head to head · open source
Sentry vs stern
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars, 4,959 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stern has 4,912 stars, 180 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 830% (45,704 vs 4,912 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; stern is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, stern 4%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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 | stern | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 180 |
| 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 stern if
- You want the stern 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 stern 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 stern
stern Fork of discontinued wercker/stern Stern allows you to tail multiple pods on Kubernetes and multiple containers within the pod. Each result is color coded for quicker debugging. The query is a regular expression or a Kubernetes resource in the form / so the pod name can easily be filtered and you don't need to specify the exact id (for instance omitting the deployment id). If a pod is deleted it gets removed from tail and if a new pod is added it automatically gets tailed. When a pod contains multiple containers Stern can tail all of them too without having to do this manually for each one. Simply specify…
read the full stern overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or stern more popular?
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars and stern has 4,912. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and stern free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and stern is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and stern?
Sentry is written in Python and stern 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 stern?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (45,704 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose stern if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.