When comparing Splunk vs Sentry, the Slant community recommends Sentry for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Sentry is ranked 2nd while Splunk is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Sentry is:
It's what Sentry calls [Rollups](https://docs.sentry.io/learn/rollups/]. All individual issues rolled-up can still be drilled down. Also two issues can be **merged** manually.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use, powerful search
It's human readable, intuitive, fast and with auto-complete to boot. And if you need more advanced functionality out of your queries, 120+ page search manual will give you an insight in how much is actually possible.
Pro Widely used
De facto standard for log aggregation, monitoring, analysis and reporting.
Pro Scales effortlessly
It is built for enterprise use, meaning it scales easily.
Pro Real-time graphs
You can create visualizations that update in real time.
Pro Cross-platform
OS X, Linux & Windows are supported. You can also access Splunk from iOS and Android devices.
Pro Free version
With restrictions on log size and devices a free version is available.
Pro Alerts
Splunk can turn searches into alerts.
Pro Understands data in any format or language
Pro Extendable via a large selection of apps
Additional functionality can be added with over 500 apps.
Pro Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy
It's what Sentry calls [Rollups](https://docs.sentry.io/learn/rollups/]. All individual issues rolled-up can still be drilled down. Also two issues can be merged manually.
Pro Email/Slack/GitHub/Hipchat integration
Newly discovered issues (i.e. one that isn't rolled-up under and existing one) can generate an instant notification via many means.
Pro Has an official Docker image
Sentry has an official Docker image which means it's likely going to be well reviewed and maintained for a while and it makes it easy to set up.
Pro Completely open source, with a hosted version available
Sentry is a completely open source tool. It's free to use if you want to run it on your own. If you want to avoid the overhead of running and maintaining another server, it also has a hosted version available at www.getsentry.com
Pro Source maps support
Has support for source maps.
Pro Can create projects and teams
A single Sentry server can be used for various teams/products.
Cons
Con Expensive
Splunk is pretty expensive compared to other solutions.
Con Antiquated
The interface and service are very antiquated
Con Seriously SLOW ingest
Their docs and sales say it will ingest up to 20k EPS, but reality is more like 1k eps per server.
Con Complex set up process
Con Not really a logging solution
Sentry collects exceptions, it's not a solution for log aggregation.
Con Can't filter by browser versions
Sentry only filters by browser names and not by browser versions (for example: Firefox, instead of Firefox 27, Firefox 28 etc...)
Con No free cloud hosting
Unfortunately there is no free plan for cloud hosted solution. Only self-hosted solutions are free to use.