Sentry vs. Smartlook

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Sentry
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Sentry provides engineering teams with tools to detect and solve user-impacting bugs and other issues.
$26
per month
Smartlook
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels. Data is seen on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This is to support clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers,…
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Pricing
SentrySmartlook
Editions & Modules
Team
$26
per month
Business
$80
per month
Developer
Free
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Pro
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Free
Free forever
per month 3000 sessions
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SentrySmartlook
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsAll Smartlook packages support both web and mobile app platforms.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SentrySmartlook
Considered Both Products
Sentry
Chose Sentry
It is cheaper and offers better support for front-end applications for enterprise large environments with more then 30 scrum teams and hundreds of micro frontend applications. The configuration options, both with the agent and from the user interface, are superior to other …
Chose Sentry
The only similar products tested were in-house products, not commercial ones.
Chose Sentry
Rollbar, Dynatrace, Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Datadog and Grafana
Chose Sentry
We used rollbar but didn't like the configuration its not easy. And also doesn't support wide features like Sentry although its a cheaper option but doesn't have the dash-boarding like Sentry and its was not easy to integrate webhooks for different purposes. Somehow many people …
Chose Sentry
Both AppD and Instana are a superset of sentry the majority of the time. Sentry is specialised in error tracking does the best in it, but the other too mentioned does a similar job along with multiple other monitoring features. Also, sampling of data is best in Instana, and is …
Chose Sentry
We actually ended up using both because New Relic is a more robust overall IT infrastructure monitoring product. However, sentry is more developer oriented on the backend and more client friendly on the front end as far as showing results and the dashboard etc. It can provide …
Chose Sentry
Sentry was cheaper and lighter weight/easier to deal with. New Relic always felt like it was slowing the site down some. I don’t think either has had any major negative impact, but Sentry always seemed better/faster. Also, Sentry doesn’t have contracts like New Relic does …
Chose Sentry
Sentry is better suited for tracking and aggregating exceptions over New Relic. New Relic does report on exceptions that occur, but Sentry is better at rolling up similar exceptions and filtering out the noise. Sentry also does a great job at identifying when an exception first …
Chose Sentry
Sentry is really a tool to be used in combination with other things, like Pingdom and PagerDuty. For those applications, Sentry is a far more full-features offering that lets you see why errors happened, not just be alerted to their occurrence. We chose it over other error …
Chose Sentry
There are quite a few players in this space, but Rollbar and Sentry seem to be the top two. I can't remember why I chose Sentry over Rollbar, but they seem pretty close in terms of features.
Smartlook
Chose Smartlook
I like it more in different aspects such as pricing, capabilities, UI, etc. When it comes to the pricing, I have been using it for many years, and always was easy to use and to see what was happening with conversions. It's the most undervaluable tool these days. When I was …
Chose Smartlook
FullStory is more complex, detailed, better-looking and way more expensive. Therefore I think it makes sense to start with Smartlook at least. FullStory also has yearly plans which is really annoying. Hotjar doesn't have browser error logging which is a huge disadvantage for …
Chose Smartlook
Smartlook is the better overall value of all the solutions we've tried. Hotjar was overpriced, Lucky Orange seems more like an experimental project than a full-fledged product and Mouselflow seems to have some problems dealing with some types of browsers that we did not …
Chose Smartlook
For me personally, I use Smartlook more for the debugging side of things, so I wish it had more debugging/error reporting features.
Chose Smartlook
Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some …
Chose Smartlook
We use both intensively in our agency. Google Analytics is our first go-to analytics suite, but we often combine it with Smartlook to prove or disprove our hypotheses. Both our web design and marketing projects benefit greatly from this synergy. Google Analytics offers better …
Chose Smartlook
For me, Smartlook gathers everything a product designer or even a product manager needs. We have everything gathered in a single platform, and it's very powerful we can analyze everything we need. It's the only product where recordings are as well done. The UX/UI of the …
Chose Smartlook
Smartlook has all the features of the other products I have tried but was both simpler to use and cheaper.
Chose Smartlook
Smartlook seems smoother than Hotjar and it also offers more customizable options such as events and funnels.
