 Raygun
Crash reporting, RUM and APM from Wellington · New Zealand · raygun.com
Reserved events Three products New Zealand company
Raygun suits teams that want to buy error tracking on its own and add front-end timing or backend traces later, because each of the three products is priced on the same ladder. Basic, Team and Business tiers are published for each, a reserved-events model discounts annual commitments, and the Business tier adds dedicated support and SAML SSO.
- Pricing: Per event / month. Crash Reporting, Real User Monitoring and APM are sold separately in Basic, Team, Business and Enterprise tiers. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Teams buying crash reporting without APM
- Strengths: Crash reporting; Real user monitoring; Application performance monitoring.
Where it falls short
Buying three separate products means three event meters to watch, and the line between an error event, a session and a trace is easy to misjudge.
Wrong for
A solo developer or a hobby project that wants a permanent free plan is better served by Sentry, Honeybadger or Rollbar.
Visit Raygun →
#3 Bugfender
Remote logs and crash reports from user devices · Spain · bugfender.com
Device logs Mobile focus On-premises option
Bugfender is built around a different habit from the usual stack-trace tools: pull the log lines a specific phone produced before it crashed. The device-centric view suits a support team that needs to look at one customer's session, and the free plan, unlimited team members and apps, is a fair starting point for a small mobile product.
- Pricing: Per tier / month. Free plan with 100K daily log lines, 24-hour retention and up to 2,000 devices. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Mobile teams debugging issues on real devices
- Strengths: Remote logging; Crash reporting; User feedback.
Where it falls short
It is a logging product first, so error grouping, release tracking and performance data are less developed than at Sentry or Bugsnag. Free-plan log retention is only 24 hours and Team retention is 7 days.
Wrong for
A back-end team debugging server exceptions will not find what it needs here; Rollbar, Honeybadger or Sentry cover server-side grouping and release tracking better.
Visit Bugfender →
#4 Honeybadger
Exception, uptime and log monitoring from a small independent shop · United States · honeybadger.io
Independent Uptime included Unlimited users
Honeybadger earns its place by being a complete answer for a team that has no wish to run a monitoring stack. Exceptions, uptime monitors, cron check-ins, logs and a status page sit behind one login, and the plan table is short enough to read in a minute.
- Pricing: Flat monthly. Developer is $0 with 5,000 errors a month, Team is $26 a month and Business $80 a month (both 50K errors), unlimited users on paid plans, overage of $0.0003 or $0.0006 per notification. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Small teams wanting one calm monitoring bill
- Strengths: Error tracking; Uptime monitoring; Status pages.
Where it falls short
Honeybadger is thinner than the big platforms once an organization needs distributed tracing, session replay or a dense dashboard layer; its focus stays on exceptions, uptime and logs.
Wrong for
A platform group at a large enterprise that needs one tool for traces, replays and infrastructure metrics should look at Datadog or New Relic instead.
Visit Honeybadger →
#5 Rollbar
Error grouping and workflow for production code · United States · rollbar.com
Error grouping Overage controls Deploy tracking
Rollbar is the strongest pure error-tracking product on this list for a team that already runs several services and wants triage to be a workflow rather than a feed. Its grouping puts a stack trace under one item rather than hundreds, items can be assigned, and deploys are tied to the fifth occurrence of an error.
- Pricing: Per event / month. Free plan includes 5,000 occurrences and 1,000 sessions a month with 30-day retention. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Teams triaging errors across many services
- Strengths: Real-time alerts; Error grouping; Stack traces.
Where it falls short
Rollbar keeps its paid prices behind a volume selector rather than a plain table, which makes comparison shopping slower than at Honeybadger or Airbrake. The credit system layered over occurrences adds one more number to track.
Wrong for
A team that wants uptime checks, logs and error tracking in a single product will find Rollbar narrower than Honeybadger or AppSignal.
Visit Rollbar →
#6 Sentry
Error tracking, tracing and replay across most languages · United States · sentry.io
Widest SDK coverage Self-hosting option Add-on billing
Sentry is the default answer in this category and would take first place on capability alone. It has official SDKs for most languages and frameworks, a single issue view that links an error to its trace, replay and release, and a large community that means almost any framework quirk has a documented fix.
- Pricing: Usage-based. Developer is $0 for 1 user and 5,000 errors. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Developer teams wanting broad SDK coverage
- Strengths: Error tracking; Performance tracing; Session replay.
