Bugsnag vs Grafana

What Bugsnag is

Bugsnag monitors application errors and reports a stability score per release, so you can see whether a deploy made things worse. Grouping errors by release is what makes it useful in a deploy review: you can say whether the last ship raised the error rate rather than guessing. It is narrower than the full observability suites, so metrics and traces still come from somewhere else.

What Grafana is

Grafana turns metrics, logs and traces into dashboards, and connects to almost any data source. The open-source version is fully capable; the cloud version removes the operational work. Its strength is that it does not own your data: it queries Prometheus, Loki, SQL databases and cloud providers where they already live. That also means Grafana alone is not a monitoring system, and you still have to choose and run the stores behind it.

What Bugsnag is built to do

Release health

Scores stability per release so a regression is visible after deploy.

Error grouping

Collapses duplicate exceptions into one issue with occurrence counts.

Breadcrumbs

Records the user actions leading up to an error for reproduction.

What Grafana is built to do

Data-source agnostic

Queries Prometheus, Loki, SQL and cloud APIs without moving data into Grafana.

Alerting

Evaluates rules against queries and routes notifications to external channels.

Dashboard as code

Stores dashboards as JSON so they can be versioned and provisioned.

Choose Bugsnag if

• Teams that ship mobile or web releases and need to know if quality is slipping.

Choose Grafana if

• Any team that needs to see what its systems are doing, from one server to a large fleet.

Bugsnag: pros & cons

• Stability scores tie errors to releases
• Good mobile SDK coverage
• Clear grouping of duplicate errors
• Event pricing climbs with traffic
• Smaller ecosystem than Sentry
• Fewer performance features

Grafana: pros & cons

• Connects to dozens of data sources out of the box
• Open source and self-hostable
• Alerting built into the same tool as the dashboards
• Dashboard design takes real effort to get right
• Cloud pricing scales with data volume
• Configuration sprawl on large teams