Highlight: Open Source Alternatives to Datadog, FullStory, and Sentry (hosted)

What is Highlight?

What it is

Highlight is an open-source, full-stack monitoring platform for modern web applications. It lives in the Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem, and its repository lists TypeScript, Golang, APM, metrics, tracing, and self-hosted as topics.

The problem it addresses is fragmented web-application observability. Developers often need separate tools to capture frontend sessions, group errors, search logs, trace operations, and alert on regressions. Highlight combines session replay, error monitoring, logging, and tracing so users can move from a session to console logs and errors, or from an error or log to related sessions. The README says the project aims to be easy to install with a few lines of code, and it offers a hosted service and a Docker self-hosted path.

Key capabilities

Session replay captures frontend sessions and can show console logs, embedded errors, and comments.
Error monitoring groups repeated errors with customizable grouping rules and supports alerting rules that control frequency and destination.
Logging supports search across logs with automatic property collection, threshold-based alerts, and an alerts dashboard.
Tracing supports search across traces with automatic property collection and threshold-based alerts.
The platform links signals by embedding session replay inside error and log views.
SDK support is listed, and the README says the client SDK snippet is used after account setup.
Integrations with other tools are listed, and topics include metrics, APM, and distributed tracing.

Who uses it and how

Teams use the hosted service at app.highlight.io after creating an account and installing the client SDK snippet.
Self-hosters deploy a hobby instance on Linux with Docker after cloning the repository with submodules, with a recommended minimum of 8GB RAM, 4 CPUs, and 64GB disk.
Frontend developers use session replay and console logs to understand why bugs happen.
Backend developers use logs and traces to search server behavior and set alert thresholds.
Support or product teams can comment on errors and sessions to communicate about user frustration and bugs.

Getting started

Hosted use starts at app.highlight.io, then the user installs the client SDK snippet. Self-hosted hobby use clones the GitHub repository with submodules and runs a one-line Docker deployment on Linux.

When to use it — and when not to

Use Highlight when a team wants an open-source alternative to the paid products it positions itself against, including Datadog, sentry-hosted, and FullStory, and needs session replay, error monitoring, logging, and tracing in one platform. Avoid it when the team cannot operate self-hosted infrastructure or review the license, because the provided metadata lists NOASSERTION, 553 open issues, and 0 contributors. A self-hoster must operate the Docker deployment and meet the hardware recommendation, while the hosted option may reduce that burden but still requires SDK installation and account setup.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

docs-thumbnail

GitHub commit activity GitHub closed issues

Docs - Community (Support & Feedback) - Feature request - Bug report

highlight.io: The open-source, fullstack monitoring platform.

highlight.io is a monitoring tool for the next generation of developers (like you!). Unlike the age-old, outdated tools out there, we aim to build a cohesive, modern and fully-featured monitoring solution, something we wished WE had. And it's all open source :)

At a high level, highlight.io's feature set is:

Session Replay
Error Monitoring
Logging

We strive to make highlight.io as easy to install as a few lines of code in any environment.

Read more about our features, values and mission below, and get started at https://highlight.io today!

Get started for free
Features
SDKs
Contributors
Mission
Values

Get started

Hosted highlight.io (free to get started!)

The fastest and most reliable way to get started with highlight.io is signing up for free at app.highlight.io. After making an account, getting started is as easy as installing the client SDK snippet.

Hobby self-hosted

Deploy a hobby instance in one line on Linux with Docker (we recommend at least 8GB of RAM, 4 CPUs, and 64 GB of disk space):

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/highlight/highlight
# or `git submodule update --init --recursive` on git < 2.13
cd docker && ./run-hobby.sh

After a brief frontend load time, the app should be accessible at https://localhost. Use the password set in docker/.env variable ADMIN_PASSWORD with any valid email address.

Good for docs

Console logs: Analyze the logs printed (console.error, console.log, etc..) to the console from your frontend -> docs
Embedded Error Monitoring: See the errors associated with a given session to understand what the user was doing leading up to them.
Session Comments: Comment on errors to communicate with your team on user frustration, bugs, and more! -> docs
Integrations with your favorite tools -> docs

Frame 43972

Error Monitoring: Understand WHAT bugs are happening.