Where it falls short
The base plan is cheap but the product is a menu of metered extras: logs, metrics, profiling hours, uptime alerts and cron monitors are each billed separately, and the AI debugger costs extra on every plan.
Wrong for
A team that wants a single predictable bill and no add-on arithmetic should compare Honeybadger or AppSignal before committing to a usage-metered stack.
Visit Sentry →
#7 Bugsnag
Stability monitoring for mobile and web releases · United States · bugsnag.com
Stability scores Mobile focus On-premises option
Bugsnag's strength is turning crash data into a release-health question: the stability benchmarks and automatic prioritization on the Preferred plan help a mobile team decide whether a build is safe to push to everyone. The free plan is generous with spans, paid plans carry unlimited users, and the Enterprise tier is one of the few in this ranking offering on-premises deployment.
- Pricing: Per event / month. Free plan with 7.5K events and 1M spans a month for 1 user. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Mobile and web teams tracking release stability
- Strengths: Error monitoring; Performance monitoring; Stability benchmarks.
Where it falls short
Ownership by a larger portfolio company means the product's direction follows SmartBear's broader roadmap, and small teams report less direct contact than at independent vendors. The free plan is capped at one user.
Wrong for
A small team that wants an independent vendor with straightforward flat prices should look at Honeybadger or AppSignal.
Visit Bugsnag →
#8 Airbrake
Error and performance monitoring on a tiered ladder · United States · airbrake.io
Public tiers Spend caps LogicMonitor-owned
Airbrake is the tool for buyers who like to see the ladder: $19 for 25,000 errors, $59 for 100,000, $129 for 300,000, $299 for a million and $799 for five million. Error monitoring and performance monitoring are chosen independently, so a team can pay for exceptions only.
- Pricing: Per tier / month. Five monthly error tiers from $19 for 25,000 errors to $799 for 5 million, 10 percent off annual plans, with performance monitoring priced separately. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Teams wanting fixed monthly error tiers
- Strengths: Error monitoring; Performance monitoring; Usage caps.
Where it falls short
Airbrake has no permanent free plan, only a trial, so a side project pays from the first month. The product is now part of LogicMonitor, and the marketing and roadmap emphasis has drifted toward infrastructure monitoring.
Wrong for
A hobby developer or very early startup wanting a free plan for ongoing use should start with Sentry, Honeybadger or Bugsnag.
Visit Airbrake →
#9 Datadog Error Tracking
Error tracking inside the Datadog observability platform · United States · datadoghq.com
Observability suite Bundled with APM Large platform
Datadog Error Tracking makes sense when the rest of the stack already reports to Datadog. It groups errors from APM traces, browser and mobile real-user monitoring, and logs into issues, shows how many users an issue hit, and points to the probable commit.
- Pricing: Usage-based. Error Tracking is billed by monthly error volume, with a flat $25 a month on annual billing for volumes below 50,000 errors. Free plan: none.
- Best for: Teams already running Datadog APM or RUM
- Strengths: Error grouping; APM trace linking; RUM linking.
Where it falls short
Standalone, it is a feature of a platform built for scale, and the surrounding bill (APM hosts, logs, RUM sessions) is where cost climbs.
Wrong for
A small team with no other Datadog products should look at Honeybadger or Rollbar instead of buying into a full observability platform for exceptions only.
Visit Datadog Error Tracking →
#10 New Relic
Observability platform with an errors inbox · United States · newrelic.com
100 GB free ingest Per-user pricing Large platform
New Relic works for a team that wants a single account for application performance, infrastructure, logs and errors and is willing to learn a bigger tool to get it. The free tier allows 100 GB of ingest a month and one full platform user with unlimited basic users, which is enough for a small production service.
- Pricing: Usage-based. Usage-based: a free tier of 100 GB data ingest a month and one full platform user, then $0.40 per GB (Standard) or $0.60 per GB (Data Plus), with full platform users from $10 to $418.80 a month depending on tier. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Teams that want one platform for everything
- Strengths: Errors inbox; APM; Browser monitoring.
Where it falls short
Cost design is two-dimensional: ingest per GB and full-platform users from $10 up to $349 to $419 a month on the Pro edition, and the sum is hard to predict before data flows.
Wrong for
A team of a few developers needing only exception alerts and release tracking will pay in complexity for features they never open.
