Pick a replacement by the question you most need answered when something breaks. If it's which line of code failed, a dedicated error tracker fits. If it's what the user saw, session replay helps, and if it's which service caused it, a wider observability platform makes more sense.
What do you really need when your app throws an error at two in the morning? For some teams it's a stack trace and an alert. For others it's a replay of the user's session, or a view across every service and log. Bugsnag describes itself as performance and error monitoring for your application, and the ten alternatives here take that job in different directions.
Four camps of error and performance tools
Dedicated error trackers. Sentry, Airbrake, Honeybadger and Raygun all start from errors and add performance data on top. Rollbar goes further down the fix path, with an agent the vendor says writes tested pull requests.
Frontend and user sessions. TrackJS focuses only on JavaScript in the browser, while LogRocket records sessions so you can watch what the user did before things broke.
Full observability. Datadog and New Relic pull metrics, logs and traces from the whole stack. They do far more than error tracking, which is useful at scale and heavy for a two-person team.
Checks written as code. Checkly runs tests and monitors against your app on a schedule, so you hear about broken flows before users do.
The ten compared
| Tool | Main job | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Airbrake | Error and performance monitoring | Quick installs across the whole app stack |
| Checkly | Monitoring as code | Tests, alerts and status pages written in code |
| Datadog | Cloud monitoring and observability | Metrics, logs and APM from every service |
| Honeybadger | Errors, logging and light APM | One simple interface for common web stacks |
| LogRocket | Session replay and analytics | Seeing the user session behind a bug |
| New Relic | Observability platform | Correlating telemetry to find root causes |
| Raygun | Web and mobile monitoring | Real-user experience plus AI error help |
| Rollbar | Error monitoring and fixes | Errors handed back as tested pull requests |
| Sentry | Errors and performance | A drop-in SDK with no agent to install |
| TrackJS | Frontend JavaScript errors | Browser-only error tracking |
Error monitoring alternatives listed A to Z
Here they are in no particular order beyond the alphabet, each described in the vendor's own terms where it's a claim.
Airbrake
Best for: Teams wanting error monitoring and performance insights across the whole app stack, which the vendor says installs in minutes and covers testing through to production.
Checkly
Best for: Developers who want tests, monitors, alerts and status pages in an AI-native workflow, with agents able to own reliability work, as the vendor pitches it.
Datadog
Best for: Operations teams that want metrics, logs and app performance from every service in one place, sold by the vendor as cloud monitoring as a service.
Honeybadger
Best for: Developers on Rails, Elixir, PHP, Python and similar stacks who want error tracking, logging and lightweight performance monitoring in one interface, per the vendor.
LogRocket
Best for: Product teams who want AI session replay that flags user-facing issues and gives reproduction steps, alongside product analytics, per the vendor.
New Relic
Best for: Engineering groups wanting an observability platform that correlates telemetry across the stack to find the root cause of issues, as the vendor describes it.
Raygun
Best for: Web and mobile teams watching how real users experience their apps, with the vendor pitching AI error resolution that passes stack trace context to your chosen LLM.
Rollbar
Best for: Engineers who want production errors, session replay and deploy tracking together, plus an agent the vendor says turns errors into tested pull requests; a free plan is named.
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Sentry
Best for: Software teams wanting error tracking and performance monitoring through an SDK you drop in, with no agents to install, as the vendor describes it.
TrackJS
Best for: Frontend teams that only need JavaScript error monitoring, which the vendor says is private by default and has no impact on page speed.
Set-up time and upkeep beat the feature grid
The thing to test in any replacement is how fast a small team gets from sign-up to a working set-up, and who maintains it afterwards. A monitoring tool that takes a week to wire in, or needs someone to tune alerts every sprint, quietly becomes nobody's job. Then the alerts get muted and you're back to hearing about bugs from customers.
So time the install. Add the SDK or script to one real service, trigger a known error, and see how long it takes to reach the right person with enough context to fix it. Do it in each tool on your shortlist and the right fit usually becomes obvious.
My advice on choosing a monitoring tool
Match the tool to the size of your team, not the size of your ambitions. A small team with one web app is usually best served by a focused error tracker it can set up in an afternoon. Wider observability earns its place once you're running many services and someone owns the dashboards. If you're also worried about unwanted traffic hitting your site, my guide on stopping AI bots scraping your website covers that side of things.
What to measure in the first fortnight
- How long the install took from sign-up to the first real error captured.
- How many alerts fired, and how many were noise.
- Whether the error context was enough to fix the bug without reproducing it.
- Who on the team opened the tool without being asked.
- How much tuning the alerts needed to stay useful.
If what you need to watch is mentions of your brand rather than your code, that's a different tool altogether: see my Brand24 review.
Do you make error monitoring or developer tools? Tool makers can ask to be considered for a featured place on this list.
Want your tool on this list? Featured spots and reviews here are paid partnerships. Here's how to partner with me.
Frequently asked questions
What should I test when replacing Bugsnag?
Test how fast your team goes from sign-up to a working set-up, and who'll maintain it. Trigger a known error in one real service and time how long it takes to reach the right person.
Do I need full observability or just error tracking?
Small teams with one app usually only need error tracking. Full observability makes sense once you run many services and someone has time to own dashboards and alerts.
What's session replay for?
Session replay records what a user did in the browser before an issue, so you can see the clicks and screens behind a bug report instead of guessing.
Can I run two monitoring tools at once?
Yes, and many teams do while they switch. Keep the old tool live until the new one has caught the errors you care about for a couple of weeks.
Is this list ranked?
No. It's alphabetical and nothing is crowned. The right tool depends on your stack, your team size and what you need to know when something breaks.
