DevPick
monitoring2026-01-1512 min read

Best Monitoring and Error Tracking Tools for SaaS in 2026

Compare Sentry, LogRocket, Datadog, and more. Find the right monitoring stack for your SaaS app with real pricing and feature breakdowns.

Best Monitoring and Error Tracking Tools for SaaS in 2026

Your users will find bugs before you do. The question is whether you find out from an angry support ticket or from your monitoring dashboard. This guide covers the tools that help you catch issues before they become customer problems.

TL;DR

  • Best overall error tracking: Sentry
  • Best for session replay: LogRocket
  • Best for infrastructure monitoring: Datadog
  • Best budget option: Highlight.io
  • Best for simple uptime: BetterStack

What to monitor in a SaaS app

Before picking tools, know what you need to track:

  1. Errors and exceptions - JavaScript errors, API failures, unhandled crashes
  2. Performance - Page load times, API latency, Core Web Vitals
  3. User sessions - What users did before they hit a bug
  4. Infrastructure - Server health, database performance, queue depth
  5. Uptime - Is the site actually reachable?

Most teams need at least error tracking and uptime monitoring. Session replay and infrastructure monitoring become important as you scale.

Provider breakdown

Sentry

Sentry is the standard for error tracking. It captures exceptions with full stack traces, breadcrumbs, and context.

Strengths:

  • Excellent error grouping and deduplication
  • Good integrations with most frameworks
  • Performance monitoring included
  • Self-hosted option available

Tradeoffs:

  • Can get expensive at high volume
  • UI has a learning curve

Best for: Teams that want reliable error tracking with good developer experience.

LogRocket

LogRocket combines error tracking with session replay. You can watch exactly what a user did before they hit a bug.

Strengths:

  • Session replay is genuinely useful for debugging
  • Good Redux and state tracking
  • Network request logging

Tradeoffs:

  • Session storage costs add up
  • Can impact page performance

Best for: Teams debugging complex frontend issues or user-reported bugs.

Datadog

Datadog is a full observability platform. It handles logs, metrics, traces, and more.

Strengths:

  • Unified platform for all monitoring
  • Powerful dashboards and alerting
  • APM and distributed tracing

Tradeoffs:

  • Expensive, especially at scale
  • Complex to set up fully

Best for: Teams with infrastructure to monitor beyond just the application.

Highlight.io

Highlight is a newer player offering error tracking, session replay, and logging in one tool.

Strengths:

  • Generous free tier
  • Simple setup
  • Open source option

Tradeoffs:

  • Smaller community and ecosystem
  • Fewer integrations

Best for: Early-stage teams that want monitoring without high costs.

BetterStack

BetterStack (formerly Better Uptime) focuses on uptime monitoring and incident management.

Strengths:

  • Clean status pages
  • Good alerting and on-call scheduling
  • Affordable pricing

Tradeoffs:

  • Less deep application monitoring

Best for: Teams that need uptime monitoring and status pages.

Decision matrix

NeedBest choiceWhy
Error trackingSentryIndustry standard, great DX
Session replayLogRocketBest replay quality
Full observabilityDatadogUnified platform
Budget-friendlyHighlight.ioGenerous free tier
Uptime and status pagesBetterStackSimple and effective

Recommended stacks by stage

Early stage (pre-revenue):

  • Sentry free tier for errors
  • BetterStack free tier for uptime

Growth stage:

  • Sentry Team plan
  • LogRocket for session replay
  • BetterStack for status pages

Scale stage:

  • Datadog for full observability
  • Or Sentry + LogRocket + dedicated infrastructure monitoring

Implementation checklist

  1. Add error tracking to your frontend and backend
  2. Set up source maps for readable stack traces
  3. Configure alerting for critical errors
  4. Add uptime monitoring for your main endpoints
  5. Create a public status page for customers

Final recommendation

Start with Sentry for error tracking. It is the most mature option and the free tier is generous. Add session replay with LogRocket when you need to debug complex user issues. Consider Datadog only when you have real infrastructure complexity.


Last updated: January 2026

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