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Highlight.io alternative

Highlight.io alternatives, after the move to LaunchDarkly

Highlight.io's hosted service stopped on February 28, 2026, after LaunchDarkly bought the company. Its users were moved to LaunchDarkly Observability. If you'd rather go elsewhere: for session replay, look at Sentry, PostHog or OpenReplay. BugOtter is a fit if what you used most was error tracking, and you'd like uptime, analytics and revenue in the same place.

  • Feb 28, 2026hosted service's announced end
  • 5options side by side, us included
  • Publicopen-source repo, not archived
See the optionsSee the BugOtter demo
An otter calmly looking through a magnifying glass

The short version

  • Least change: LaunchDarkly

    Observability is Highlight's product, moved over: replay, errors, logs and traces. Switch the SDK snippet.

  • For replay: Sentry, PostHog, OpenReplay

    All three record sessions, and all three can be self-hosted, though PostHog calls that officially unsupported.

  • For errors and more: BugOtter

    Errors with source maps, plus uptime, analytics and revenue for every app. No replay, logs or traces.

What happened to Highlight

  1. April 7, 2025

    LaunchDarkly lists “LaunchDarkly Acquires Highlight to Advance the Future of Guarded Software Releases” on its press page. Highlight's own post, “We're joining LaunchDarkly!”, followed on April 23, 2025, and said Highlight would keep running as a standalone product for now.

  2. November 2025

    Highlight announced it “will be deprecating services on February 28, 2026 and moving 100% of our infrastructure and services to LaunchDarkly”, and that customers “will need to update their Highlight SDK Snippet to use LaunchDarkly before March 1, 2026”.

  3. February 28, 2026

    The hosted service's announced end date. Today highlight.io and its docs redirect to launchdarkly.com.

  4. The code

    The highlight/highlight repository is still public and not archived. Most of it is Apache 2.0; two directories have their own licences.

Highlight was a full-stack observability tool: session replay, error monitoring, logs and traces, and open source. That's a lot to replace in one move, so it's worth asking which part you actually used.

Checked Nov 4, 2026 on their own pages: LaunchDarkly press: acquires Highlight, LaunchDarkly blog: welcome Highlight, Highlight blog: we're joining LaunchDarkly (archived), Highlight blog: migrating to LaunchDarkly Observability (archived), github.com/highlight/highlight. Prices are in USD as their pages showed them, and they can change. We re-check every quarter.

Where Highlight users can go

The main options, by what Highlight did. Only what each tool's own site says.

Highlight.io alternatives compared
FeatureLaunchDarkly ObservabilitySentryPostHogOpenReplayBugOtter
What Highlight did
Session replayYesYesYes5K recordings a month freeYesNo
Error trackingYesYesYes100K exceptions a month freeCheck their docsYes
LogsYesYesCheck their docsCheck their docsNo
TracesYesYesCheck their docsCheck their docsNo
Self-hostingCheck their docsYesFSL licencePartlyDocker Compose, MIT, officially unsupportedYesMostly AGPLv3No
Beyond Highlight
Product or web analyticsCheck their docsNoYesYesProduct analyticsYesCookieless web analytics
Uptime checks and status pagesCheck their docsPartlyUptime monitorsCheck their docsCheck their docsYes
Revenue from Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, CreemNoNoCheck their docsNoYes

No means we didn't find it on their own pages. Checked Nov 4, 2026 on their own pages: LaunchDarkly Observability docs, Sentry Session Replay, PostHog pricing, PostHog self-hosting, OpenReplay, OpenReplay on GitHub. Prices are in USD as their pages showed them, and they can change. We re-check every quarter.

Which one, for whom

LaunchDarkly Observability: the path of least change

It's Highlight's product, moved over, with session replay, errors, logs and traces, and Highlight's migration post shows how to switch the SDK snippet.

When it joined LaunchDarkly, Highlight said it was “doubling down on even more observability features, especially for releases and feature flag-level insights”, so if you already use LaunchDarkly flags, it's the natural pick.

Sentry: the safe default for errors and replay

Errors, session replay for web and mobile, tracing, profiling and logs, with SDKs for nearly everything. The free Developer plan is for one user. Sentry is also self-hostable under the FSL licence.

