head to head · open source
Sentry vs kapacitor
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars, 4,857 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. kapacitor has 2,377 stars, 479 forks, 834 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 1,785% (44,806 vs 2,377 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 | ★ 45K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 479 |
| 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 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
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 kapacitor
Kapacitor is an open source, MIT licensed framework written in Go for processing, monitoring, and alerting on time series data, built for operators and platform engineers who store metrics in InfluxDB and need rule based stream and batch processing on top of them.
read the full kapacitor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or kapacitor more popular?
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars and kapacitor has 2,377. 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 (44,806 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose kapacitor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.