GlitchTip

GlitchTip is an open-source error tracking and performance monitoring platform that has carved out an important niche as a lightweight, privacy-friendly alternative to Sentry. Developed with the goal of providing essential error tracking capabilities without the complexity and cost of enterprise monitoring solutions, GlitchTip combines error tracking, uptime monitoring, and performance monitoring in a single, easy-to-deploy application. For European organizations concerned about data sovereignty and GDPR compliance, GlitchTip's self-hosting capability and open-source nature make it a particularly attractive choice.

What makes GlitchTip unique in the monitoring landscape is its full compatibility with the Sentry SDK ecosystem. This means teams can use the same client libraries and integration code they would use with Sentry, but point them at their own GlitchTip instance instead. This SDK compatibility dramatically reduces migration effort for teams switching from Sentry and provides access to Sentry's well-documented, battle-tested client libraries for virtually every programming language and framework. The platform supports React, Next.js, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, Django, Go, Java, and many more environments out of the box.

Error Tracking and Issue Management

At its core, GlitchTip captures and organizes application errors in real time. When an error occurs in your application, the Sentry-compatible SDK sends the error data to GlitchTip, where it is grouped by type, deduplicated, and presented in a clean dashboard. Each error event includes the full stack trace, environment details, browser or device information, user context, and any custom tags or metadata you configure. This level of detail enables developers to quickly understand not just what went wrong, but under what conditions and for which users.

GlitchTip groups similar errors together into issues, preventing your dashboard from being flooded with duplicate entries. Each issue shows a timeline of occurrences, the number of affected users, and the environments where it has been observed. Teams can assign issues to specific members, mark them as resolved, and receive notifications when resolved issues recur. This workflow ensures that errors are tracked systematically rather than being lost in logs or ignored after initial triage.

Uptime Monitoring

Beyond error tracking, GlitchTip includes built-in uptime monitoring that regularly checks your websites and APIs to ensure they are responding correctly. You can configure checks for HTTP endpoints, specifying expected status codes and response time thresholds. When a monitored endpoint goes down or responds slowly, GlitchTip sends alerts through your configured notification channels. This eliminates the need for a separate uptime monitoring service, consolidating your observability stack into a single platform.

The uptime monitoring feature is straightforward and effective, providing a clear timeline of availability and response times for each monitored endpoint. While it does not offer the advanced features of dedicated uptime monitoring services like multi-region checks or complex assertion rules, it covers the common use case of knowing when your services are down and how their response times trend over time.

Performance Monitoring

GlitchTip's performance monitoring capabilities allow teams to track transaction durations and identify slow endpoints or operations. By instrumenting your application with the Sentry SDK's performance tracing, you can capture timing data for HTTP requests, database queries, external API calls, and custom spans. GlitchTip aggregates this data to show transaction duration percentiles, throughput, and trends over time, helping teams identify performance regressions before they impact users significantly.

The performance monitoring feature provides essential visibility into application behavior without the overwhelming complexity of full APM solutions. For teams that need to know which API endpoints are slow and how performance changes over time, GlitchTip delivers these insights with minimal configuration overhead.

Simplified Architecture and Resource Efficiency

One of GlitchTip's most significant advantages over self-hosted Sentry is its dramatically simplified architecture. While self-hosted Sentry requires a dozen or more services including Kafka, ClickHouse, Snuba, and numerous workers, GlitchTip operates with just four components: the Django-based backend, a Celery worker, Redis for caching and task queuing, and PostgreSQL for data storage. This simplified stack means GlitchTip can run on minimal hardware, typically requiring just 1 GB of RAM and a single CPU core for small to medium deployments.

This resource efficiency makes GlitchTip practical for environments where running a full Sentry installation would be prohibitively expensive or complex. Small teams, startups, and organizations with limited infrastructure budgets can deploy GlitchTip alongside their existing applications without requiring dedicated monitoring infrastructure. The low resource footprint also makes it viable for running on small VPS instances, Raspberry Pi devices, or constrained Kubernetes clusters.

