11 Best Error Tracking Tools in 2024

Imagine losing users because of errors you didn't even know existed. Error tracking isn't just an important part of development—it's essential for ensuring your users have the best possible experience. You need the right error-tracking tools to diagnose and fix issues swiftly. But with so many options, choosing the perfect one can be challenging. That's why we've compiled a list of the best error tracking tools to help you make an informed decision and keep your application running smoothly.

What is an error tracking tool?

Before diving into the details, let's take a moment to understand the purpose of error tracking tools. When a user encounters a crash or error in your application, these tools provide crucial visibility into what went wrong, offering detailed context such as stack traces and error messages. They also send real-time notifications to alert you as soon as issues arise.

This level of insight allows you to address problems quickly and helps ensure the same errors don't happen again in your frontend, backend or mobile app.

Factors to consider when choosing an error tracking tool

Before diving into the best error tracking tools, let’s look at the key factors to consider when choosing the right one for your needs.

Feature set and functionality

An effective error tracking tool should offer comprehensive features that help you diagnose and fix errors efficiently. Essential features include:

• Detailed stack traces: To pinpoint the exact location of errors.
• Frequency histograms: To identify how often errors occur.
• Metadata collection: To provide context around errors.
• User session replay: To understand why errors happen from the user's perspective.
• Data filtering and search: To quickly navigate through error logs.
• Real-Time alerts and notifications: To stay informed about critical issues as they happen.

Budget

A great error tracking tool shouldn’t break the bank. Make sure the solution you choose offers the right balance of features and affordability, so you can maintain it over time without sacrificing the functionality you need.

Ease of use

A tool’s effectiveness is diminished if it’s too complicated. Choose a solution that’s user-friendly, quick to set up, and easily integrates into your current workflow, allowing you to focus on resolving issues rather than learning a new system.

Language and framework support

It’s essential that your error tracking tool supports the languages and frameworks you’re working with. Whether it’s frontend, backend, or mobile development, the tool should align with your tech stack to provide seamless error detection and reporting.

Integration with other services

Your tool should work well with the other platforms your team uses. Look for integrations with communication tools like Slack and project management software like Jira. Strong integrations can help streamline workflows and foster better collaboration across teams.

Technical support

Even with an intuitive tool, you’ll likely encounter challenges. Opt for a solution that offers solid technical support—whether through live chat, email, or knowledge bases—so you can resolve issues quickly and keep your focus on development.

Considering these factors, let’s explore the best error tracking tools available.

1. Better Stack

Starting off the list is Better Stack. While it doesn't currently have built-in error tracking, this feature is in the works. However, it's still a powerful tool for analyzing and diagnosing errors thanks to its observability features.

Better Stack centralizes your logs and metrics, making it easy to analyze them using its ClickHouse SQL language. If you’re not familiar with SQL, you can still query your data using their SQL query builder. Additionally, the platform provides monitoring tools that ensure your APIs, scheduled tasks, DNS, SSL certificates, and email protocols like SMTP, IMAP, or POP3 are functioning correctly. Better Stack does this by pinging services from at least three locations, ensuring accuracy. You can configure alerts through email, SMS, Slack, and other channels. To make notifications more insightful, Better Stack includes screenshots and detailed log messages when issues arise.

One unique feature is the ability to reuse your existing Playwright code to run browser checks, helping you troubleshoot errors with logs and visual records. You can also create public status pages to inform your users about incidents and downtime.

🌟 Key features

• Uptime monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Log and metrics management
• Incident management

➕ Pros

• Offers ready-made dashboards for visualizing logs and metrics.
• Supports running Playwright scripts for end-to-end monitoring.
• Allows the creation of public status pages for transparency with users.
• Strong collaboration features for teams.
• Provides detailed error logs and screenshots to aid in troubleshooting.

➖ Cons

• Doesn't have error tracking yet, but it's on the way.

