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bughq vs Bugsnag

Bugsnag, now part of SmartBear, is polished stability monitoring with release health and stability targets baked into the product. It is closed source and primarily delivered as SaaS. If you want to own the data and run error tracking yourself on plain Postgres, bughq is the open alternative that covers the same capture-and-triage loop.

bughq and Bugsnag, side by side

Capability
bughq
Bugsnag
What it is
Focused error and crash tracking
Error and stability monitoring
Open source
Yes, open source
No
Self-host / data ownership
Yes, your own Postgres
SaaS; on-prem for enterprise
Pricing model
Free self-hosted, usage-based hosted
Event and seat based
Error grouping
Automatic fingerprinting
Yes
Source maps and stack traces
Full source-mapped traces
Yes
Releases and environments
Built in
Yes, with stability scores
Alerting
New and spiking issues
Yes
Data retention
Yours to set when self-hosted
Plan-based

Where Bugsnag still leads: its stability-score model and release-health targets are a mature, opinionated way to gate deploys. If that workflow is central to your team, it is well built.

Why teams pick bughq

01

Own your data

Bugsnag is hosted by default. bughq runs on your own Postgres, so error payloads and stack traces never leave your infrastructure.

02

Open source

You can read, audit, and extend bughq. A closed SaaS gives you the product as shipped and nothing underneath it.

03

Simple pricing

Event-plus-seat pricing adds up as the team grows. Self-hosted bughq is free, and the hosted tier bills on usage, not head count.

Credit where it is due

Bugsnag’s stability scores are a genuinely useful framing for release quality. bughq favors a simpler new-and-spiking model, so pick the one that matches how your team decides to ship.

What bughq is

Open-source error and crash tracking you can run on your own Postgres, or use on a hosted tier. Automatic capture, fingerprint grouping, source-mapped traces, releases, and alerts, without the rest of an observability suite.

Own your error tracking.