PostHog: replay with product analytics

Session replay and error tracking with large free monthly allowances, plus product analytics. You can self-host it with Docker Compose under an MIT licence, though PostHog says self-hosted deployments are officially unsupported.

OpenReplay: self-hosted session replay

If what you loved about Highlight was owning your replay data, OpenReplay is open source session replay and product analytics you run yourself.

Self-hosting Highlight itself

The repo still runs. For a small app, the hobby setup is one script on a Linux box with Docker. Expect to maintain it yourself.

BugOtter: if errors were the part you used

Plenty of indie apps used Highlight mostly for its error tracking. If that's you, BugOtter gives you errors with source maps, grouping and deploy tracking.

It adds the things Highlight didn't do: uptime checks from three regions with status pages, cookieless analytics, and revenue from Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy and Creem, for every app on one plan. What you won't get is replay, logs or traces.

BugOtter errors for one app: a deploy check for v1.8.1 that looks fine, and the error inbox with a new ChunkLoadError
  1. A deploy check for each release: new errors, speed and sales against the day before.
  2. One inbox: for review, all open, snoozed, resolved and ignored.
  3. Each error with its runtime, the release it started in, and how many people it hit.
Errors for one app in the live demo.

Moving from Highlight to BugOtter

  1. Add your apps

    Paste URLs or import from Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare. Uptime starts right away.

  2. Replace the Highlight browser SDK with one script

    Remove Highlight's browser SDK and add BugOtter's script. It catches uncaught errors and failed promises, counts visitors without cookies, and links each error to the visit that hit it.

    In your <head>
    <script defer src="https://bugotter.com/bo.js" data-app="YOUR_APP_ID"></script>

  3. Send server errors through a Sentry SDK

    Highlight's backend SDKs don't talk to BugOtter. Install the Sentry SDK for your runtime and point it at your app's BugOtter DSN:

    Server
    import * as Sentry from "@sentry/node"; // or @sentry/nextjs, sentry-sdk (Python), …
Sentry.init({
  dsn: process.env.BUGOTTER_DSN,
  tracesSampleRate: 0,
  // SDK v11+. On v10 or older use sendDefaultPii: false instead.
  dataCollection: { userInfo: false, cookies: false, httpBodies: [] },
});

    Exactly what BugOtter keeps from Sentry SDK events.

  4. Upload source maps

    After each build
    npx bugotter sourcemaps .next --release $(git rev-parse --short HEAD) --delete

    Put the same release on the script tag (data-release="…") so browser errors match their maps exactly.

  5. Connect deploys and revenue

    Connect Vercel so each issue says which deploy it started after, and connect your payment provider if you want to see which errors hit paying customers.

BugOtter keeps up to 250k errors a month on Pro, shared across your apps. The 14-day trial has everything, no card needed.

Is BugOtter right for you?

Questions

Is Highlight.io shut down?

Highlight's hosted service was deprecated on February 28, 2026, and its infrastructure moved to LaunchDarkly. Highlight asked customers to switch their SDK snippet to LaunchDarkly Observability before March 1, 2026. As of Nov 4, 2026, highlight.io redirects to launchdarkly.com.

Can I still self-host Highlight?

The open-source repository is still on GitHub, not archived, with commits in October 2026. Its README describes a hobby self-hosted setup for under 10k sessions and 50k errors a month, with at least 8 GB of RAM. When Highlight joined LaunchDarkly, it said the repo would stay open for community maintenance, with critical fixes released back.

What's the closest replacement for Highlight?

LaunchDarkly Observability, since it is the same product moved over: session replay, errors, logs and traces. If you'd rather leave, Sentry and PostHog both have session replay with error tracking, and OpenReplay is a self-hostable session replay tool.

Does BugOtter have session replay?

No. BugOtter covers errors, cookieless analytics, revenue and uptime. If session replay was the main reason you used Highlight, pick one of the replay tools on this page.

Does BugOtter accept the Highlight SDK?

No. BugOtter takes errors from its own script and from Sentry SDKs pointed at a BugOtter DSN. Moving from Highlight means swapping the SDK, which is a few lines in most apps.

Errors, uptime and revenue for every app, in one calm list.

14 days of everything, no card needed. Plans from $10 a month, billed yearly.

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