💲 Pricing

Better Stack offers a free plan that includes up to 10 monitors, heartbeat tracking, incident management, and one status page—giving you a great starting point to explore its capabilities. If you need more, you can upgrade to the pay-as-you-go plan at $29/month, which unlocks features like unlimited team members, phone and SMS alerts, customizable status pages, and more.

Want more details? Check out our pricing page.

2. Sentry

Sentry is an excellent open-source error tracking tool. It can be used to monitor both the front end and back end. One of its standout features is session replay, which allows you to track user interactions and diagnose errors effectively.

Sentry also includes a user feedback widget, letting you collect feedback from end users when encountering bugs. This feedback is linked to debugging context, such as session replays, giving you deeper insight into the issue.

In addition to error tracking, Sentry provides performance monitoring features, including code profiling. This helps identify and resolve performance bottlenecks quickly by isolating slow functions across different environments.

Another helpful feature is its cron monitoring, which ensures scheduled tasks run as expected and sends alerts when a job fails, along with details about the failure.

🌟 Key features

• Error monitoring
• Session replay
• Distributed tracing
• Application performance monitoring

➕ Pros

• Collects feedback from users when errors occur.
• Offers over 100 SDKs for web, mobile, and server-side languages and frameworks.
• Self-hosting options are available.
• Provides performance monitoring features like request tracing, function profiling, and issue detection.
• Sentry's code is open-source, allowing for transparency and community contributions.

➖ Cons

• Session replay can be resource-intensive, which may impact performance.
• Has performance overhead on serverless platforms like Vercel and AWS Lambda.

💲 Pricing

Sentry offers a free plan ideal for solo developers, providing basic error monitoring and tracking. For teams that need more functionality, the team plan starts at $26/month and includes user management and third-party integrations. Larger teams can opt for the business plan at $80/month, which offers advanced features like custom dashboards. Enterprise plans are available with custom pricing and premium support for more complex needs.

3. Datadog

Datadog is a comprehensive full-stack monitoring solution that provides visibility across mobile apps, frontends, backends, and infrastructure. Its error tracking feature offers rich debugging context, including detailed stack traces down to the line of code, making it easier to identify root causes.

Datadog also includes session replay, which allows you to visualize user behavior, and heatmaps to show where users click on your site. This integration with real user monitoring, application performance monitoring, and logs gives you full-stack visibility from the front end to the back end.

With over 750 integrations, Datadog is highly versatile for organizations with complex systems. Beyond error tracking, it offers infrastructure monitoring, log management, application performance monitoring, security monitoring, and more, all within a single interface.

🌟 Key features

• Error tracking
• Real user monitoring
• Infrastructure and application monitoring
• Log management
• Distributed tracing
• Security monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• LLM observability

➕ Pros

• Integrates with real user monitoring (RUM), application performance monitoring (APM), and logs, providing complete visibility across frontend, backend, and mobile apps.
• Reduces noise by automatically grouping related errors.
• Integrates with over 750 services.
• Works well with workflow tools like PagerDuty and Slack for smooth error management.
• Offers a unified platform for monitoring, security, and user experience.
• Advanced anomaly detection powered by AI.
• Highly scalable, making it ideal for large enterprises.

➖ Cons

• Pricing can escalate quickly as usage grows.
• Datadog may feel overwhelming or complex for those with simpler needs.

💲 Pricing

Datadog offers flexible pricing to accommodate various business needs. The free plan provides basic infrastructure monitoring for up to 5 hosts, while the pro plan starts at $15 per host, per month, offering extended metric retention and pre-built dashboards. For advanced features, the enterprise plan starts at $23 per host, per month, and includes machine learning-based alerts and enhanced administrative controls. The DevSecOps plan, focused on cloud security, starts at $22 per host, per month. Additional costs apply for custom metrics, with volume discounts available for large-scale usage, and tailored support is offered for enterprise infrastructures.

4. LogRocket

LogRocket is an error tracking tool designed to help you identify, prioritize, and resolve issues efficiently. It provides detailed error tracking, complete with stack traces and source maps, allowing you to pinpoint the exact source of errors and troubleshoot more effectively.

