Sumidata vs Sentry
Sentry is the standard for error tracking, issue management, and performance monitoring — end-to-end across frontend and backend. Sumidata is focused on the frontend story: replays + console errors + product analytics in one viewer. Here's an honest read on the overlap.
01TL;DR
They overlap a lot less than you'd expect.
Sentry is where you go when a production error needs a stack trace, an assignee, and an alert. Sumidata is where you go when you need to watch what the user did around the error — with console logs and product events on the same timeline — plus conversion and UTM attribution. Many teams run both; choose the one that matches the primary question you're trying to answer.
02Feature comparison
Feature-by-feature, including the parts Sentry clearly wins.
| Feature | Sumidata | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Session replay + AI analytics + conversions with error / console capture on the timeline. | Error tracking, performance monitoring, distributed tracing. Replay is an add-on. |
| Error & console capture | Console log / warn / error / info / debug, uncaught exceptions, unhandled rejections — stored next to the replay. | Deep error capture with breadcrumbs, source maps, release tracking, stack traces. |
| Issue management | Not available. Errors are visible per-session, not grouped into issues. | Core product. Grouping, triage, assignment, status workflows. |
| Alerts | Not available yet. | Mature: threshold, anomaly, metric alerts with Slack / PagerDuty / email routing. |
| Session replay | Every session. rrweb-based. Console logs and product events overlaid on the timeline. | Add-on to the JavaScript SDK. Linked to the associated error when replay is on. |
| AI ad-hoc queries | AI Analyst: plain English → ClickHouse SQL, chart + explanation, inspectable SQL. | "Seer" AI assistant for error triage and root-cause suggestions. |
| Distributed tracing / APM | Not offered. We don't instrument the backend. | Core product. Cross-service traces, spans, performance profiling. |
| Conversion tracking | First-class. orderId / productId dedup, UTM + multi-touch attribution, server-side ingest for webhooks. | Not a Sentry feature. |
| Install | One <script> tag with data-project-id. Async loader ~2 KB gzipped. | NPM install + SDK init with DSN and release metadata. |
| Pricing | Free 50K sessions/mo. Paid $100 / $200 / $500 — retention included, no per-replay metering. | Free tier + usage-based pricing. Replays and spans metered separately. |
03Same incident, different lenses
Two tools looking at the same production incident from different angles.
Imagine a user can't complete checkout. In Sentry you get the exception grouped into an issue, a stack trace, a release tag, a breadcrumb trail, and — if you've paid for replay — a clip linked to that error. Your on-call engineer acknowledges the alert, assigns it, and ships a fix.
In Sumidata you open the user's session directly: the full replay is there, every console.error is overlaid on the timeline, and you can see the product events that fired leading up to the failure. You also see the UTM source for the session and whether the user eventually converted. You ask the AI Analyst "how many users hit a checkout error this week on Safari mobile?" and get a chart.
04Where each tool fits
Match the tool to your primary workflow.
- Web-only product and replay is your main investigative artefact.
- You want console errors, product events, and AI queries on the same timeline.
- Conversion and UTM attribution matter and you want them without a second tool.
- Predictable flat pricing with retention included, instead of per-replay metering.
- Cross-service / backend error tracking and performance monitoring are core needs.
- You need issue grouping, alert routing, and release tracking as a workflow.
- Source maps, release health, and distributed tracing are part of your debugging loop.
- Mobile / native SDKs are required.
05What Sumidata doesn't do
Said out loud, so Sentry-coming teams know what they'd miss.
- Issue management — no grouping, triage workflow, assignees, or resolution status.
- Alerting — no threshold / anomaly / metric alerts today.
- Source maps / release tracking — not supported.
- Distributed tracing / backend APM — we don't instrument the server side.
- Mobile SDKs — web only.
Replay + errors + analytics, flat pricing
Free plan — 50,000 sessions/month with retention and unlimited AI queries included.