head to head · open source
Sentry vs kindling
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars, 4,959 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kindling has 1,063 stars, 166 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 4,200% (45,704 vs 1,063 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; kindling is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, kindling 16%. 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 | kindling | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-07-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 166 |
| 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 kindling if
- You want the kindling 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 kindling 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 kindling
Kindling Visit our Kindling website for more information. What is Kindling Kindling is an eBPF based cloud native monitoring tool, which aims to help users understand the app behavior from kernel to code stack. With trace profiling , we hope the user can understand the application's behavior easily and find the root cause in seconds. Besides trace profiling, Kindling provides an easy way to get an overview of network flows in the Kubernetes environment, and many built in network monitor dashboards like TCP retransmit, DNS, throughput, and TPS. Not only as a network monitor, but Kindling is also trying to analyze…
read the full kindling overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or kindling more popular?
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars and kindling has 1,063. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and kindling free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and kindling is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and kindling?
Sentry is written in Python and kindling 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 kindling?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (45,704 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose kindling if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.