Production errors are inevitable. How you detect, diagnose, and resolve them determines your user experience. Three platforms dominate monitoring for web applications.
What Each Does Best
Sentry: Error tracking and performance monitoring. Captures exceptions with full stack traces, breadcrumbs, and context. Developer-focused.
Datadog: Full observability platform. APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, metrics, and dashboards. Operations-focused.
LogRocket: Session replay with error tracking. Watch exactly what users experienced when errors occurred. UX-focused.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Sentry | Datadog | LogRocket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Error tracking | Excellent | Good | Good |
| Stack traces | Full (with source maps) | Full | Full |
| Session replay | Basic | Yes (add-on) | Excellent |
| Performance monitoring | Good | Excellent | Basic |
| Infrastructure monitoring | No | Excellent | No |
| Log management | No | Excellent | No |
| Real user monitoring | Basic | Excellent | Excellent |
| Alerting | Good | Excellent | Basic |
| Dashboards | Basic | Excellent | Basic |
| Next.js integration | First-class SDK | Via APM agent | SDK |
| React integration | Error boundary + hooks | Via RUM | Native |
| Free tier | 5K errors/month | 14-day trial | 1K sessions/month |
| Paid pricing | $26/month (team) | $15/host/month + per feature | $99/month |
| Setup complexity | Low (5 minutes) | Medium (agent + config) | Low (script tag) |
When Sentry Wins
- Development teams wanting fast error diagnosis
- Budget-conscious projects needing error tracking
- Open-source option (self-hosted available)
- Release tracking (which deploy introduced a bug)
- Source map integration for minified production code
When Datadog Wins
- Engineering teams managing infrastructure
- Microservices needing distributed tracing
- DevOps teams wanting a single pane of glass
- Complex architectures with many services
- Compliance requirements needing audit logs
When LogRocket Wins
- Product teams needing user experience insights
- UX debugging (see exactly what the user saw)
- Conversion optimization (watch where users struggle)
- Customer support (replay customer-reported issues)
- Frontend-heavy applications
Our Stack
We use Sentry for error tracking on all projects. It catches exceptions, provides actionable stack traces, and integrates seamlessly with Next.js. For clients with complex infrastructure needs, we add Datadog. LogRocket is valuable when UX debugging is a priority.
Set up proper monitoring for your application.