head to head · open source
Sentry vs jaeger
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars, 4,854 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger has 23,217 stars, 3,119 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 93% (44,792 vs 23,217 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, jaeger 13%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), 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 | jaeger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 23K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 jaeger if
- You want the jaeger 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 jaeger 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 jaeger
Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it graduated as the 7th top level project in October 2019. It was originally created by Uber Technologies and then donated to the CNCF. The project is written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the OpenTelemetry and observability ecosystem: it consumes traces from OpenTelemetry SDKs and reuses components from the OpenTelemetry Collector. Its repository carries topics including cncf, distributed tracing, jaeger, observability, opentelemetry and tracing, and the project is openly gove…
read the full jaeger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or jaeger more popular?
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars and jaeger has 23,217. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and jaeger free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and jaeger is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and jaeger?
Sentry is written in Python and jaeger 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 jaeger?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,792 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose jaeger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.