head to head · open source
Sentry vs alertmanager
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars, 4,959 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. alertmanager has 8,678 stars, 2,496 forks, 419 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 427% (45,704 vs 8,678 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 8.7K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 46K 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
Users and logs provide clues. Sentry provides answers. What's Sentry? Sentry is the debugging platform that helps every developer detect, trace, and fix issues. Code breaks, fix it faster. Official Sentry SDKs JavaScript Electron React Native Python Ruby PHP Laravel Go Rust Java/Kotlin Objective C/Swift C\ /F\ C/C++ Dart/Flutter Perl Clojure Elixir Unity Unreal Engine Godot Engine PowerShell Resources Documentation Discussions (Bugs, feature requests, general questions) Discord Contributing Bug Tracker Code Transifex (Translate Sentry\!)
read the full Sentry overview →
About alertmanager
Alertmanager [ ][circleci] [ ][quay] [ ][hub] The Alertmanager handles alerts sent by client applications such as the Prometheus server. It takes care of deduplicating, grouping, and routing them to the correct receiver integrations such as email, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or many other mechanisms thanks to the webhook receiver. It also takes care of silencing and inhibition of alerts. Documentation Install There are various ways of installing Alertmanager. Precompiled binaries Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the download section on prometheus.io. Using the latest production release binary…
read the full alertmanager overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or alertmanager more popular?
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars and alertmanager has 8,678. 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 (45,704 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.