Deployment and Self-Hosting

GlitchTip provides multiple deployment options to suit different infrastructure preferences. Docker Compose is the simplest approach, with a well-documented configuration that gets you running in minutes. For production environments, GlitchTip offers Kubernetes Helm charts and can be deployed on any container orchestration platform. The project also provides documentation for deployment on platforms like Railway, Render, and traditional Linux servers with systemd.

Self-hosting GlitchTip means your error data never leaves your infrastructure. All stack traces, user context, and performance data remain on servers you control, making it straightforward to comply with GDPR, HIPAA, and other data protection regulations. For organizations operating in regulated industries or those with strict data residency requirements, this self-hosting capability is invaluable. The platform can be deployed entirely within EU data centers, ensuring that sensitive application data stays within European jurisdiction.

Alerting and Notifications

GlitchTip supports email-based notifications out of the box, alerting team members when new errors occur or when uptime checks fail. The platform can also send push notifications through its Progressive Web App (PWA) support, enabling mobile access and real-time alerts without requiring a dedicated mobile application. For teams that need integration with chat platforms or incident management tools, GlitchTip provides webhook support that can be connected to Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, or custom automation workflows.

Open Source and Community

GlitchTip is released under the MIT license, one of the most permissive open-source licenses available. This means organizations can use, modify, and distribute GlitchTip without restriction, including in commercial products. The project is actively maintained on GitLab, with regular releases that add features, fix bugs, and improve performance. The open-source nature ensures that security practices are transparent and that the community can contribute improvements, report vulnerabilities, and verify that the platform handles data responsibly.

The GlitchTip community, while smaller than Sentry's, is active and welcoming. The project maintains documentation that covers installation, configuration, upgrading, and common troubleshooting scenarios. Community support is available through the project's issue tracker and discussion forums, while commercial support options are available for organizations that need guaranteed response times.

Cloud Hosted Option

For teams that prefer not to manage their own infrastructure, GlitchTip offers a cloud-hosted service starting at $16 per month. The managed service handles all infrastructure, updates, and backups, allowing teams to start tracking errors immediately without any DevOps effort. Plans are based on event volume, with the entry-level plan supporting a generous number of monthly events. The cloud option provides the same features as the self-hosted version, giving teams the flexibility to start with managed hosting and migrate to self-hosting later if their needs change.

Pricing and Value Proposition

GlitchTip's pricing model is one of its strongest differentiators. The self-hosted version is completely free with no limitations on events, users, or projects. The cloud-hosted plans start at $16 per month and scale based on event volume, remaining significantly more affordable than Sentry's cloud pricing for comparable usage levels. For organizations that are currently paying hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for Sentry's cloud service, switching to self-hosted GlitchTip can result in dramatic cost savings while maintaining Sentry SDK compatibility.

Limitations and Trade-offs

GlitchTip is intentionally simpler than Sentry, which means it lacks some of Sentry's more advanced features. Session replay, profiling, advanced issue grouping algorithms, and the breadth of Sentry's integration ecosystem are not available in GlitchTip. The user interface, while functional and clean, is less polished than Sentry's extensively refined dashboard. Performance monitoring is more basic, lacking Sentry's detailed span waterfalls and query analysis capabilities. For teams that rely on these advanced features, GlitchTip may not be a complete replacement. However, for the majority of teams that primarily need reliable error tracking, uptime monitoring, and basic performance insights, GlitchTip delivers excellent value.

Who Should Use GlitchTip?

GlitchTip is ideal for development teams that want open-source, self-hosted error tracking with full control over their data. It is particularly well-suited for European organizations needing GDPR-compliant monitoring, startups and small teams with limited monitoring budgets, organizations already using Sentry SDKs who want to reduce costs or gain data sovereignty, and teams operating in regulated industries where error data must remain within specific jurisdictions. If you need essential error tracking without enterprise complexity or pricing, GlitchTip offers the best combination of capability, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness available today.