A Self-Hosted Alternative to Highlight.io

Highlight.io built a name for itself as an open-source monitoring platform: session replay, errors, logs, traces — the whole stack, with a GitHub repository that gathered over 10,000 stars. That wasn’t accidental. Developers backed it because it looked like a modern tool that you could inspect, trust, and if needed, self-host.

For many teams — especially those who avoid SaaS for compliance or operational reasons — that combination of “full stack monitoring” and “open-source” was the selling point.

With Highlight now being folded into LaunchDarkly Observability — and its standalone service shutting down on February 28, 2026 — that option effectively disappears. The repo remains, but the running product won’t. There’s no supported path to keep the original system alive, and open-source development has slowed sharply since the acquisition.

If you were relying on Highlight because it felt open and self-hostable, you’re back at zero.

This page looks at the practical alternative for what most teams used Highlight for: error tracking.

What people used Highlight for

Although Highlight provided session replay, logs, and traces, many teams depended on it mainly for:

  • Error monitoring
  • Stack traces with context
  • Grouping
  • Alerts

If that describes your usage, you don’t need to replace an entire observability suite. You only need a reliable, self-hosted crash reporter that won’t disappear because the business behind it changed direction.

A self-hosted crash reporter

If your requirements are:

  • self-hosted
  • lean
  • long-term predictable
  • Sentry SDK compatible
  • focused on error tracking, not a whole platform

…then a dedicated crash reporter is the simplest solution.

This is exactly where Bugsink fits.

It does one thing well: capture exceptions with context so you can fix them. No platform lock-in, no sprawling microservices, no “observability ecosystem” bolted on afterwards. One container. Easy upgrades. Stable over time.

If you’re already using a Sentry SDK, switching is mostly a matter of updating the DSN.

Why a focused tool makes sense now

Highlight’s original value proposition — open, flexible, self-hostable — is no longer available. The hosted product will disappear, and the replacement requires buying into LaunchDarkly’s SaaS platform.

If all you actually needed was to know when your application broke (and why), running a small, dedicated tool is less effort, less risk, and far easier to keep around for years.

Bottom line

Highlight.io’s open-source story attracted a large community — 10k GitHub stars worth of trust — but the product that community rallied around won’t survive past 2026. If your usage was mainly error tracking, the simplest long-term alternative is a self-hosted crash reporter.

Since you’re already here: Bugsink is exactly that. Small footprint, Sentry-compatible, built to stay self-hosted. If you need a straightforward replacement for Highlight’s error monitoring, updating your DSN is probably the easiest part of the migration.