Open source error tracking tools

Three ways to track errors

Every tool here catches exceptions, groups repeated occurrences into one issue, keeps the stack trace and context, and tells someone when something new breaks. They differ mostly in where they run.

• Standalone servers receive reports over HTTP from any number of applications and services. Rustrak, Exceptionless and Errbit work this way. They are the closest match to hosted services such as Sentry or Rollbar, and they are the only option when errors come from several languages, a browser front end or third-party hosting.
• In-app libraries run inside one application and write errors to its own database, with a dashboard mounted in the app. Solid Errors does this for Rails and ErrorTracker for Elixir and Phoenix. There is nothing extra to deploy and no data leaves your system, but they only see that one application and offer far fewer features.
• Mobile crash reporting adds what native apps need: ANRs and app hangs, symbol files to make native stack traces readable, and replays of what the user did before a crash. Measure is built for this and covers Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native.

Client libraries decide how hard it is to switch

The code that reports errors lives in your application, so the protocol a server speaks matters more than its interface. Rustrak implements the protocol of the official Sentry SDKs: an app already instrumented for Sentry switches by changing its DSN, and you can send to both while you compare. Errbit implements the Airbrake API and works with Airbrake’s notifiers. Exceptionless and Measure have their own SDKs, which means replacing client code when you move, and Exceptionless only has official clients for .NET and JavaScript.

Check which of your platforms have a supported client, and whether release tracking, source maps for minified JavaScript, and symbol uploads for mobile builds work with your build pipeline.

What to check before you choose

1. Scope. Do you need only errors, or also performance traces, logs, release health (crash-free sessions) and session replay? Rustrak and Measure cover several of these; Errbit, Solid Errors and ErrorTracker stay with errors.
2. Self-hosting effort. Rustrak runs as one process on SQLite, with PostgreSQL for higher volume. Exceptionless needs Elasticsearch and Redis, Errbit needs MongoDB, and Measure’s single-VM install runs PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, object storage and a message broker and asks for 16 GB of RAM.
3. Grouping. How issues are fingerprinted, and whether you can change the rules. Too coarse and different bugs merge; too fine and one bug becomes hundreds of issues.
4. Alerting. Built-in email, Slack and webhooks, thresholds for repeated errors, and alerts for regressions. ErrorTracker leaves notifications to your own Telemetry handlers; Solid Errors only emails out of the box.
5. Retention and disk. Error data grows fast during an incident. Look for retention settings and automatic cleanup of old or resolved issues.
6. License and editions. All the tools listed here are under OSI-approved licenses. Exceptionless and Measure also run hosted services; read each app page for what differs.

Personal data in error reports

Error reports often carry personal data: IP addresses, user IDs and email addresses, request parameters, and whatever was in memory when the error happened. If that data concerns people in the EU, the GDPR’s principles of data minimization and storage limitation apply to it like any other processing. Self-hosting keeps the data on your own infrastructure but does not remove those duties. Tools help in different ways: Exceptionless can strip named fields in the client before sending, Solid Errors does not record request params or job arguments unless you turn that on, and ErrorTracker has a filter hook for sanitizing context. Whatever you pick, set a retention period and keep secrets out of error context.

Source-available and excluded projects

Sentry publishes its own code under the Functional Source License, which turns each version into Apache-2.0 after two years but forbids offering it as a competing service in the meantime. It is not an open source license, so Sentry is covered on its alternatives page rather than listed here. Self-hosted Sentry also asks for at least 4 CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM plus swap. Bugsink, another self-hosted tracker that accepts Sentry SDK events, uses the PolyForm Shield license and is not listed for the same reason.

GlitchTip is MIT-licensed and also accepts Sentry SDK events, but its code is hosted on GitLab, and this directory currently only tracks GitHub projects. Highlight.io had an Apache-2.0 core, but its company joined LaunchDarkly, its hosted service closed in February 2026 and its website now redirects there, so it is not listed as a maintained product.