head to head · open source
Sentry vs lnav
Sentry has 45,711 GitHub stars, 4,966 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. lnav has 10,783 stars, 415 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 324% (45,711 vs 10,783 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; lnav is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, lnav 4%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | lnav | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 11K |
| License | Custom / other | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Python | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 415 |
| 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 lnav if
- You want the lnav feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and lnav 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 lnav
This is the source repository for lnav , visit for a high level overview. LNAV The Logfile Navigator The Logfile Navigator is a log file viewer for the terminal. Given a set of files/directories, lnav will: decompress as needed; detect their format; merge the files by time into a single view; tail the files, follow renames, find new files in directories; build an index of errors and warnings; pretty print JSON lines. Then, in the lnav TUI, you can: jump quickly to the previous/next error (press e / E ); search using regular expressions (press / ); highlight text with a regular expression ( :highlight command)…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or lnav more popular?
Sentry has 45,711 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,783. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and lnav free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and lnav is licensed under BSD-2-Clause. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and lnav?
Sentry is written in Python and lnav in C++. 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 lnav?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (45,711 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose lnav if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.