Visit New Relic →
#11 LogRocket
Session replay with front-end error and log capture · United States · logrocket.com
Session replay Front-end focus Self-hosted option
LogRocket answers a different question from the server-side tools: what exactly did the user do before the error. Each error links to a replay with console output and network requests, which saves the back-and-forth with support.
- Pricing: Per session / month. Priced on captured sessions, starting at $176 a month for 25,000 sessions, with unlimited error, log and analytics events included. Free plan: free trial.
- Best for: Front-end teams reproducing user-facing bugs
- Strengths: Session replay; Error tracking; Performance monitoring.
Where it falls short
Back-end error coverage is thin compared with Sentry or Rollbar, since the product is oriented to browser and mobile sessions.
Wrong for
A back-end team running APIs, workers and queues needs exception tracking on the server side first, and should start with Rollbar, Honeybadger or Sentry.
Visit LogRocket →
#12 GlitchTip
Open-source, Sentry-compatible error tracking you can host yourself · United States · glitchtip.com
Open source Sentry SDK compatible EU hosting
GlitchTip takes a different route from the rest of this ranking: it accepts events from Sentry's open-source SDKs, so a team can point an existing application at it by changing one DSN.
- Pricing: Per tier / month. Free for 1,000 events a month. Free plan: free plan.
- Best for: Small teams that want cheap hosting or full control of their data
- Strengths: Error tracking; Sentry SDK compatibility; Performance monitoring.
Where it falls short
The pages we read list errors, performance, uptime and logs, but no session replay, profiling or release-health scoring, and compatibility with Sentry means newer Sentry features may not be matched.
Wrong for
A company that wants replay, release-health reporting or a contracted support team should look at Sentry, Bugsnag or Rollbar, and a team with no one to patch a server should use the hosted plans rather than self-host.
Visit GlitchTip →
Questions and answers
What is the best error tracking software in 2026?
AppSignal ranks first of 12, best for european teams on Ruby, Elixir or Node. Raygun is second (teams buying crash reporting without APM) and Bugfender third (mobile teams debugging issues on real devices). Places 1 to 3 go to challengers, vendors outside the best-known brands, wherever the category has them.
How is error tracking different from logging?
A log is a stream of lines you search after the fact. Error tracking watches for exceptions, deduplicates them by stack trace, counts how many users were hit, attaches the release and sends an alert to a named owner.
Do we still need error tracking if we already run an observability platform?
Often the platform already covers it. Datadog includes Error Tracking at no extra cost for APM traces and RUM events, and New Relic has an errors inbox in the same account. The question is whether engineers actually triage there.
Can I self-host an error tracker to keep data in my own infrastructure?
Yes, with limits. Sentry documents a self-hosted deployment in its repository, Bugsnag lists on-premises deployment on its Enterprise plan, LogRocket offers self-hosted deployments for regulated industries, and Bugfender sells on-premises licensing from EUR 3,000 a month.
What counts as one error event, and why does it change my bill?
Definitions differ. Sentry and Airbrake count errors, Rollbar counts occurrences, Bugsnag and Raygun count events, AppSignal counts requests, and New Relic bills by gigabytes ingested.
How long should error history be kept?
At least 30 days for most web applications, and 90 days or more if releases ship slowly or bugs show up on monthly cycles such as billing runs.
Is session replay worth paying for next to error tracking?
For front-end problems, often yes. A stack trace says where code failed, while a replay shows the click sequence and form state that led there, which cuts the time to reproduce a bug.
Which tools suit a mobile app better than a web back end?
Bugsnag and Bugfender lean toward mobile: Bugsnag with release stability benchmarks, Bugfender with per-device log capture.
How do I stop alert fatigue after switching on error tracking?
Start with alerts only on new issues and on regressions, not on every occurrence, and route them to one channel owned by the team on call.
Does a European company need to worry about where error data is stored?
Yes, because stack traces and request context can contain personal data such as emails, IP addresses and identifiers. Choose a plan with a documented EU region or data processing addendum, and scrub personal fields before they leave your application.
When is a free plan enough?
For a side project, a prototype or a small internal tool, a free plan is enough: Sentry gives 5,000 errors for one user, Honeybadger 5,000 errors a month, Rollbar 5,000 occurrences with 30 days of retention, and Bugsnag 7.5K events.
