GlitchTip vs JustAnalytics: Self-Hosted Sentry-Compatible Errors or a Managed Full Stack
GlitchTip gives you Sentry-compatible error tracking at a fraction of the cost. JustAnalytics bundles errors with analytics, replay, and uptime. Honest breakdown.
If you're comparing GlitchTip vs JustAnalytics, or looking for a GlitchTip alternative, you're weighing two different bets on error tracking. Here's a hypothetical scenario:
Picture a dev lead who panic-migrates off Sentry after their invoice triples. They've grown from 50K errors/month to 400K during a launch — Sentry's pricing scales faster than their runway.
They land on GlitchTip. Spin up a Docker container on a small cloud VM. Point their existing Sentry SDKs at the new DSN. Everything works. No code changes. Error tracking bill: one small VM.
And then, about six weeks later, they need analytics, session replay and uptime monitoring too. They're back to four different tools.
That's the GlitchTip tradeoff in a nutshell. It's excellent at one thing: cheap, self-hosted, Sentry-compatible error tracking. If that's your whole problem, it's a great solution. But most teams eventually need more — analytics, replay, uptime, APM — and GlitchTip doesn't cover those surfaces. You end up building a Frankenstein stack anyway.
We built JustAnalytics as the opposite bet: bundle everything into one managed platform, even if it costs more than a bare VM. Different philosophy. Both valid. Let's figure out which fits your situation.
Quick Verdict: GlitchTip or a GlitchTip Alternative?
TL;DR: GlitchTip wins on cost and data ownership. JustAnalytics wins on consolidation and zero ops.
If your primary goal is cutting your Sentry bill while keeping your existing SDK instrumentation, GlitchTip delivers. Self-hosted is free (you pay infrastructure), and there's a managed cloud option with a free tier. It accepts Sentry SDKs directly — no code changes, no migration headaches. For teams where error tracking is the main concern and budget is tight, GlitchTip is hard to beat.
If your goal is consolidating your observability stack — replacing GA4 plus Sentry plus Pingdom plus LogRocket with one tool — GlitchTip won't get you there. It does errors, basic uptime checks, and performance transactions. No analytics. No session replay. No conversion funnels. You'd still need three or four other tools.
JustAnalytics covers five surfaces in one script: analytics, error tracking, APM, session replay, and uptime monitoring. One dashboard. One bill. One integration. The tradeoff is you can't self-host and it costs more than a bare VM.
The honest question: Do you need just error tracking, or do you need a full observability stack? Answer that first.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | JustAnalytics | GlitchTip |
|---|---|---|
| Error tracking | Yes (source-mapped stacks, issue grouping, rage-click detection) | Yes (Sentry-compatible, grouping, release tracking) |
| Session replay | Yes (pixel-perfect DOM replay with privacy masking) | No |
| Web analytics | Yes (pageviews, funnels, attribution, cohorts, UTM) | No |
| APM / distributed tracing | Yes (OpenTelemetry-native, P95/P99, service maps) | Yes (performance transactions, basic tracing) |
| Uptime monitoring | Yes (HTTP checks, SSL, status pages, cron alerts) | Yes (basic uptime checks) |
| Structured logs | Yes (ingestion, filtering, alerting) | No |
| Sentry SDK compatible | No (uses its own script and SDKs) | Yes (works with all Sentry SDKs) |
| Self-hosted option | No | Yes (Docker, free, unlimited) |
| Free tier | $0/mo — 100K events, 1 site, 6mo retention (analytics only) | Cloud: small free tier. Self-hosted: free software, no event limits |
| Paid starting plan | Pro $49/mo ($39/mo billed annually) — 1M events, 5 sites, errors, replay, APM, uptime, logs | Cloud: paid plans by event volume (see GlitchTip's pricing page) |
| Script/SDK size | under-5KB script | Uses Sentry SDKs (size varies by language) |
| GDPR cookieless default | Yes | Depends on implementation |
The shapes are different. GlitchTip is narrower but cheaper — errors, basic uptime, basic perf. JustAnalytics is wider — five surfaces in one platform — but costs more and can't be self-hosted.