Chose Smartlook
Compared to Hotjar, the first, and most important criteria for us is the performance impact on our customers. We've always had problems with Hotjar's rather resource-intensive script, which causes a noticeable degradation even on medium to high-performance client devices. In …
Chose Smartlook
Smartlook is better in tracking events, building advanced funnels, and filtering out the sessions than Hotjar. It's definitely cheaper and more user-friendly than Fullstory.
Chose Smartlook
Smartlook is far more cost-effective and simple to use for agencies with multiple clients than Hotjar, which targets the user companies more directly.
Chose Smartlook
So much simpler to the user and way more effective. The pricing for our requirement was also much better.
Chose Smartlook
The thing about Hotjar is they became too big too fast. They forgot what their product was all about and then started to charge an exorbitant amount for what is a glorified heat map. Smartlook has taken into account new features but always kept the essence of what they're …
Chose Smartlook
At my old company, we debated using FullStory, but I believe Smartlook was the better option financially.
Chose Smartlook
100% better. Microsoft had no support at all. They directed you to a forum where other users "could" assist, but there was no assistance.
Chose Smartlook
In terms of analytics, we are still using other products, which are more suited to our needs and more complex. In terms of user behavior and session recording, this is by far the best tool there is!
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SentrySmartlook
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Medium-sized Companies
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User Ratings
SentrySmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
SentrySmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
[Sentry] is honestly an amazing product. It allows us to detect errors in real time complete with stack traces and any extra accompanying information the developer wants to provide in the alert. With the alerting into Slack it has allowed us to quickly triage and tag in people who need eyes on a specific issue. It would be really useful in any Saas product environment.
Read full review
Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.
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Pros
  • It collects very detailed information on problems that happen to our users while using the platform
  • It supplies very good tools in order to aggregate the collected data and analyze it
  • It integrates with Slack, making it easier to "monitor it in real time"
Read full review
  • Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
  • Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
  • Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.
Read full review
Cons
  • if we could decrease the costing via some kind of sampling of errors.
  • sometimes same error is in loop and Sentry will count all the events for pricing if there is any way this can be reduced.
  • self hosted capabilities or using own storage to reduce cost.
Read full review
  • Events -- but I think this is something that we could improve ourselves in our system.
  • Create some suggestions for funnels and heatmaps.
  • Give general insights for a certain period of time, e.g. from Oct. 7th to 12th, 75 users left the checkout step and 60% of them left due to a payment issue. IDK just bringing some ideas!
  • Send an e-mail with main insights.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.
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Usability
Its incredibly versatile, but that leads to complexity for the uninitiated, which can be intimidating. Nevertheless its a well polished product, in our case leading to only using it for a focus on frontend is still more cost effective than buying a one-to-rule-them-all tool...
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Smartlook is very intuitive and simple for an average programmer (I don't know if it will be as simple for a normal user). We have never had to resort to looking for information on the web or ask for help for something we didn't understand or didn't work as expected.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
I am always very happy when a company offers the option to use online chat, as I do not like to call customer support and writing an email is just too slow and cumbersome. I did not even expect a reply right away, yet it took the customer support team less than a minute to respond to my problem.
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Alternatives Considered
We actually ended up using both because New Relic is a more robust overall IT infrastructure monitoring product. However, sentry is more developer oriented on the backend and more client friendly on the front end as far as showing results and the dashboard etc. It can provide product level insights that New Relic does not.
Read full review
Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some custom dashboards.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Error tracking is a must in any modern dynamic website or app. By looking into the error notifications I'm able to fix errors before anyone even has a chance to complain about them!
  • Surprisingly, many website issues aren't showing up in Sentry, because they don't trigger exceptions. I'm interested in seeing if I can use Sentry to catch manually-triggered exceptions for "undesirable states" that my website can find itself in. Of course, that means I have to figure out how to have my client code recognize that it's in an undesirable state...
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  • We have increased the conversion rate from the beginning till now with 120%.
  • We redesigned our landing pages and decreased the bounce rate by 41%.
  • We rethinked and redesigned our menu structure and internal site linking to increase the time users spent on our site based on the data we got from Smartlook analysis.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Smartlook Screenshots

Screenshot of HeatmapsScreenshot of RecordingsScreenshot of DashboardsScreenshot of EventsScreenshot of FunnelsScreenshot of Analytics for websites & mobile apps