~ $ diff sentry lognorth
Why not Sentry?
Sentry does more. LogNorth does less, on one $5 box.
[01] sentry
Sentry is good.
Performance monitoring, session replay, profiling, release tracking, integrations with everything. If you have a team and need all of that, use Sentry.
[02] what you need
But maybe you don't need all of that.
You're running a SaaS with a few hundred users. A side project. An internal tool. You need to know when something breaks, see the stack trace, and fix it.
For that, Sentry is a lot of machine. Self-hosted Sentry needs PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, ClickHouse, 4 CPU cores, and at least 16 GB of RAM. Cloud Sentry starts free, then bills per event.
[03] the trade-off
LogNorth is the opposite trade-off.
One Docker container. SQLite. Runs on a $5 VPS. No external dependencies. No cluster to manage. No event limits.
Fewer features. Far less to run.
| sentry | lognorth | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free tier, then from $26/mo with event quotas | Free and open source (MIT), unlimited apps. |
| Self-hosted | Yes (16 GB RAM, 5+ services) | Yes (512 MB RAM, 1 container) |
| Dependencies | PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka | None. SQLite embedded. |
| Features | Full platform: replays, profiling, tracing | Logs, errors, alerts, uptime. That's it. |
| Complexity | Powerful, many moving parts | One container |
[04] disk
How much disk does LogNorth use?
About 0.3 KB per event on average, including SQLite overhead and indexes.
| events/day | 90 days | 1 year | 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1k | ~25 MB | ~100 MB | ~500 MB |
| 10k | ~250 MB | ~1 GB | ~5 GB |
| 25k | ~625 MB | ~2.5 GB | ~12.5 GB |
A $5 VPS with 25 GB of disk handles most apps comfortably. Set retention to 90 days and old events are cleaned up automatically.
[05] who
Who LogNorth is for.
Solo developers. Indie hackers. Small teams without a DevOps person. People who want to know when something breaks without managing infrastructure to find out.
One container. One price. Your data.
Install in under 3 minutes. Free and open source.