Customizable Error Grouping: Customize rules for grouping repeated errors -> docs
Customizable Alerting Rules: Customize how often, and where alerts are sent -> docs
Embedded Session Replay: See all of the sessions associated with any given error.
SDK Support: Support for a long (and growing!) list of SDKs.
Integrations with your favorite tools -> docs

error-monitoring

Logs: Dig deeper into what's happening on your server.

Powerful Search: Search across all your logs, with automatic property collection -> docs
Log Alerts: Set thresholds for your log alerts, and view them in the alerts dashboard -> docs
Embedded Session Replay and Errors: See all of the sessions & errors associated to a log.
SDK Support: Support for a long (and growing!) list of SDKs.
Integrations with your favorite tools -> docs

logging

Traces: Track the performance of operations on your server.

Powerful Search: Search across all your traces, with automatic property collection -> docs
Log Alerts: Set thresholds for your log alerts, and view them in the alerts dashboard -> docs
Embedded Session Replay, Errors and Logs: See all of the sessions, errors, and logs associated to a trace.
SDK Support: Support for a long (and growing!) list of SDKs.
Integrations with your favorite tools -> docs

logging

More?! Metrics? Traces? Merch?

Have an idea for what we should build next? Please share our community or via a Github Issue!

Read a full list of highlight.io features.

SDKs

All of our SDKs for highlight.io can be found in the sdk directory. To get started with these SDKs, we recommend the getting started guide in our docs.

Contributors

_{Jay Khatri} 💻 📖	_{Vadim Korolik} 💻 📖	_{Zane Mayberry} 💻 📖	_{Eric Thomas} 💻 📖	_{Chris Schmitz} 💻 📖	_{Chris Esplin} 💻 📖	_{Spencer Amarantides} 💻 📖
_{Abhishek More} 💻	_Aaron 💻	_{Julian Schneider} 🎨	_{Cameron Brill} 💻	_{Sasha Aptlin} 💻	_{Richard Hua} 💻	_{Anthony Teo} 💻
_{Nathan Brockway} 💻	_{John Pham} 💻	_{Lewis Liu} 💻	_Darius 💻	_{George Thayamkery} 💻	_{Betty Alagwu} 💻	_{Aaron Carver} 💻
_{Nathan R} 💻	_denise 💻	_{Xiaojing Chen} 💻	_{Shayne O'Sullivan} 💻	_{Nils Gereke} 💻 📖	_{Nir Gazit} 💻	_{Jayant Keswani} 💻
_wancup 📖	_{Adam from Buildjet} 💻	_{Nick Fiacco} 💻 📖	_{Mark Chapman} 📖	_edde746 💻	_{Lucas Lemanowicz} 💻	_{Karl Horky} 📖
_{Pedro Saratscheff} 💻	_{Grant Mercer} 📖	_Lewis 📖	_{Kalkidan Betre} 💻	_{Tolulope Adetula} 💻	_jemiluv8 💻	_{Gergő Móricz} 💻

Our Mission

Our mission is to support developers like you in shipping with confidence. We do this by giving you the tools you need to uncover, resolve, and prevent issues in your web app.

Our Values

We build in public.

We strive to build in public in every way we can. This means that what we built, what we're building, and what we plan to build is shared with the world.

We build a cohesive product.

People may think that we're building multiple products (session replay, error monitoring, etc..). But we see it as one. Before we build anything new, we prioritize making it operate seemlessly with everything else.

We build for today's developer.

If you're building software, why should you care about grafana or loki or the elk stack? highlight.io is built for developers that want to develop. Leave the monitoring stuff to us 👍.

Is Highlight free to use?

Highlight is open source. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Highlight do?

Real-time observability for modern web applications

What is Highlight written in?

Highlight is primarily written in TypeScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/highlight/highlight, and it has 9,385 GitHub stars.

What is a good open source alternative to Datadog?

Highlight is one of the open source options listed as an alternative to Datadog, FullStory, Sentry (hosted). Compare licences, stars and activity side by side on the Highlight profile.