Crashlytics vs Sentry: Cost, Limits, and Fit

Crashlytics is free on every Firebase plan and does one job well, which is telling you which crashes in your iOS or Android app are affecting the most people. Sentry starts at $26 a month for its Team plan and watches your mobile app, your website and your backend together, with far more control over how a bug gets assigned and chased down. If the app is your whole product and the team is small, Crashlytics is the sensible default and you keep the money. If you also own the server the app talks to, or you need engineers held to a process, the paid tiers earn what they cost.

Almost every comparison of these two currently ranking on Google was published by a company selling one of them, or by a third product using the question as a way to introduce itself. None of them print a price. This one does, along with the storage limits and the retention windows that decide how useful either tool is six months in, all of it checked against the vendors’ own pages while writing.

What do Crashlytics and Sentry actually do differently?

Crashlytics is a crash reporter and Sentry is an error tracker that also reports crashes, and that one distinction explains most of what follows. A crash is the app dying: the process stops, the user stares at their home screen, and a report gets sent the next time the app opens. An error is anything that went wrong without killing the app, such as a payment call that returned nothing, a screen that rendered empty, or a background sync that quietly failed for three weeks. Crashlytics concerns itself almost entirely with the first category. Sentry treats both as the same kind of event and asks you to decide which ones matter.

That difference sounds academic until you look at what actually generates support tickets. Apps that crash constantly are rare, because a crash is obvious and gets fixed. The complaints that pile up are usually about things that didn’t work rather than things that stopped, and those never appear in a crash reporter at all. A team running only Crashlytics can be looking at a healthy dashboard while customers write in about a checkout that fails silently.

The second difference between them is one of scope. Crashlytics lives inside Firebase and watches your iOS and Android apps, full stop. Sentry watches the app, the website, and the API server behind them, then links a single failure across all three. When someone reports that the app showed a blank screen at 14:20, one tool tells you the app didn’t crash, and the other tells you which endpoint returned a 500 and what the request looked like.

What does each one cost in 2026?

Crashlytics costs nothing on either Firebase plan, and Sentry runs from $0 to $80 a month before overages on its published tiers. Firebase lists Crashlytics as no-cost on both the free Spark plan and the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, and it lists Performance Monitoring and Google Analytics as no-cost on both as well. Moving to Blaze because you started using Cloud Functions or Firestore doesn’t begin a charge for crash reporting.

Sentry publishes four tiers, and the free one is genuinely usable for a side project while being too tight for a business.

Plan	Price	Errors included	Users	Lookback
Developer	$0	5,000	1	30 days
Team	$26 a month, billed annually	50,000	Unlimited	Up to 90 days
Business	$80 a month, billed annually	50,000	Unlimited	Up to 90 days
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Unlimited	Custom

The Developer plan allows a single user, which rules it out for any team that wants two people looking at the same dashboard. The jump from Developer to Team buys you a tenfold increase in included errors, everyone on the team, and the longer retention window, which is why $26 is the number worth comparing against free rather than $0. Both paid plans include the same 50,000 errors, with the extra $54 on Business buying features rather than volume, and both charge pay-as-you-go rates once you exceed the base allocation.

Budget for those overages with some care, because an error tracker counts every event rather than every unique bug, and one loop that fails on a bad server response can produce tens of thousands of events in an afternoon. That is a real cost difference from Crashlytics, where a bad week costs you nothing but your attention. Anyone weighing this against the rest of their app maintenance cost should treat the licence as the small line and the engineering time as the large one.

How long does each one keep your crash data?

Sentry publishes its retention plainly and Crashlytics doesn’t, which is an argument for Sentry that nobody selling Sentry seems to make. The free Sentry plan gives you a 30-day lookback and the paid plans extend that to up to 90 days. You know exactly how far back you can look, and you can plan around it.

Thirty days is shorter than it sounds. Plenty of bugs surface once a month, or only during a billing cycle, or only when a particular customer runs their end-of-quarter export. On a 30-day window the first occurrence has already fallen off the end by the time the second one arrives, so the pattern never becomes visible and each report looks like a one-off. The 90-day window on the paid plans is the first one long enough to see a quarterly shape, and it’s also long enough to compare stability before and after a release rather than guessing.

Crashlytics has its own limits, and they apply to the detail attached to each report rather than to how long reports live. Firebase documents a cap of 64 custom key-value pairs per report, each up to 1 kB in size, and a 64 kB ceiling on custom logs, with older log entries deleted once a session goes over it. Those numbers are generous for normal use and easy to exhaust if you log every screen transition and every network call. When a report arrives with the last 40 seconds missing because the earlier noise pushed it out, the cap is usually why.

Which platforms and frameworks does each one support?

Crashlytics covers mobile and nothing else, while Sentry covers mobile alongside roughly everything else you might run. Firebase documents Crashlytics for Apple platforms, Android, Android NDK, Flutter and Unity, and its documentation doesn’t offer a web path. That list covers the great majority of real mobile products, so calling it narrow is only fair if you need the parts it leaves out.

