head to head · open source
Sentry vs cortex
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars, 4,857 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. cortex has 5,864 stars, 876 forks, 343 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 664% (44,806 vs 5,864 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; cortex is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, cortex 15%. 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 | cortex | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 876 |
| 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 cortex if
- You want the cortex 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 cortex 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 cortex
Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi tenant, long term storage backend for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics, aimed at platform and observability teams whose metrics workload has outgrown a single Prometheus server.
read the full cortex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or cortex more popular?
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars and cortex has 5,864. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and cortex free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and cortex is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and cortex?
Sentry is written in Python and cortex 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 cortex?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,806 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cortex if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.