head to head · open source
Sentry vs alerta
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars, 4,857 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. alerta has 2,528 stars, 374 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 1,672% (44,806 vs 2,528 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; alerta is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, alerta 15%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Sentry | alerta | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-06-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 374 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 45K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick alerta if
- You want the alerta feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and alerta fits your workflow better
About Sentry
Sentry is an open source debugging platform for detecting, tracing, and fixing software issues in real time. It lives in the developer infrastructure ecosystem and provides error tracking and performance monitoring across languages, frameworks, and runtime environments.
read the full Sentry overview →
About alerta
Alerta is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed monitoring system in Python that aggregates alerts from any source into a single API driven server and web console, and it is aimed at operations and platform teams that want a scalable, low configuration alert aggregation layer instead of another polling based monitoring stack.
read the full alerta overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or alerta more popular?
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars and alerta has 2,528. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and alerta free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and alerta is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and alerta?
Sentry is written in Python and alerta in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Sentry or alerta?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,806 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose alerta if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.