Where GlitchTip Wins: Budget and Data Ownership
GlitchTip's pitch is simple: Sentry is expensive, GlitchTip isn't. That's genuinely compelling for a lot of teams.
Sentry SDK compatibility is the killer feature. GlitchTip accepts events from official Sentry SDKs across Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Go, and more. Your existing Sentry instrumentation works without modification. Change the DSN in your config, deploy, done. No rewriting error boundaries. No updating try-catch blocks. No learning a new SDK. For a simple setup, the migration is often a one-line config change.
This matters because Sentry's SDK ecosystem is excellent. Years of refinement. Battle-tested in production across millions of apps. GlitchTip gets all that instrumentation quality for free by being protocol-compatible. If you're already on Sentry and want out, GlitchTip is the smoothest exit ramp. (Our consolidation checklist covers more migration patterns: consolidate five observability tools.)
Self-hosted is genuinely free. Deploy GlitchTip via Docker Compose on your own infrastructure. No license fees. No per-event charges. No usage limits. The Django-based architecture is relatively simple to maintain — a small VM is the usual starting point for modest traffic.
For bootstrapped startups, this math is compelling. Your Sentry bill grows with your event volume. GlitchTip self-hosted is whatever your VM costs. The savings compound. That's not life-changing money, but it's runway when you're pre-revenue.
Data ownership is real. Self-hosted means error data never leaves your infrastructure. For companies with strict compliance requirements — healthcare, finance, government contractors — this can be the deciding factor. Some security teams simply won't approve SaaS observability tools that ship error payloads (which can contain PII) to external vendors. GlitchTip self-hosted solves that. (We covered GDPR session replay concerns in our privacy masking guide — the compliance angle applies to errors too.)
The cloud tier is cheap too. If you don't want to self-host, GlitchTip's managed service has a free tier sized for side projects, with paid plans priced by event volume. Check both GlitchTip's and Sentry's current pricing pages for comparison; for small volumes GlitchTip has generally been the cheaper option.
Here's the catch: GlitchTip is error tracking plus basic extras. That's intentional — they picked a lane and stayed in it. If your stack needs analytics, session replay, or serious APM, you're adding other tools.
And suddenly the "cheap" solution has four invoices.
Where JustAnalytics Wins: Consolidation and Zero Ops
Our angle is different: don't make teams juggle five tools when one can cover everything.
Five tools in one script. JustAnalytics bundles analytics (replaces GA4), error tracking (replaces Sentry basics), APM (replaces basic Datadog), session replay (replaces LogRocket), and uptime monitoring (replaces Pingdom). One dashboard. One event model. One bill. For teams that were paying for GA4 plus Sentry plus Pingdom plus LogRocket, the consolidation math usually works out. Our breakdown of the five-tool stack shows the math in detail.
The operational benefit isn't just cost — it's context. When a user hits an error, you can see their full journey: which campaign brought them in (analytics), what pages they visited (analytics), what they clicked before the error (replay), the error stack trace (errors), and whether the underlying API was slow (APM). That correlation matters at 2am when you're debugging blind. GlitchTip gives you the error. We give you the story around it.
Session replay is a big gap. GlitchTip doesn't have it. When support says "I can't reproduce the bug," you're stuck asking users for steps. With replay, you click the error, watch exactly what happened, and ship the fix. Rage-click detection surfaces frustration signals even when users don't report bugs. Privacy masking is built in. Of the gaps between the two tools, this is the one that matters most when you're debugging.
Web analytics included. GlitchTip doesn't do pageviews, conversion funnels, UTM tracking, cohort retention, or attribution. You'd need GA4 or Plausible or something else. That's another tool, another integration, another dashboard to check. We bundle cookieless analytics — GDPR-compliant by default — alongside errors and replay.
