If you searched for Sentry alternatives and got as far as GlitchTip and Bugsink, you have already ruled out the deep observability platforms. You landed on the same idea from two different teams: keep the Sentry SDK protocol so you do not have to touch your app's instrumentation, and drop everything else Sentry bundles that you were not using anyway. Both projects describe themselves this way.
The sections below answer what actually differs between them, and what "self-host it yourself" costs once you count the part neither pricing page shows.
Everything below is sourced to each project's own site, read September 21, 2026. Prices and licenses change; check the source before deciding.
What do GlitchTip and Bugsink have in common?
Both accept events from existing Sentry SDKs, which follow Sentry's published SDK protocol. Point your DSN at GlitchTip or at Bugsink instead of sentry.io, change nothing else in your app, and events start arriving. Both explicitly stay out of tracing, session replay, and profiling, the categories that make Sentry's own bill unpredictable; error tracking is the whole job for each of them. Both offer a hosted option with a free tier and a self-hosted option you run yourself. The similarity ends there.
How do GlitchTip and Bugsink differ?
GlitchTip and Bugsink differ in license, self-hosting footprint, hosted pricing and maturity.
License. GlitchTip is MIT-licensed, an OSI-approved open-source license with no restrictions on how you use, modify, or redistribute the code. Bugsink is source-available under PolyForm Shield 1.0.0. That license lets you view, run, and modify the code but restricts using it to compete with Bugsink commercially. Bugsink's own comparison pages state plainly that this is not an OSI open-source license. If "open source" in the strict, foundation-recognized sense is a requirement for your stack, that requirement points at GlitchTip and rules out Bugsink regardless of anything else on this page.
Self-hosting footprint. GlitchTip's self-hosted deployment runs Postgres and background workers alongside the application, the shape of a typical Django-based service. Bugsink is built around a narrower footprint: a single Docker container with SQLite out of the box, explicitly aimed at teams who want to skip standing up a database cluster just to catch exceptions. If you already run Postgres for everything else in your stack, GlitchTip fits into infrastructure you have; if you want the smallest possible thing to operate, Bugsink's one-container model is built for exactly that case.
Hosted pricing. GlitchTip's hosted free tier includes 1,000 events a month, with paid tiers at $15/month for 100,000 events, $50/month for 500,000, and $250/month for 3 million, per GlitchTip's own pricing page. Bugsink's hosted free tier is larger, 15,000 events a month, stepping up to $16/month for 75,000, $50/month for 600,000, and $158/month for 3 million, per Bugsink's published pricing. Bugsink is at or below GlitchTip's price at nearly every paid tier:
- Entry tier: roughly matched, with GlitchTip giving more events for about the same money (100,000 for $15 against Bugsink's 75,000 for $16).
- Middle tier: Bugsink ahead, with 600,000 events for $50 against GlitchTip's 500,000 for the same $50.
- Top tier compared here: Bugsink clearly cheaper, at $158 against $250 for 3 million events on both.
The free tier gap is the starkest: 15,000 events against 1,000.
Ecosystem maturity. GlitchTip has been running as a hosted and self-hosted product longer and has a larger public user base and more third-party references. Bugsink is newer and narrower in scope by design, one container versus a fuller stack, which is a feature for some teams and a smaller ecosystem for others. Neither is wrong; they are optimizing for different operators.
How do you choose between GlitchTip and Bugsink?
Four questions settle the choice faster than a feature matrix. If you have already ruled out a hosted product and the choice is specifically GlitchTip versus self-hosted Bugsink, ask these:
- Does "open source" need to mean OSI-approved, for a legal or procurement reason, not just "I can read the code"? If yes, that is GlitchTip; PolyForm Shield is a real restriction, not a technicality, and it rules Bugsink out regardless of anything else here.
- Do you already operate Postgres for other services? If yes, GlitchTip's self-hosted footprint adds one more application to a database you are already running and backing up. If you would be standing up Postgres specifically for this, Bugsink's single-container SQLite model removes a whole category of operational work.
- What is your actual event volume? Below roughly 15,000 events a month, Bugsink's hosted free tier covers you outright where GlitchTip's does not; above the free tiers, Bugsink stays at or below GlitchTip's price at every published tier, most clearly at 3 million events a month, where it is noticeably cheaper for the same volume.
- How much do you trust yourself to keep either one patched? A self-hosted error tracker is, among other things, software with its own security surface, watching your application's exceptions. An unpatched instance is a liability in exactly the category it is supposed to help you manage.
None of these questions has a universally right answer. They depend on constraints specific to your team, which is why this comparison is a feature-by-feature page and not a recommendation.
What does self-hosting an error tracker really cost?
Self-hosting costs the engineering time to run the service, which neither pricing page counts. Both projects are honest about what they charge to host your data. Neither page, and this is not a criticism specific to either one, prices what decides whether self-hosting saves money: running the thing yourself once it is live.
Self-hosting either tool for free means you now own:
- A service that needs upgrades when a security release ships.
- A database that needs backups someone actually tests.
- Disk space that needs monitoring before it fills silently.
- An on-call response the day the container itself goes down. That is the one outage your error tracker cannot report, because it is the thing that is down.
None of that shows up as a dollar figure on a comparison page, and all of it is real time from an engineer who could be doing something else. For a team of one or two people, that time is often the most expensive part of "free."
The argument is not that self-hosting is always the wrong call. A team with existing Postgres operations, a genuine data-residency requirement, or a wish for full control regardless of labor cost has good reasons to self-host either tool. Both are well-built software for that use case. The point is to price the labor honestly before calling either option free.
Where does a hosted, flat-priced tracker fit?
RealUptime Errors is the third option: hosted only, so there is no container to operate, no database to back up, and no upgrade schedule to track. The price is a flat monthly fee rather than a per-event meter. It accepts the Sentry SDK protocol, so an existing Sentry SDK can be pointed at it by changing the DSN, and RealUptime also ships its own SDKs for JavaScript, Go, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Tracing and performance data are not part of it: transaction items are accepted and discarded.
What it buys is one less service to run. Errors, uptime checks, and a status page live in the same account, with sensitive-data scrubbing on by default in the SDK. Plans cost $0, $23.99, or $58.99 a month, with 10,000 free events to start.
If open source or SDK compatibility with an existing Sentry setup is the actual requirement, GlitchTip or Bugsink is the right answer, and this post will not talk you out of it. The feature-by-feature pages cover the rest of the comparison, sourced and dated: RealUptime Errors vs GlitchTip, RealUptime Errors vs Bugsink, and the direct GlitchTip vs Bugsink matrix if you are choosing between those two specifically rather than against us.
If the deciding question is "I do not want to operate another service," start free on RealUptime Errors with 10,000 events a month before comparing anything else.
Sources: GlitchTip pricing, Bugsink homepage, and Bugsink's own comparison pages, read September 21, 2026.