If you're trying to choose between Sentry, Datadog, Rollbar, and Bugsnag for error monitoring and application observability, you've come to the right place. We used QBack to analyze over 1,000 G2 reviews, explored dozens of Reddit discussions, and compared current pricing across all four platforms to give you a clear picture of which one might work best for you.

This comparison covers everything from pricing and features to what real customers are saying. Whether you're a developer looking for code-level diagnostics, a DevOps team needing full-stack visibility, or an enterprise requiring comprehensive observability, we break down the strengths, weaknesses, and true costs of each platform so you can make an informed decision.

Which Error Monitoring Platform Has the Best G2 Rating?

G2 Performance Metrics

Sentry G2 Reviews

Rating: 4.5/5 from 123 reviews

Top Pros:

• Centralized error tracking (14 mentions)
• Ease of use / Simple setup (13 mentions)
• Easy integrations (10 mentions)

Top Cons:

• Ineffective alerting system / alert noise & limits (6 mentions)
• Error handling / noise management limitations (5 mentions)
• Inadequate/notification issues (4 mentions)

Notable Quotes:

• "An indispensable tool for quick bug resolution."
• "The most useful tool for error detection and monitoring"
• "Sentry saves me when a problem emerges outside of test coverage: I know about bugs that make it to production as soon as they happen and get a crystal-clear view into why they happen." - G2 Review

Source: Sentry G2 Reviews

Datadog G2 Reviews

Rating: 4.4/5 from 671 reviews

Top Pros:

• Ease of use (97 mentions)
• Intuitive monitoring (80 mentions)
• Real-time monitoring (69 mentions)
• Seamless integrations (56 mentions)
• User-friendly interface (47 mentions)

Top Cons:

• Expensive (65 mentions)
• Pricing issues / paying for unused features (54 mentions)
• Steep learning curve (46 mentions)
• Complexity (37 mentions)
• Learning difficulty (36 mentions)

Notable Quotes:

• "What I like best about Datadog is how seamlessly it brings together metrics, logs, and traces in one place. The dashboard is very intuitive, and it's easy to set up real-time monitoring for applications and infrastructure." - G2 Review
• "Extremely reliable. Ability to fine tune Custom metrics and logs ingested -> this helps to control the cost. Many features integrated together multiplying the efficiency of Datadog as a global Observability solution." - G2 Review

Source: Datadog G2 Reviews

Rollbar G2 Reviews

Rating: 4.5/5 from 172 reviews

Top Pros:

• Easy setup (2 mentions)
• Simple (2 mentions)
• Cost efficiency (1 mention)
• Ease of use (1 mention)
• Easy integrations (1 mention)

Top Cons:

• Inconsistent/mismatched error titles vs descriptions (1 mention)

Notable Quotes:

• "Simple and amazing tool for error notifications" - G2 Review
• "Rollbar is great" - G2 Review

Source: Rollbar G2 Reviews

Bugsnag G2 Reviews

Rating: 4.3/5 from 33 reviews

Top Pros:

• Ease of use / intuitive UI
• Efficient tracking/monitoring of bugs and crashes
• Robust bug tracking and monitoring capabilities
• Intuitive dashboard and strong SDK integration
• Real-time notifications and detailed stack traces

Top Cons:

• Limited AI/integration options noted by some reviewers
• Unexpected pricing changes / overage-related price increases
• Limited customization for alerts / notification settings
• Developer-focused (less friendly for non-technical users)

Notable Quotes:

• "Great service for monitoring and tracking bugs"
• "I like the dashboard, the searchability it offers and the metrics it defines. The SDK integration and configuration is also super smooth and easy to work with."
• "Real-time error notifications help us catch issues before users report them, and the detailed stack traces make debugging much faster"

Source: Bugsnag G2 Reviews

How Much Do Error Monitoring Platforms Really Cost?

Sentry Pricing

Source: Sentry Pricing

Developer (Free): $0

• One user
• Error Monitoring and Tracing
• Alerts and notifications via email
• Limited dashboards/retention

Team: $26/month (annually)

• Everything in Developer
• Unlimited users
• Third-party integrations (GitHub, Slack, Jira)
• Custom dashboards (20)
• Purchase additional events via PAYG

Business: $80/month (annually)

• Team features + advanced capabilities
• 90-day lookback in Insights
• Unlimited custom dashboards
• Unlimited metric alerts with anomaly detection
• SAML + SCIM support

Enterprise: Custom pricing

• Everything in Business plus enterprise features
• Dedicated technical account manager
• Advanced compliance (BAA/HIPAA, SOC2, ISO)
• Data residency and custom retention

Hidden Costs:

• Logs: $0.50/GB
• Cron Monitoring: $0.78/monitor
• Uptime Monitoring: $1.00/uptime alert
• Continuous Profiling: $0.0315/hr
• UI Profiling: $0.25/hr
• PAYG overages for events, spans, replays, and profiling

True Cost Analysis: Sentry's advertised base prices cover defined quotas, but the platform is fundamentally usage-based. Applications with bursty or high-volume traffic can see materially higher bills due to PAYG overages and separately billed features (logs, profiling, replays). For predictable, low-volume usage, base plans plus reserved volume are fairly predictable.