Zero ops burden. JustAnalytics is managed SaaS. You add an under-5KB script, data flows, dashboards populate. No provisioning servers. No managing Docker containers. No worrying about disk space or database backups or security updates. We handle the infrastructure.
The ops tax of self-hosted observability is real. Every hour spent keeping GlitchTip running is an hour not spent on your actual product. If you're a small team without dedicated devops, that tax matters. (For teams running ad campaigns alongside their product, ClickzProtect handles click fraud detection with the same managed approach.)
OpenTelemetry-native APM. JustAnalytics is OpenTelemetry-native, so services instrumented with OpenTelemetry fit straight in. P95/P99 latency dashboards, service maps, distributed tracing across services. GlitchTip has performance transactions, but it's positioned around errors rather than as a full APM platform.
The catch: You can't self-host JustAnalytics. If data must stay on your infrastructure for compliance or preference, we're not an option. And at $49/month for Pro ($39/month billed annually), we're more expensive than a self-hosted GlitchTip VM. The consolidation value has to justify the cost.
The Self-Hosting Question
Let's be direct about when self-hosting makes sense.
You should probably self-host (and consider GlitchTip) if:
- Compliance requires error data to stay on your infrastructure. Some security frameworks won't approve external vendors seeing stack traces (which can contain PII, secrets, internal paths).
- You're in an air-gapped environment. Internal tools that can't reach the public internet need on-prem solutions.
- Your team has devops capacity and enjoys running infrastructure. Some engineers genuinely prefer controlling the stack end-to-end.
- Budget is extremely tight and error tracking is your only need. A small VM can cost less than a SaaS subscription.
You should probably not self-host if:
- You're a small team without dedicated ops. The maintenance tax adds up. Updates, backups, scaling, security patches — it's a second job.
- You need more than just errors. GlitchTip covers errors plus basic uptime plus basic perf. Analytics, replay, serious APM — you'd need additional tools, and suddenly you're managing three or four self-hosted services.
- You value your time over infrastructure costs. The hours spent keeping a self-hosted stack running have opportunity cost.
- You've been burned before by a self-hosted tool that ran out of disk space during an incident. Debugging your debugging tools while users hit errors is not fun.
The honest take: most early-stage startups shouldn't self-host observability. The ops burden exceeds the savings unless you already have the devops muscle. GlitchTip's cloud tier might be the better middle ground — cheap error tracking without the server babysitting.
Pricing Breakdown (as of July 2026)
JustAnalytics:
- Free: $0/mo — 1 site, 100K events/mo, 6mo retention. Analytics only.
- Pro: $49/mo ($39/mo annual) — 5 sites, 1M events/mo, 1yr retention. Errors, replay, APM, uptime, logs.
- Enterprise: custom — unlimited. SSO/SAML, SLA, dedicated infrastructure.
- AI Command Center add-on: $25/mo (requires Pro+). MCP server for Claude and Cursor, anomaly detection, natural-language queries.
GlitchTip:
- Self-hosted: free, open-source software with no event limits. You pay for your own infrastructure (DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP or similar).
- Cloud Free: a small free tier, good for side projects.
- Cloud Paid: plans priced by monthly event volume. Check GlitchTip's pricing page for current tiers.
The consolidation math: add up GlitchTip cloud, a web analytics tool, a session replay tool and an uptime tool, using each vendor's current published price. That's four invoices, four dashboards, four integrations. JustAnalytics Pro is $49/mo for all of those surfaces in one place. Confirm GlitchTip's current tiers on their pricing page before you buy.
If you genuinely only need error tracking, GlitchTip is cheaper. If you need errors plus analytics plus replay plus uptime, consolidation wins.
Who Should Pick What
Budget-constrained team needing only error tracking: GlitchTip. Self-hosted is free (you pay the VM), and there's a managed cloud tier. Sentry SDK compatibility means zero migration friction. If errors are your whole problem, GlitchTip solves it cheaply.