LogRocket also includes session replay, which lets you understand how users interact with your application and assess the impact of errors on their experience. It translates error messages into natural language, making them easier to comprehend, and its UX and product analytics tools enable you to track user behavior, spot areas where users get stuck, and receive notifications to address issues, ultimately improving the user experience.

🌟 Key features

• Error tracking
• Session replay
• Product analytics
• UX analytics

➕ Pros

• Can be used for product and UX analysis.
• Automatically assigns severity scores to errors.
• Integrates with tools like Jira for seamless issue tracking and progress monitoring.
• Self-hosting option available.

➖ Cons

• Primarily focused on frontend monitoring.

💲 Pricing

LogRocket offers a free plan with 1,000 monthly sessions and one month of data retention—ideal if you're just starting out. If you need more sessions or advanced features like in-depth session replay and error tracking, the team plan starts at $69/month.

For more robust tools such as AI-powered struggle detection and comprehensive product analytics, the professional plan is priced at $295/month. For businesses requiring custom solutions, LogRocket’s enterprise offering includes options like self-hosting and custom session volumes.

5. AppSignal

AppSignal is an error tracking tool that helps you monitor front and backend errors. It provides deep insights into errors, enabling you to identify the root cause and resolve issues efficiently and quickly. AppSignal sends real-time error alerts, so you're instantly notified when something goes wrong.

It supports many languages and frameworks, including Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, Python, and JavaScript. AppSignal automatically tracks exceptions and intelligently groups related errors, simplifying the debugging process by highlighting recurring issues.

Beyond error tracking, AppSignal integrates performance monitoring, uptime monitoring, anomaly detection, and host monitoring, giving you a complete view of your application's health.

🌟 Key features

• Error tracking
  
• Deploy tracking
  
• Uptime monitoring
  
• Log management
  
• Anomaly detection
  
• Host monitoring
  
• Metric dashboards
  
• Performance monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Automatically tracks exceptions and groups related errors, making debugging easier.
• Full observability with log management, metrics, and performance monitoring.
• Provides dashboards that simplify data analysis.
• Lightweight and stable agent, built with Rust.

➖ Cons

• Lacks session replay features.

💲 Pricing

AppSignal offers flexible pricing plans:

• 30-day free trial: Access all features for testing.
• Base plan: Starts at €18/month, covering up to 250,000 requests/month. This includes application monitoring, error tracking, performance monitoring, host monitoring, anomaly detection, and uptime monitoring.
• Add-ons: Features like logging (1GB/month) are available as paid add-ons.

6. Airbrake

Airbrake is another excellent error tracking tool to consider. It offers SDKs for most popular languages and frameworks. It has features like hotspot analysis, which identifies high-risk areas in your codebase and flags files or functions that frequently trigger errors, helping you focus on the most critical parts.

Airbrake also includes an error grouping feature that intelligently categorizes errors by message, type, and function. This helps you quickly spot trends and resolve issues more efficiently.

In addition to error tracking, Airbrake offers performance monitoring and deployment tracking, providing real-time insights. This allows you to identify and resolve issues quickly. Its application performance monitoring tracks key performance metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction, helping improve overall app performance.

🌟 Key features

• Error tracking
  
• Application performance monitoring
  
• Deploy tracking
  
• Real-time error alerts
  

➕ Pros

• Provides error grouping and hotspot analysis for better focus on critical issues.
• Integrates with popular development tools.
• Correlates errors with deployments, making it easier to pinpoint issues.
• Instant error notifications via preferred channels like Slack or email.
• Lightweight, serverless SDK-based architecture.

➖ Cons

• Airbrake samples data in some cases, which can result in incomplete error visibility.

💲 Pricing

Airbrake’s basic plan starts at $19 monthly for single-user accounts, offering unlimited projects and integrations—perfect for solo developers.

For growing teams, plans start at $38 per month, providing unlimited users and teams, as well as perks like audit logs and spike forgiveness, making it a suitable option as your team scales.

