head to head · open source
Sentry vs lnav
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars, 4,857 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. lnav has 10,683 stars, 404 forks, 295 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Sentry leads on adoption by 319% (44,806 vs 10,683 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 | ★ 45K | ★ 11K |
| License | Custom / other | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Python | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 404 |
| 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 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
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 lnav
lnav is a log file viewer for the terminal that decompresses, detects the format of, merges, indexes and queries log files in one interactive text interface, built for developers, system administrators and support engineers who diagnose systems from the command line.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or lnav more popular?
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars and lnav has 10,683. 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 (44,806 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.