Team with devops capacity that prefers data ownership: GlitchTip self-hosted. You control the stack, data never leaves your infrastructure, no vendor lock-in. The Django codebase is readable if you need to customize.
Team that needs errors plus analytics plus replay plus uptime: JustAnalytics. GlitchTip doesn't cover these surfaces. You'd need three or four additional tools. Consolidation reduces cost and cognitive load.
Team without ops capacity that values zero-maintenance: JustAnalytics. We run the infrastructure. No Docker containers to babysit. No disk space to monitor. Add the script, data flows.
Already on Sentry and want a cheaper drop-in: GlitchTip. SDK compatibility is the deciding factor. Zero code changes. Change the DSN, deploy, done. JustAnalytics requires a different SDK — there's migration work involved.
Using Sentry SDKs and also need session replay: This is tricky. GlitchTip accepts your Sentry errors but doesn't have replay. You could run GlitchTip plus LogRocket, but now you're back to multiple tools. JustAnalytics has both errors and replay, but you'd need to migrate off Sentry SDKs. Evaluate the migration cost.
Our Honest Take
Look, GlitchTip is good at what it does. Sentry-compatible error tracking at a fraction of Sentry's price, with a self-hosted option for teams that want data ownership. If your whole observability need is "errors, cheap" — GlitchTip fits.
But GlitchTip doesn't pretend to be a full observability platform. No session replay. No web analytics. No conversion funnels. No serious APM. Basic uptime checks, not a monitoring platform. That's not a criticism — it's scope. They picked a lane. Respect.
We picked a different lane. JustAnalytics bundles five tools into one managed platform. More expensive than a VM. Can't be self-hosted. But also: one integration, one dashboard, one event model that correlates errors to user journeys. The consolidation value has to justify the cost.
For some teams it does. For others, GlitchTip plus a few other cheap tools is the better path. Which camp you're in is your call.
You know your constraints better than we do. Budget, ops capacity, surface area needed. Pick accordingly.
More comparison posts on the JustAnalytics blog — including session replay privacy guide, AppSignal comparison, and our observability cost breakdown. For teams running paid campaigns, VeloCalls tracks pay-per-call attribution.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GlitchTip really Sentry-compatible?
Yes. GlitchTip accepts events from official Sentry SDKs across Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Go, and more. Your existing Sentry instrumentation works without modification — point your DSN at GlitchTip and errors flow in. No proprietary SDK lock-in. JustAnalytics uses its own under-5KB script and its own SDKs rather than Sentry's.
Can I self-host JustAnalytics like GlitchTip?
No. JustAnalytics is managed SaaS only. If self-hosting is required for compliance, air-gapped networks, or preference, GlitchTip wins. If you'd rather pay for managed infrastructure and skip the ops burden, JustAnalytics handles it.
Does GlitchTip have session replay or web analytics?
No. GlitchTip covers error tracking, basic uptime monitoring, and performance transactions. No session replay, no pageview analytics, no conversion funnels. You'd need separate tools for those surfaces. JustAnalytics bundles replay, analytics, errors, APM, and uptime in one script.
What's the pricing difference between GlitchTip and JustAnalytics?
GlitchTip self-hosted is free software — you pay only for your own infrastructure. GlitchTip's cloud service has a small free tier and paid plans priced by event volume; check their pricing page for current numbers. JustAnalytics Free is $0/month for 100K events (analytics only). Pro is $49/month, or $39/month billed annually, for 1M events including errors, replay, APM, uptime, and logs.
Try JustAnalytics
All-in-one observability in one under-5KB script: cookieless analytics + error tracking + APM + session replay + uptime + structured logs. Replaces GA4 + Sentry + Datadog + Pingdom + LogRocket. Free tier (100K events/mo), Pro $49/month ($39/month billed annually).
Author at JustAnalytics.