head to head · open source
Sentry vs alertmanager
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars, 4,857 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. alertmanager has 8,620 stars, 2,467 forks, 419 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Sentry leads on adoption by 420% (44,806 vs 8,620 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; alertmanager is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, alertmanager 29%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (hacktoberfest, 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 | alertmanager | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 8.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 alertmanager if
- You want the alertmanager feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and alertmanager 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 alertmanager
Prometheus Alertmanager is the Go based, Apache 2.0 alert routing service that receives alerts from client applications such as the Prometheus server, deduplicates and groups them, and routes them to receivers including email, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Slack and a generic webhook — it is for operations and platform teams that already run Prometheus and need notifications that are neither duplicated nor noisy.
read the full alertmanager overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or alertmanager more popular?
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars and alertmanager has 8,620. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and alertmanager free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and alertmanager is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and alertmanager?
Sentry is written in Python and alertmanager in Go. 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 alertmanager?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,806 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose alertmanager if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.