Datadog Pricing

Source: Datadog Pricing

Datadog offers various pricing tiers in USD with options for annual, month-to-month, and on-demand billing:

Infrastructure Monitoring:

• Infrastructure Pro: $15/host/month (annually); $18 (monthly)
• Infrastructure Enterprise: $23/host/month (annually); $27 (monthly)
• Container Monitoring: $1/container/month; $0.002/container hour

Application Performance Monitoring (APM):

• APM Pro: $35/APM host/month (annually); $42 (monthly)
• APM Enterprise: $40/APM host/month (annually); $48 (monthly)
• APM Fargate: $2/task (annually); $2.40 (monthly); $2.90 (on-demand)

Logs / Log Management:

• Ingest: starting at $0.10/GB ingested (on-demand)
• Flex Storage: starting at $0.05/million events/month
• Flex Compute: starting at $0.05/instance-hour

Real User Monitoring (RUM):

• Product Analytics: $0.80/1,000 sessions (annually); $1.20 (on-demand)
• RUM Investigate: $3/1,000 filtered sessions (annually); $4.50 (on-demand)
• Session Replay add-on: $2.50/1,000 sessions (annually); $3.60 (on-demand)

Security & Code:

• Cloud Security Management (CSM) Pro: $10/host/month (annually)
• CSM Enterprise: $25/host/month (annually)
• Application Security Management (ASM): $31/host/month (annually)
• Cloud SIEM: $5/1M analyzed events/month (annually)

Hidden Costs:

• Fargate tasks, custom metrics beyond allotments, custom events, and logs Flex Compute/Storage can materially increase costs
• Per-100 unit surcharge for custom metrics
• Per 100K events for custom events

True Cost Analysis: Advertised list prices cover base unit costs, but true cost for real deployments is often substantially higher due to usage-based billing for logs, custom metrics, events, Fargate tasks, and product add-ons. Unoptimized instrumentation, heavy log volume, or many custom metrics/traces can lead to large overages.

Rollbar Pricing

Source: Rollbar Pricing

Free: $0 (forever)

• 5,000 occurrences/month
• 1,000 sessions/month
• Real-time feed and alerts
• Intelligent error grouping
• Deploy and version tracking

Essentials: $15.83/month (annually)

• Everything in Free
• Data retention up to 90 days
• Fine-grained rate limiting
• 10K–50M occurrences/month (selectable)
• Overages via on-demand events

Advanced: $32.50/month (annually)

• Everything in Essentials
• Adaptive alerts
• Rollbar Analyze (RQL + Metrics API)
• SCIM provisioning
• Data retention up to 180 days
• 25K–50M occurrences/month (selectable)

Enterprise: Custom pricing

• Everything in Advanced
• Direct Slack channel and priority support
• Custom security and audit controls
• Custom BAA/HIPAA options
• Dedicated CSM and custom SLAs

Hidden Costs:

• On-demand event charges (not published)
• Rollbar Analyze pricing not listed
• Enterprise features require custom contracts

True Cost Analysis: Advertised base prices reflect starting costs, but exceeding included occurrences incurs additional on-demand charges. Rollbar's per-event billing is variable, and since rates aren't published, final costs for high-volume usage are likely higher than advertised.

Bugsnag Pricing

Source: Bugsnag Pricing

Free: $0

• 1 user
• Error and performance monitoring
• 7.5K events and 1M spans/month
• 50+ platforms supported
• 30+ third-party integrations

Select: Starting at $20/month

• Choose your events (50k–3M monthly)
• Purchase span packs (1M–150M monthly)
• Unlimited users
• End-to-end diagnostics

Preferred: Starting at $33/month

• Higher event allowances (100k–3M monthly)
• Larger span packs (1M–300M+ monthly)
• Automatic error prioritization
• Stability benchmarks
• SAML single sign-on

Enterprise: Custom pricing

• Automatic error assignment
• Premium support
• Dedicated CSM
• SSO provisioning
• Feature flags & experiments
• On-premises or SaaS deployment options

Hidden Costs:

• Event overages and span pack purchases beyond base tier
• Minidump events billed as 5 events each
• Enterprise features (premium support, CSM, SSO, on-prem) carry extra fees

True Cost Analysis: The advertised "Starting at" prices reflect entry-level event/span allowances. Customers with moderate-to-high event volumes or many minidump crashes will see higher costs due to event counting and span pack purchases. Performance monitoring increases spend significantly.