7. Rollbar

Rollbar is a solid error tracking tool that helps you discover, prioritize, and resolve issues in real-time. It provides immediate visibility when errors occur, coupled with real-time logging for unhandled exceptions.

To help you identify the root cause of errors faster, Rollbar offers detailed context, including stack traces, telemetry data, and local variables. Additionally, it supports continuous delivery by tracking errors across deployments, ensuring smoother rollouts or aiding in necessary rollbacks.

🌟 Key features

• Deployment and version tracking
  
• Real-time error tracking
  
• Continuous delivery support
  
• Cross-project search
  

➕ Pros

• Supports continuous delivery with deployment error tracking.
• Offers automated issue tracking and workflow creation.
• Includes source maps for debugging JavaScript errors.
• Prioritizes errors based on metadata that highlights the impact of each issue.

➖ Cons

• Does not include native session replay.

💲 Pricing

Rollbar’s free plan provides up to 5,000 monthly events, making it ideal for small teams just starting. For teams that need more, the essentials plan starts at $15.83/month, allowing for increased event limits and extended data retention.

The advanced or enterprise plans are available for more advanced features like cross-project search or custom workflows, offering flexibility tailored to your specific needs.

8. Honeybadger

Honeybadger is an error tracking and performance monitoring tool originally built for Ruby but has since expanded to support other languages like Python, JavaScript, and Go.

Honeybadger captures detailed error information, including backtraces, context, user sessions, and environment data, making it easier to pinpoint the root cause of an error. It also sends instant notifications, ensuring your team can quickly follow up. Its breadcrumb feature tracks user actions leading up to an error, giving you a clear sequence of events that triggered the issue.

🌟 Key features

• Performance monitoring
• Error tracking
• Intelligent error grouping
• Deployment tracking
• Log management
• Cron and heartbeat monitoring

➕ Pros

• Includes heartbeat and cron monitoring to keep track of scheduled tasks.
• Full-stack observability centralizes logs and metrics for easier analysis.
• Allows you to create status pages to keep users informed.
• Dashboards help visualize application performance and issues.
• Quick to set up and easy to use.
• Integrates with popular project management tools.

➖ Cons

• Lacks session replay functionality.

💲 Pricing

Honeybadger offers the following plans:

• Developer plan (Free): 5,000 errors/month, 15-day retention, 50 MB/day log storage, basic uptime and check-in monitoring.
• Team plan ($39/month): 150,000 errors/month, 90-day retention, unlimited users and teams—ideal for small to medium businesses.
• Business plan ($120/month): Includes advanced features like team management, SSO authentication, and custom error routing, suitable for larger organizations.
• Enterprise plan (Custom pricing): Designed for large-scale operations with high-volume error support, dedicated environments, and custom SLAs.

9. Highlight.io

Highlight.io is a comprehensive error tracking and full-stack monitoring platform. It features session replay, allowing you to trace user interactions visually and helping you understand what caused errors from the user’s perspective.

You can also centralize logs from both your front end and back end, making it easier to perform analysis. Highlight.io offers distributed tracing for distributed services, giving you a complete view of your system and helping you identify performance bottlenecks across services.

The error tracking feature includes custom error grouping and OpenTelemetry-powered alerts, helping you catch issues early before they escalate.

🌟 Key features

• Error monitoring
  
• Distributed tracing
  
• Session replay
  
• Log management

➕ Pros

• Supports full-stack observability with logs, traces, and errors.
• Self-hosting option available.
• Natively supports OpenTelemetry for seamless tracing and monitoring.

➖ Cons

• Self-hosting can be challenging, especially for smaller teams.

💲 Pricing

Highlight.io is open-source, meaning you can choose to self-host, though it can be complex. For an easier start, you can use the free plan, which includes 500 monthly sessions, unlimited team members, and AI error grouping.

As your needs grow, the pay-as-you-go plan starts at $50/month, offering 3 dashboards, 15 seats, 2 projects, and 7 days of data retention.

For larger teams, the business plan starts at $800/month, providing unlimited dashboards, projects, and custom retention options.

