Searching for BugSnag pricing in 2026 is a genuinely confusing experience, and it is not your fault. The product was renamed, the rename is incomplete, and the third-party pricing pages that rank for the query contradict the vendor's own site on basic facts like whether a free plan exists.
We traced it back to first-party sources, recorded exactly what each page says, and compared eight alternatives.
The short answer
SmartBear acquired BugSnag and rebranded it as SmartBear Insight Hub in January 2025. But the rebrand has not reached the commercial pages: SmartBear's own Insight Hub pricing URL issues a 301 Moved Permanently back to bugsnag.com/pricing, and the page it lands on does not mention Insight Hub anywhere.
Meanwhile the vendor's page advertises a free plan at 0 dollars per month and "Unlimited users" on paid tiers, while a major software directory lists BugSnag at "$65.00 Per User,Per Month" with no free version at all. Those cannot both be right.
The practical consequence: price BugSnag from bugsnag.com and treat every third-party listing as historical. Below is what the first-party page actually says.
How BugSnag pricing actually works in 2026
Four plans, metered on two units: monthly error events and monthly spans.
| Plan | Price as printed | Events | Spans | Users | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | "$0/month" | "7.5K events and 1M spans per month" | included | "1 user" | "7 days" |
| Select | "STARTING AT $0 /month" | 50k to 3M monthly | 1M to 150M monthly | "Unlimited users" | "60 days" |
| Preferred | "STARTING AT $0 /month" | 100k to 3M monthly | 1M to 300M monthly | Not stated on page | "60 days" |
| Enterprise | "Custom plans for enterprises that need to scale" | Custom | packs of "150M spans" | Custom | "Custom" |
A few things deserve comment.
"STARTING AT $0 /month" on both paid tiers is a slider default, not a price. The page prices those plans through a volume selector, and the static page ships the zero-position value. It tells you nothing about what you will pay, and it is the reason third-party trackers publish wildly different numbers for this product.
Unlimited users on Select is a genuine advantage, and worth crediting. Error monitoring is a tool the whole engineering team should be able to open, and per-seat pricing in this category actively discourages that. Note one asymmetry, though: the page states "Unlimited users" for Select but does not explicitly repeat it for Preferred, so confirm seat terms for the higher tier rather than assuming they carry over.
The finding: the free tier is metered on time, not volume
The most consequential number on that table is not an event count. It is 7 days.
The Free plan retains data for 7 days, printed as a footnote rather than a headline: "Our Free tier includes 7 days of data retention". Both paid plans retain for 60. That is an 8.57x difference, and it is a far harder wall than the event quota.
Seven days of retention means a bug reported on the 8th day after it first appeared has no history. You cannot establish when a regression started, cannot compare this release to the last one, and cannot answer the single most useful question in triage: is this new? The Free plan gives you 7.5K events per month, which is reasonably generous for a small app, and then makes them disappear before most teams finish a sprint.
There is a second structural quirk worth noticing, and it rhymes with what we found at Sentry.
Select and Preferred share the same event ceiling: 3M monthly events. Moving up does not raise the error headroom at all. What moves is spans, from 150M to 300M, a clean 2x, plus features like advanced segmentation and custom notifications. The event floor doubles from 50k to 100k, so the entry point rises, but the roof does not.
In other words, as with Sentry, the upper tier is not a volume tier for errors. If errors are your binding constraint, the more expensive plan does not relieve it, and you should model your spans volume carefully before assuming the upgrade helps.
Retention, meanwhile, does not move either: both paid tiers sit at 60 days. So the ladder sells spans and features, not error capacity and not history.
The identity problem, and why it costs you money
It is tempting to treat a rebrand as cosmetic. In this case it has a direct commercial cost.
SmartBear announced Insight Hub in January 2025 as a broadening of the product beyond error monitoring into wider observability. Yet smartbear.com/insight-hub/pricing/ 301-redirects to www.bugsnag.com/pricing/, and the destination page carries no mention of Insight Hub at all. The old brand is still the canonical commercial surface.
The result is that search results for this product are a mix of three eras: pre-acquisition BugSnag, post-acquisition BugSnag, and Insight Hub. They disagree. One well-known directory currently lists the starting price as "$65.00 Per User,Per Month" and states there is no free version, while the vendor's own live page shows a 0 dollar plan and "Unlimited users" on paid tiers. Both the pricing basis and the existence of a free tier are contradicted.
We are not going to adjudicate which third-party number was once true. The useful rule is the one at the top: price this product from bugsnag.com and ignore the directories. The same discipline applies to any acquired tool. We hit the identical pattern with Hotjar after the Contentsquare acquisition, where the pricing page itself started redirecting, and with Smartlook, where the acquiring platform ended sale of the product entirely. An acquisition is the single best predictor that a tool's published pricing has gone stale.
The 8 best BugSnag alternatives in 2026
1. Koji, best for why the error mattered. BugSnag tells you an exception fired and how many users it touched. It cannot tell you whether those users cared. Koji is an AI-native customer research platform that runs AI-moderated voice interviews with real customers, transcribes them, and applies automatic thematic analysis to produce a one-click report of themes, quotes and frequencies. This is the question stability scoring approximates and never actually answers: a crash on a settings screen nobody visits and a silent failure on your signup flow can score similarly and matter entirely differently. Koji supports six structured question types (open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, yes_no), so a single study yields both severity ratings and the reasoning behind them. Pricing is EUR 29 per month for Insights or EUR 79 per month for Interviews, with EUR 1 per extra credit, and only conversations scoring 3 or above consume credits.