How Do These Platforms Compare?

What Do Customers Say About Each Platform?

Sentry Reddit Feedback

Positive:

• "Been using Sentry at my current job for many years and love it. Used it for years at a previous job, too. Can't imagine running a large site without it." - Reddit
• "I'm using Sentry for pretty much all my customer facing products, their free tier is pretty sweet. You can also self host it if you're brave!" - Reddit
• "We selfhost sentry and it's super cheap. 15€/Month for a VPS, deployed with ansible. Does not need much maintenance." - Reddit

Negative:

• "The only downside I can think of which doesn't usually get discussed, is that the bundle is absolutely massive. It gets bigger and and bigger every year too. Like 300KB minified for web. Which funny enough, will have a pretty negative impact in your sites performance." - Reddit
• "3k/month is a huge bill but consider your traffic. You will need storage, backups, speed, HA and a team to maintain it up and running." - Reddit

Key Themes: Functionality and reliability praised by long-term users. Cost and billing concerns drive self-hosting discussions. Client bundle size (~300KB) criticized for performance impact. Mixed sentiment overall—users value capabilities but complain about pricing and bundle size.

Sources: r/devops, r/webdev

Datadog Reddit Feedback

Positive:

• "Love it. We used it with Terraform." - Reddit
• "Datadog's UI and dashboards are significantly more performant than New Relics." - Reddit
• "Datadog has superior code injection tools and far superior EBPF integration into their platform." - Reddit

Negative:

• "Get rid of that shit now before it's too late." - Reddit
• "The cost of data dog is way too high for me and I never signed up. After filing my work email with spam that I ignored, they tried my personal email that I also ignored. Then they called my spouse. Seriously?" - Reddit
• "We dropped them a couple years ago because they wouldn't even explain or talk to us about the billing model. Seemed like they were using P99 or P100 to bill on host count which kept screwing us with our bursty auto-scaled clusters." - Reddit

Key Themes: Pricing and billing unpredictability dominate negative feedback. Aggressive sales outreach criticized heavily. Product quality (UI, APM, integrations) praised. Many discuss migrating to open-source alternatives due to cost. Mixed sentiment—technical capabilities praised, but pricing and sales practices drive negative sentiment.

Sources: r/devops, r/devops

Rollbar Reddit Feedback

Positive:

• "Have been using Rollbar for 3 years and it is easy to setup and use. Tested sentry and received a lot of duplicate errors, bad grouping and the UI just has too much going on. Datadog is great if you have the money for it but I prefer Rollbar hands down... just works." - Reddit
• "YES!!! Love using Rollbar in my app (JavaScript and .NET Core for the backend)" - Reddit

Negative:

• "yeap, were planning to move away from it though" - Reddit
• "I suspect that one of your installed apps or programs is using Rollbar and it's trying to set analytics and/or diagnostic data, and is poorly coded so it just keeps retrying at high frequency when it can't connect." - Reddit

Key Themes: Mixed sentiment. Praised for easy setup and "just works" reliability. Some teams planning to move away. Concerns about client library network call frequency. Favorably compared to Datadog (cost) and Sentry (grouping issues). Overall mixed—positive endorsements alongside negative concerns.

Sources: r/csharp, r/sre

Bugsnag Reddit Feedback

Positive:

• "I'm using Bugsnag for my open source project Tapaaminen.net. Easy to setup and it has been working like a charm." - Reddit
• "I use Bugsnag, I've tried a few other options and just keep coming back to Bugsnag... for Bugsnag to organize reports based on deployments and automatically create issue reports is so helpful." - Reddit
• "Bugsnag is actively developing our platforms to improve features and support. Our roadmap is very much focussed on improving our already best-in-class support for error reporting and stability monitoring." - Reddit

Negative:

• "On Bugsnag you tap the error and you see 100 different errors beneath it. Fuck logic." - Reddit
• "Bugsnag is not great as sentry when comes to features and frameworks support." - Reddit
• "We changed to atatus as bugsnag had not all the features we needed and you get performance metrics as well." - Reddit

Key Themes: Mixed sentiment. Users praise ease of setup and usefulness for open-source projects. Frequently compared to Sentry with Sentry often called more feature-rich. Pricing and value concerns reported. Error grouping behavior criticized (many small errors grouped). Support and deployment automation praised. Overall mixed—simpler but gaps vs. competitors noted.

Sources: r/reactnative, r/laravel, r/vuejs

What Are the Strengths and Weaknesses of Each Platform?

