# Elastic Cloud vs Sentry

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/elastic-cloud-vs-sentry/

Every value below is read from Elastic Cloud's and Sentry's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Elastic Cloud | Sentry |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Pricing model | Hosted: resource-based pricing, pay-as-you-go monthly or prepaid. Serverless: usage-based pricing, pay-as-you-go monthly or prepaid. | A plan fee plus five independent meters — errors, logs, application metrics, tracing spans and session replays — each with its own included amount and its own overage. Logs and metrics overflow at $0.50/GB; extra uptime alerts at $1.00 each. |
| Self-hostable | Supported | Limited |

## Where they differ

### Free tier

- Elastic Cloud: No ([source](https://www.elastic.co/pricing))
- Sentry: Yes ([source](https://sentry.io/pricing/))

### Pricing model

- Elastic Cloud: Hosted: resource-based pricing, pay-as-you-go monthly or prepaid. Serverless: usage-based pricing, pay-as-you-go monthly or prepaid. ([source](https://www.elastic.co/pricing))
- Sentry: A plan fee plus five independent meters — errors, logs, application metrics, tracing spans and session replays — each with its own included amount and its own overage. Logs and metrics overflow at $0.50/GB; extra uptime alerts at $1.00 each. ([source](https://sentry.io/pricing/))

### Self-hostable

- Elastic Cloud: Supported ([source](https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions))
- Sentry: Limited ([source](https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Elastic Cloud if Teams that need full-text search and observability on the same underlying engine, or that want the option to self-host later — Elastic's dual identity as a search platform and an observability platform is the actual differentiator against single-purpose competitors.

Pick Sentry if Teams that want tracing, logs, replays and uptime in one place and will pay per meter for it. The tooling is the deepest in the category and the SDK coverage is the widest.

Consider something else: Elastic Cloud — The need is narrowly error tracking or APM — a purpose-built tool is usually simpler to operate than standing up an Elasticsearch cluster for one workload, and Elastic Cloud's per-resource pricing doesn't publish a flat entry price the way single-purpose competitors do.

Consider something else: Sentry — Five meters bill independently, so 50,000 errors is not 50,000 units of observability. A team watching cost needs to watch spans and logs too, not just the error count.

## Documented by only one

- Entry paid plan: Sentry: $26/month for Team, the cheapest paid plan
- When you exceed a cap: Sentry: Billed, not throttled: each meter charges for additional usage beyond the included amount, at a published per-unit rate.
- Regions: Elastic Cloud: Hosted: 60 regions across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud (also Alibaba Cloud and FedRAMP). Serverless: generally available on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
- Events included: Sentry: 50,000 errors a month on Team and Business; 5,000 on Free. Errors are one meter of several — logs, spans, replays and uptime monitors are counted and billed separately.
- Retention window: Sentry: 30-day lookback on Developer, the free plan. Up to 90 days on Team, and up to 90 days plus additional sampled retention on Business. Enterprise is custom. "Up to" is Sentry's own wording — the 90 days is a ceiling, not a guarantee.
- Session replay: Sentry: Supported
- Hybrid search (vector + keyword): Elastic Cloud: Supported — combines vector similarity scores with BM25F text-relevance scores in a single hybrid query.
- Metadata filtering: Elastic Cloud: Supported — vector search results can be filtered by metadata while preserving approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search speed.
- SOC 2: Sentry: SOC 2 Type I and Type II certifications; report available via account or on request.
- ISO 27001: Sentry: ISO 27001 certified; certificate available via account or on request.
- HIPAA: Sentry: HIPAA attestation obtained.
- Encryption at rest: Sentry: All data encrypted at rest; keys managed via a redundant, globally distributed Key Management Service.
- Role-based access control: Sentry: Role-based access: Billing, Member, Admin, Manager, Organization Owner.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Free tier: Elastic Cloud or Sentry?**

Elastic Cloud: No
Sentry: Yes

**Should I choose Elastic Cloud or Sentry?**

Pick Elastic Cloud if Teams that need full-text search and observability on the same underlying engine, or that want the option to self-host later — Elastic's dual identity as a search platform and an observability platform is the actual differentiator against single-purpose competitors.
Pick Sentry if Teams that want tracing, logs, replays and uptime in one place and will pay per meter for it. The tooling is the deepest in the category and the SDK coverage is the widest.