2. Sentry, the category default. Broader SDK ecosystem and a deep open-source community. Its pricing has its own surprise worth understanding first, which we cover in the Sentry alternatives guide.
3. Rollbar, the closest direct competitor. Comparable error grouping, deploy tracking and workflow integrations, and a common shortlist entry against BugSnag.
4. Honeybadger, best for small teams wanting one bill. Bundles errors, uptime and cron monitoring instead of metering each separately, which makes forecasting easier at small scale.
5. Raygun, best for crash reporting plus real user monitoring. Pairs errors with frontend performance in one product, useful if you want both without adopting a full observability platform.
6. Instabug, best for mobile-first teams. Strong on in-app bug reporting and mobile crash diagnostics, with user feedback capture built in.
7. Datadog Error Tracking, if you already run Datadog. Listed at 25 dollars for the first 50k errors per month annually, or 36 dollars on-demand. Consolidation is the argument; be aware of the session-based meters alongside it, covered in our Datadog RUM alternatives guide.
8. GlitchTip, the open-source option. Sentry-API compatible and self-hostable, which turns a subscription into infrastructure and engineering time. Sensible at high volume, rarely worth it at low volume.
How to choose a BugSnag alternative
Check your retention need before your volume need. This is the reverse of how most teams evaluate, and it is the right order here. Event quotas are easy to estimate and easy to top up. Retention is a wall: once the window passes, that history is simply gone. If you are on the Free plan, assume 7 days is the real constraint and test whether your team's actual triage cycle fits inside it. It usually does not.
Model spans, not just errors. BugSnag's paid ladder moves on spans while the error ceiling stays at 3M. If you are considering Preferred over Select, confirm you are actually span-constrained, because on errors alone the upgrade buys you nothing.
Do not price this product from a directory. The rename has left contradictory figures in circulation, including a per-user basis the vendor's own page contradicts with "Unlimited users". Get a quote against your real volume.
Then ask what the error data is for. Crash-free rates and stability scores are proxies for user experience, not measurements of it. They cannot distinguish a crash users shrugged off from one that ended the relationship, and they are completely silent on the much larger population who hit no error and left anyway. Evaluating a product only through the users who stayed long enough to generate telemetry is textbook survivorship bias.
If your team keeps closing tickets while the retention curve stays flat, the missing input is not a better crash reporter. It is conversation with the people who left. Our guides to how many interviews are enough and structured questions cover how to get there quickly and defensibly.
Frequently asked questions
Is BugSnag still called BugSnag in 2026?
Officially no, practically yes. SmartBear rebranded the product as SmartBear Insight Hub in January 2025 to reflect a broader observability scope. But the rebrand is incomplete on the commercial pages: SmartBear's own Insight Hub pricing URL issues a 301 redirect back to bugsnag.com/pricing, and that destination page does not mention Insight Hub anywhere. You will see both names used interchangeably, including by the vendor.
How much does BugSnag cost per month?
The vendor's page does not publish a flat figure for paid plans. Free is listed at "$0/month", while both Select and Preferred show "STARTING AT $0 /month", which is a volume-slider default rather than a real price. Third-party directories disagree sharply, with one listing "$65.00 Per User,Per Month" and stating there is no free version, which the vendor's own page contradicts on both the per-user basis and the existence of a free tier. Get a quote against your actual event and span volume.
How long does BugSnag keep your error data?
The Free plan retains data for "7 days". Both Select and Preferred retain for "60 days", and Enterprise retention is custom. The 8.57x gap between free and paid is usually a more binding constraint than the event quota, because seven days is shorter than most teams' triage and release cycle, which makes it impossible to tell whether a bug is a new regression.
What is the difference between BugSnag Select and Preferred?
Less than the tier names suggest, at least on errors. Both top out at 3M monthly events and both retain data for 60 days. The page also states unlimited users for Select without explicitly repeating it for Preferred, so confirm seat terms before upgrading. Preferred raises the span ceiling from 150M to 300M, doubles the entry floor from 50k to 100k monthly events, and adds features including advanced segmentation and custom notifications. If errors rather than spans are your binding constraint, upgrading does not raise your headroom.
Is BugSnag or Sentry better for error monitoring?
They are close competitors with different emphases. BugSnag has historically been strong on mobile and application-stability scoring and states unlimited users on its Select plan. Sentry has a broader SDK ecosystem, a large open-source community and more granular metering across errors, spans, replays and logs. Sentry publishes clearer list pricing, though its paid tiers include identical data volumes, so compare both against your real monthly volume rather than the headline.
What should I use alongside BugSnag to understand user impact?
A research instrument, because error data cannot supply intent. Stability metrics tell you how often something broke, never whether it changed anyone's mind about your product, and they say nothing at all about users who encountered no error and still churned. Pairing an error monitor with AI-moderated interviews from a platform like Koji gives you both halves: the crash reporter finds the defect, the interviews tell you what it cost you.
Know what the crash actually cost you
BugSnag, or Insight Hub, will tell you that 412 users hit an exception in your onboarding flow last Tuesday. That is worth knowing, and you should fix it.
It will not tell you that 3,000 others completed onboarding without a single error and never opened the product again.
Koji runs AI-moderated voice interviews with your real users, applies automatic thematic analysis across every transcript, and returns a one-click report with the themes, the quotes and the frequencies behind them. No moderator bias, no scheduling, no research expertise required. From question to insight in hours, not weeks.
New accounts get 10 free credits, and only conversations scoring 3 or above use them. Start your first Koji study and find out what your crash reporter was never measuring.