Sentry publishes SDKs across a much wider set of languages and frameworks, which is the whole reason it costs money. For a company whose product is an app plus a website plus an API, having one place where every failure lands is worth more than the difference in licence fee, because it removes the argument about which team owns a problem before anyone has looked at it.

Cross-platform frameworks are where the gap widens. Sentry documents automatic instrumentation and source map support for React Native, so a JavaScript error arrives with the original file name and line number instead of a position in a compiled bundle that tells you nothing. Crashlytics reaches React Native through the community Firebase packages and catches the native crashes underneath, but a JavaScript error isn’t a native crash and was never what Crashlytics was designed to see. Teams carrying a cross-platform codebase through a major version jump tend to feel that gap most sharply, because an upgrade generates exactly the sort of JavaScript-level breakage that only one of these tools reads properly.

What does Sentry give you that Crashlytics doesn’t?

Sentry gives you the work that happens after the alert, which is where the extra money actually goes. Crashlytics tells you what broke and how many people it hit, then stops. Sentry lets you assign an issue to a named engineer, set ownership rules so incoming issues route themselves, tie an issue to a specific commit, and push it into Jira or GitHub with the context attached.

For its iOS SDK, Sentry documents session replay, profiling, distributed tracing, breadcrumbs and automatic app hang reporting. Session replay is the one that changes conversations with support, because you stop asking a customer to remember what they tapped and watch it instead. Sentry’s own comparison page claims Crashlytics lacks profiling, screenshots, session replay and ownership rules, and while that page exists to sell you something, the specific feature claims match what each vendor’s documentation shows.

The claim to treat carefully is the one about triage. Sentry describes Crashlytics as offering no tools for prioritising or assigning issues, which is accurate in the narrow sense that Crashlytics has no assignment feature. It’s misleading in the broader sense, because Crashlytics ranks issues by how many users they affect and flags ones that are spreading quickly, and for a team of three engineers who sit together, that ranking is the prioritisation. The feature gap is real and it costs nothing until your team is big enough for work to fall between people.

What does Crashlytics do better?

Crashlytics wins on price and on never making you think about volume again. There’s no plan to choose, no seat count to manage, no event budget to watch, and no invoice that grows when your app has a bad month. For a founder or a small team shipping one product, removing a recurring decision has value that doesn’t show up in a feature table.

The crash-free users rate is the other thing Crashlytics does better than most, and it’s better mainly because it’s the number everyone already uses. It’s a single figure that a non-technical founder can read, track weekly, and put in front of investors without translation. Sentry tells you far more, which is exactly the problem when the question is whether last week was better than the week before.

Crashlytics also comes from Google, which matters if you already spend time in Android vitals watching the stability thresholds that affect how your app gets surfaced in the Play Store. The two measure crashes differently and their numbers won’t match exactly, so treat vitals as the figure Google acts on and Crashlytics as the one that tells you which code caused it. Any team already tracking the target API level deadlines that Google enforces is working in the same console either way.

Should you run both at the same time?

Run both during a migration and only during a migration, then remove one. Both tools install a handler that catches uncaught crashes, and only one handler can be last in the chain, so the two dashboards will disagree about how many crashes happened. Once your engineers start arguing about which number is correct, the tooling is costing you the time it was bought to save.

Install the new tool, keep the old one for four to six weeks, and confirm the new one sees the crashes you already knew about before you trust it with the ones you don’t. Running your usual mobile app testing checklist against both dashboards during that window is the fastest way to spot a category of failure that one tool reports and the other misses entirely. Neither vendor imports another vendor’s history, so your new dashboard starts empty, and the overlap period is the only chance you get to build a baseline while the old numbers are still on screen.

Export the numbers you care about before the old project goes quiet, particularly your crash-free users rate and your worst recurring issues. That history is what tells you whether the coming quarter is an improvement or a regression, and it’s gone the moment you stop paying attention to the old tool.

Picking the tool that matches how you actually work

The decision comes down to two questions about your team rather than a feature comparison. If your app is the entire product and fewer than about five engineers touch it, install Crashlytics, spend nothing, and put the saved budget into fixing what it finds. If you own the backend the app talks to, or your team is large enough that issues need to be assigned rather than discussed, Sentry’s Team plan at $26 a month is the smaller cost by a wide margin.

Neither tool fixes anything on its own, and that shapes the decision more than any feature list. We take over apps at RapidLabs where Crashlytics had been installed and reporting faithfully for two years while nobody opened it, and the tool was never the problem. Buying the more capable option is a way of avoiding the real question, which is whether anyone owns the number and looks at it every week. A cheaper tool that somebody reads beats a better tool that nobody does.

If the dashboard is already telling you something bad and nobody has the time to chase it, that’s a different problem from choosing a vendor. Whichever tool you land on, the useful next step is reading what it has already collected and working through it in order of how many people each issue affects. That triage work is most of what a RapidLabs engagement looks like in its first month on an inherited codebase. You can talk to a senior engineer about your app if you want a second opinion on that list, and if the underlying question turns out to be whether the codebase is worth repairing at all, that’s worth answering before you spend another month on either dashboard.