Sentry

Strengths:

• Developer-first with rich code-level context (stack traces, release correlation)
• Unified error monitoring, performance tracing, and session replay
• Open-source and self-hosting option
• Broad SDK/platform support (web, mobile, backend)
• Strong community (350K+ developers)
• Generous free tier
• Integrations with Slack, Jira, GitHub, CI/CD tools

Weaknesses:

• Usage-based pricing can spike with high traffic
• Large browser bundle size (~300KB) impacts site performance
• Pricing complexity with PAYG overages
• Self-hosting requires infrastructure expertise
• Costs can escalate quickly (reports of $3k+/month)

Datadog

Strengths:

• Comprehensive full-stack observability (infrastructure, APM, logs, RUM, security)
• Intuitive UI and dashboards praised widely
• Real-time monitoring with seamless integrations
• AI-powered features (Watchdog, Bits AI)
• Extensive turn-key integrations (600+)
• Superior eBPF and code injection capabilities
• Enterprise-grade compliance and scale

Weaknesses:

• Expensive and unpredictable pricing (top complaint)
• Complex billing model hard to understand and predict
• Costs spike with autoscaling workloads
• Steep learning curve and complexity
• Aggressive sales and outreach practices
• Paying for unused features common complaint
• Billing transparency issues drive churn

Rollbar

Strengths:

• Simple and easy to setup ("just works")
• Real-time error detection with intelligent grouping
• GitBlame and suggested owner assignment
• Session replay integration
• Generous free tier (5,000 occurrences)
• Cost-effective compared to alternatives
• Strong user reviews for simplicity
• Flexible alerting and search

Weaknesses:

• Limited feature set compared to full observability platforms
• No logs or infrastructure monitoring
• On-demand overage pricing not published
• Some teams planning to migrate away
• Inconsistent error grouping reported
• Limited performance monitoring capabilities
• Rollbar Analyze pricing unclear

Bugsnag

Strengths:

• Stability-score driven workflow prioritizes high-impact issues
• Intuitive dashboard and strong SDK integration
• Real-time error notifications with detailed stack traces
• Predictable pricing with burst protection
• Full-stack error and performance monitoring
• OpenTelemetry compatibility
• Automatic error grouping and prioritization
• On-premises deployment option (Enterprise)

Weaknesses:

• Smallest G2 review count (33 reviews)
• Unexpected pricing changes and overage increases
• Limited AI/integration options
• Minidump events billed as 5 events each
• Limited customization for alerts/notifications
• Developer-focused (less friendly for non-technical users)
• Limited performance monitoring features vs. full APM platforms

Which Platform Should You Choose?

Choose Sentry if you:

• Are a developer-focused team needing code-level diagnostics
• Value open-source and self-hosting options
• Need unified error monitoring, performance tracing, and session replay
• Have predictable, low-to-moderate traffic volumes
• Want a generous free tier to start
• Prefer deep integrations with developer tools (GitHub, Jira, Slack)

Watch out for: Bundle size impact on performance, usage-based pricing spikes with high traffic

Choose Datadog if you:

• Need full-stack observability across infrastructure, apps, logs, and security
• Are an enterprise requiring comprehensive monitoring at scale
• Value AI-powered insights and extensive integrations (600+)
• Have budget for premium observability tooling
• Need advanced features like eBPF, RUM, and SIEM
• Can dedicate resources to managing complex pricing

Watch out for: High costs, unpredictable billing, complexity, aggressive sales tactics

Choose Rollbar if you:

• Want simple, focused error monitoring that "just works"
• Are a small-to-medium team on a budget
• Need easy setup with minimal configuration
• Value cost efficiency and generous free tier
• Don't need full observability (logs, infrastructure monitoring)
• Prefer straightforward pricing without hidden complexity

Watch out for: Limited features beyond error monitoring, unclear overage pricing

Choose Bugsnag if you:

• Prioritize stability scores and impact-based error triage
• Need error and performance monitoring together
• Value predictable pricing with burst protection
• Want strong SDK integration and intuitive dashboards
• Need real-time notifications with detailed stack traces
• Require on-premises deployment (Enterprise)

Watch out for: Smaller user base, unexpected pricing changes, minidump event counting (5x multiplier)

Market Positioning Map

Sources & Links

Pricing Pages

• Sentry Pricing
• Datadog Pricing
• Rollbar Pricing
• Bugsnag Pricing

Company Websites

• Sentry
• Datadog
• Rollbar
• Bugsnag

G2 Reviews

• Sentry G2 Reviews (123 reviews, 4.5/5)
• Datadog G2 Reviews (671 reviews, 4.4/5)
• Rollbar G2 Reviews (172 reviews, 4.5/5)
• Bugsnag G2 Reviews (33 reviews, 4.3/5)

Reddit Discussions

• r/devops - Alternatives to Sentry.io
• r/webdev - If you're seeing this in that...get Sentry
• r/devops - Datadog pricing model discussion
• r/devops - Why use Datadog when it is so expensive
• r/csharp - Datadog vs Sentry vs Rollbar vs Raygun
• r/sre - Any Rollbar users in here?