head to head · open source
Sentry vs ngxtop
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars, 4,857 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped today. ngxtop has 6,525 stars, 472 forks, 62 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 587% (44,806 vs 6,525 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; ngxtop is written in Python under MIT. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, ngxtop 7%. 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 | ngxtop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-03-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 472 |
| 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 ngxtop if
- You want the ngxtop feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ngxtop 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 ngxtop
ngxtop is a command line tool that parses an nginx access log and prints top like, real time metrics about what a server is serving at that moment, built for engineers who need to troubleshoot or watch a live nginx instance without standing up a monitoring stack.
read the full ngxtop overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or ngxtop more popular?
Sentry has 44,806 GitHub stars and ngxtop has 6,525. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and ngxtop free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and ngxtop is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and ngxtop?
Sentry is written in Python and ngxtop in Python. 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 ngxtop?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,806 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose ngxtop if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.