A Sentry alternative for small teams: what you actually need from error tracking

When Sentry is the right call

Let's start with the honest part. Sentry is the most widely used error tracker, and it earns that. It has SDKs for almost every language and framework, deep performance tooling, session replay, profiling, and you can self-host it if your data can't leave your own servers.

If your stack includes Python, Go, Ruby, PHP or .NET, if you need to self-host, or if you have a platform team that will actually use every feature, Sentry is probably still the better fit. This post isn't going to pretend otherwise.

What small teams actually use

Most small teams we talk to use a much smaller slice of an error tracker than they pay for. In practice it comes down to five things:

• One issue per bug, not one alert per occurrence. When a deploy breaks the cart page, you want one issue with a count of 4,000, not 4,000 emails.
• A readable stack trace - which means source maps for minified front-end code - plus the clicks and requests that led up to the crash.
• An alert when something new breaks, and another one if a bug you fixed comes back. Nothing else.
• Knowing the site is up. Usually that's a separate uptime tool, and often a third one for cron jobs.
• A price that doesn't change shape every time traffic does.

Everything beyond that is nice to have. The question is whether you want to pay for it, configure it, and filter it out of your inbox.

Where BugCatch fits

BugCatch is a hosted error tracker built around that short list. Every exception is fingerprinted and duplicates collapse into one issue. You get the stack trace, breadcrumbs (clicks, navigation and console warnings before the crash), the user it happened to, and the release it first appeared in.

The things you'd otherwise buy separately are in the same project:

• Uptime monitors that check a URL every five minutes and retry three times before calling it down, plus SSL certificate and domain expiry warnings. Uptime docs
• Cron monitors for jobs that should check in on a schedule. Cron docs
• Public status pages with incidents. Status page docs
• Structured logs, distributed tracing and server metrics (heap, CPU, event-loop lag per instance).
• Session replay for browser apps, off by default.
• A mobile app with push alerts per project and quiet hours.

Side by side

A fair summary of where each one is stronger:

If your app is a React or Vue front end with a Node or NestJS back end, maybe a React Native app and a Java service, BugCatch covers all of it.

Pricing you can predict

BugCatch is priced on events, not seats, and every plan includes the full issue pipeline. The free plan covers one project and 5,000 events a month. Starter is €4 a month for 3 projects and 50,000 events, with monitors and a status page. Pro is €10 a month for 10 projects, 500,000 events, tracing and server metrics. See all plans.

Every paid plan starts with a 14-day Pro trial, no card required.

Switching takes about five minutes

The SDK API will feel familiar if you've used Sentry: init, captureException, setUser, setTag, beforeSend. Create a project, copy its DSN, and swap the init call:

npm install bugcatch-sdk

import BugCatch from 'bugcatch-sdk';

BugCatch.init({
  dsn: import.meta.env.VITE_BUGCATCH_DSN,
  release: import.meta.env.VITE_APP_VERSION,
  environment: import.meta.env.MODE,
});

BugCatch.setUser({ id: user.id, email: user.email });

You can run both side by side for a week before you switch Sentry off - nothing stops two SDKs reporting the same error.