head to head · open source
Sentry vs kapacitor
Sentry has 45,711 GitHub stars, 4,966 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kapacitor has 2,378 stars, 475 forks, 834 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 1,822% (45,711 vs 2,378 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; kapacitor is written in Go under MIT. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, kapacitor 20%. 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 | kapacitor | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 475 |
| 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 kapacitor if
- You want the kapacitor feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and kapacitor 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 kapacitor
Kapacitor Open source framework for processing, monitoring, and alerting on time series data Installation Kapacitor has two binaries: kapacitor – a CLI program for calling the Kapacitor API. kapacitord – the Kapacitor server daemon. You can either download the binaries directly from the downloads page or go get them: Configuration An example configuration file can be found here Kapacitor can also provide an example config for you using this command: Getting Started This README gives you a high level overview of what Kapacitor is and what its like to use it. As well as some details of how it works. To get started…
read the full kapacitor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or kapacitor more popular?
Sentry has 45,711 GitHub stars and kapacitor has 2,378. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and kapacitor free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and kapacitor is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and kapacitor?
Sentry is written in Python and kapacitor 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 kapacitor?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (45,711 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose kapacitor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.