Sentry vs Grafana for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Sentry Overview

Sentry does one thing exceptionally: it catches application errors and gives you everything you need to fix them. Stack traces with source maps, breadcrumb trails, user context, browser information, session replays, and release tracking. When your production app breaks, Sentry is the first tool that tells you what happened and why.

Integration is fast. Add the SDK to your app, initialize it with your project DSN, deploy, and errors start appearing in your dashboard. Sentry groups duplicate errors into issues, tracks their frequency, and alerts you through Slack, email, or other integrations. Performance monitoring shows slow transactions, database queries, and frontend vitals.

The free tier provides 5,000 errors per month, which is more than enough for most solo developer projects. The Team plan at $26/month adds higher limits, better retention, and advanced features. For error tracking specifically, Sentry has no real competitor in terms of depth and developer experience.

Grafana Overview

Grafana is an open-source visualization and observability platform. At its core, Grafana is a dashboard tool that connects to data sources (Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, Loki, Elasticsearch, and dozens more) and creates beautiful, interactive visualizations from your metrics and logs.

The Grafana ecosystem has grown significantly. Grafana itself handles visualization. Prometheus collects metrics. Loki aggregates logs. Tempo traces requests. Mimir provides long-term metric storage. Together, they form the LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir), which is a complete open-source observability platform.

You can self-host Grafana for free or use Grafana Cloud. The free cloud tier includes 10,000 metrics series, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces, and 500 VUH (virtual user hours) for k6 load testing. The self-hosted option gives you unlimited everything, but you maintain the infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud's free tier is genuinely useful for solo developers who want monitoring without managing Prometheus and Loki themselves. The managed agents (Grafana Alloy) collect and ship metrics and logs to the cloud with minimal configuration.

Key Differences

Purpose and focus. Sentry is an error tracking product. You install it, and it catches bugs. Grafana is a visualization platform. It shows you data, but you need to supply the data sources, configure the collectors, and build the dashboards. Sentry is ready to use in five minutes. Grafana requires meaningful setup before it shows you anything useful.

Error tracking. Sentry provides stack traces, breadcrumbs, session replay, user context, and release correlation for every error. Grafana does not do error tracking in the Sentry sense. You can log errors and visualize error rates in Grafana, but you do not get stack traces with source maps, session replays, or automatic error grouping. For debugging a specific bug, Sentry is far more useful.

Infrastructure monitoring. Grafana with Prometheus gives you comprehensive infrastructure monitoring: CPU, memory, disk, network, container health, custom application metrics. Sentry does not monitor infrastructure at all. If you need to know your server's memory usage trend over the last week, Grafana shows you a graph. Sentry has no opinion about your server.

Self-hosting economics. Grafana is fully open source. You can run the entire LGTM stack on your own server for free. The trade-off is setup time and maintenance. Getting Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, and Alertmanager configured and running takes hours, possibly a full day. Sentry also has an open-source self-hosted option, but most solo developers use the cloud version because the free tier is sufficient.

Dashboard flexibility. Grafana's dashboarding capabilities are industry-leading. You can visualize any metric from any data source with any chart type. Custom panels, variables, annotations, and alert rules create dashboards tailored to your exact needs. Sentry has pre-built dashboards for errors and performance. You cannot customize them to the same degree.

Learning curve. Sentry: install SDK, deploy, read error reports. Grafana: install Grafana, install Prometheus, configure scraping targets, install exporters for your services, create dashboards with PromQL queries, configure alerting rules. The knowledge required for a productive Grafana setup is significantly higher.

When to Choose Sentry

• Application error tracking with deep context is your primary need
• You want to start monitoring in under five minutes
• Stack traces, session replay, and breadcrumbs matter for your debugging workflow
• You prefer a focused tool that does one thing very well
• You do not want to manage monitoring infrastructure

When to Choose Grafana

• You need infrastructure monitoring with custom metrics and dashboards
• You want full control over your monitoring stack with open-source tools
• You enjoy building dashboards and have time to configure Prometheus exporters
• You need to visualize data from multiple sources in one place
• Budget is zero and you are willing to self-host everything

The Verdict

For solo developers who need to catch and fix bugs, Sentry is the obvious choice. You install it in five minutes, it catches every error, and the reports give you exactly what you need to fix them. No configuration, no dashboards to build, no query languages to learn.

Grafana is the right choice if you manage your own infrastructure and want visibility into server health, application metrics, and log data. But be honest about the time investment. Setting up a Grafana stack properly takes hours, and maintaining it is ongoing work. For a solo developer, that time might be better spent on product.

My setup: I use both. Sentry catches application errors on the free tier. Grafana with Prometheus monitors server infrastructure. But I set up Grafana once during initial server configuration and rarely touch it. Sentry I interact with daily. If you are choosing one starting point, start with Sentry. You can always add Grafana later when you have infrastructure worth monitoring.