If you're running at scale, Highlight.io offers enterprise and self-hosted plans with custom pricing, which feature advanced options like SAML, SSO, RBAC, and volume discounts.

10. Bugsnag

Bugsnag is another option for error tracking. It supports a wide variety of programming languages and frameworks, including Python, JavaScript, React, and more.

To help you balance fixing bugs with building new features, Bugsnag offers a "stability score," a metric that tracks stability trends over time and compares releases to ensure consistency. This makes it easier to track how new deployments affect overall stability.

Bugsnag also includes real user monitoring, providing performance data in real-time to help optimize the user experience. Additionally, it supports distributed tracing, making it particularly useful for complex services with distributed architectures.

🌟 Key features

• Error monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Session tracking
• Distributed tracing

➕ Pros

• Stability metrics help you balance feature development and bug fixes.
• Can be used for web, services, or mobile applications.
• Integrates with over 50 platforms and frameworks.

➖ Cons

• Documentation can sometimes be confusing.
• Lacks session replay functionality.

💲 Pricing

Bugsnag offers a free plan for solo developers, providing 7,500 events and 1 million monthly spans. Paid plans start at $18/month, covering 50,000 events and 3 million spans.

The $54/month plan adds features like advanced segmentation, stability benchmarks, and custom notifications as your needs grow. For larger teams or specific needs, Bugsnag also offers customizable enterprise plans to fit your business perfectly.

11. GlitchTip

GlitchTip is an open-source error tracking and performance monitoring tool designed to be a lightweight alternative to Sentry. It allows you to track errors and monitor performance across web, mobile, and server-side applications. One standout feature is its compatibility with Sentry’s open-source SDKs, enabling seamless integration with Sentry-based setups.

In addition to error tracking, GlitchTip offers uptime monitoring, which pings your applications and alerts you when a ping is missed, helping you ensure consistent availability.

🌟 Key features

• Error tracking
• Performance monitoring
• Uptime monitoring

➕ Pros

• Lightweight and easy to learn.
• Compatible with Sentry SDKs.
• Self-hosting option available.

➖ Cons

• Lacks session replay features.

💲 Pricing

GlitchTip keeps its pricing simple with a free plan covering up to 1,000 monthly events—ideal for smaller projects. If you need more, the small plan starts at $15/month for up to 100,000 events, and more extensive plans go up to $250/month for 3 million events. Nonprofits and open-source projects can access discounted plans starting at just $5/month.

For full control, you can self-host GlitchTip for free, giving you total ownership of your data and infrastructure.

Final thoughts

In this article, we explored some of the best error tracking tools available, each offering unique features to help streamline the process of identifying and resolving issues. From lightweight, open-source solutions like GlitchTip and Highlight.io to full-stack platforms like Datadog, there's something for every project and team size.

We recommend trying a few if you're unsure which one is right for you. Each tool offers its own strengths, and by experimenting with different options, you can find the one that fits your workflow and needs best. Happy error tracking!

Article by

Stanley Ulili

Stanley Ulili is a technical educator at Better Stack based in Malawi. He specializes in backend development and has freelanced for platforms like DigitalOcean, LogRocket, and AppSignal. Stanley is passionate about making complex topics accessible to developers.

Got an article suggestion? Let us know

Explore more

Logging vs Error Tracking

Learn the key differences between the logging and error tracking, and how each one contributes to a comprehensive monitoring strategy

13 Best Sentry Alternatives in 2023

A list of Sentry APM alternatives offering a better, less complicated and more reliable solutions to application monitoring.

Top 13 LogRocket Alternatives 2024

Find the top 13 LogRocket alternatives for 2024. Compare features and pricing to choose the best tool for session replay, user analytics, and error tracking.

10 Best Datadog Alternatives to Consider in 2023

Datadog is one of the most potent and versatile players on the market, but they have their fair share of downsides. The monitoring and observability space is quite competitive, so we will discuss 10 of the best Datadog alternatives and compare their pros and cons to determine which is better suited for your needs.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.