Sentry self-hosted: requirements, costs and the lighter alternatives

Sentry self-hosted is free software you can run with Docker Compose, but it is heavy: the official minimum is 4 CPU cores, 16 GB of RAM plus 16 GB of swap and 20 GB of disk, with 32 GB of RAM preferred. It runs dozens of containers, including Kafka, ClickHouse, Redis and PostgreSQL, ships a new release every month, and comes with no support. If you need all of Sentry's features and have the operations capacity, it works well. If you mainly need error tracking, Sentry-compatible alternatives such as GlitchTip (MIT, 512 MB of RAM recommended) and Bugsink (a single container) accept events from the same Sentry SDKs at a fraction of the resources.

What self-hosted Sentry is

Sentry is the most widely used error-tracking platform, and its main repository has about 45,500 GitHub stars. The getsentry/self-hosted repository packages the full product as a Docker Compose stack. You clone the latest release, run ./install.sh, and get the same core error monitoring, performance tracing, session replay and alerting that the cloud version offers.

Sentry is licensed under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0). You may use, modify and run it for any purpose except offering a competing commercial product, and each release converts to Apache 2.0 two years after publication. That makes it source-available today rather than OSI open source, though for internal use it imposes no practical restriction.

Requirements

From Sentry's self-hosted documentation, as of October 2026:

Resource	Minimum
CPU	4 cores
Memory	16 GB RAM plus 16 GB swap (32 GB RAM preferred)
Disk	20 GB free
Docker	19.03.6 or later
Docker Compose	2.32.2 or later
Host OS	Debian or Ubuntu preferred; RHEL-based hosts have known issues; Alpine unsupported

Treat the minimum as a floor. Event volume, retention and features such as session replay and tracing drive disk and memory use well above it. ClickHouse and Kafka are both memory-hungry, and running near the limit is the most common cause of a self-hosted install becoming unstable.

The real costs

The licence is free, so the cost is infrastructure and time:

• A large server. A machine with 16 to 32 GB of RAM costs considerably more than the small VPS that runs most self-hosted apps.
• Upgrades. Sentry publishes a new CalVer release every month (26.9.0 shipped on September 15, 2026). Upgrades run migrations across several datastores and sometimes require stepping through intermediate versions, so you should not fall far behind.
• Operations. Kafka, ClickHouse, Redis, PostgreSQL, Snuba, Relay and Symbolicator each need monitoring, backups and disk management.
• No support. Sentry states that the self-hosted version comes with no guarantees or dedicated support; help comes from the community Discord.
• Missing features. Billing-linked features such as spike protection and spend allocation, the Seer AI features, some iOS symbolication and console platform support are unavailable.

Compare that with Sentry's cloud as of October 2026: the Developer plan is free for one user with 5,000 errors a month, Team costs $26 a month and Business $80 a month, both with unlimited users. For small teams, the cloud can be cheaper than the server alone.

GlitchTip: the lightweight, MIT-licensed option

GlitchTip is an open-source error tracker under the MIT licence that implements Sentry's event ingestion API, so the official Sentry SDKs work by changing only the DSN. It covers error tracking, basic performance monitoring and uptime checks, and deliberately skips Sentry's heavier features.

Its documentation recommends 512 MB of RAM and allows 256 MB in all-in-one mode. It needs PostgreSQL 14 or later; Valkey or Redis is optional for faster or larger instances, and without it PostgreSQL handles the task queue and cache. The project estimates that about one million events a month may need 30 GB of disk. GlitchTip also offers hosted plans, from a free tier with 1,000 events a month to $15 a month for 100,000 events, as of October 2026.

Bugsink: a single container, source-available

Bugsink is a self-hosted error tracker designed for simplicity. It runs as one Docker container with SQLite, or with MySQL or PostgreSQL for larger setups, and it is compatible with Sentry's SDKs through the DSN. Self-hosting is free with unlimited users and all features; paid support and hosted plans are optional.

The licence caveat: Bugsink's code is under the PolyForm Shield License 1.0.0, which permits use but forbids building a competing product. It is source-available, not open source. For internal error tracking that rarely matters, but know it before you standardise on it.

Sentry vs GlitchTip vs Bugsink

	Sentry self-hosted	GlitchTip	Bugsink
Licence	FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 (source-available)	MIT	PolyForm Shield (source-available)
Minimum memory	16 GB RAM plus 16 GB swap	256 MB all-in-one; 512 MB recommended	Single container
Datastores	PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis	PostgreSQL; Valkey optional	SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL
Works with Sentry SDKs	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tracing and session replay	Yes	Basic performance only	No, errors only
Best for	Teams that need the full Sentry feature set	Small teams wanting open source	Simplest possible error tracking

Rounding out your monitoring

Error tracking is one layer. For uptime and status pages, Uptime Kuma is the standard choice, with its own deploy guide. For distributed tracing, logs and metrics on OpenTelemetry, SigNoz covers ground that GlitchTip and Bugsink do not.

Switching between them

Because all three accept the Sentry SDK protocol, moving is mostly a configuration change: create a project in the new tool, copy its DSN into your application's environment variables, and redeploy. Historical issues do not migrate, so run old and new side by side until the old retention window expires. Source maps and release tracking are uploaded with the same sentry-cli workflow, though support varies, so test one service first.

Which should you choose?

• Choose Sentry self-hosted if you need tracing, session replay and the full feature set, must keep data on your own infrastructure, and can dedicate a large server and regular maintenance.
• Choose GlitchTip if you want an MIT-licensed, Sentry-compatible error tracker that runs on almost anything.
• Choose Bugsink if you want the simplest deployment and a source-available licence is acceptable.
• Choose Sentry's cloud if your team is small and nobody wants to run Kafka.

See every open-source Sentry alternative and Datadog alternative, or browse the monitoring and developer tools categories.