Is Highlight.io Shutting Down?

Highlight.io will discontinue its standalone infrastructure on February 28, 2026. After that date, the hosted service at app.highlight.io will shut down, and ingest endpoints will no longer accept data.

If you chose Highlight because it was open-source, self-hostable (or you assumed it might be), this change may hit hard — especially if you depend on long-term control over your data and infrastructure.

What Highlight.io used to be

Highlight billed itself as an open source, full-stack monitoring platform: session replay, error monitoring, logging, tracing — all the pieces to get a cohesive view of your frontend and backend.

It offered:

  • Session Replay: record and replay user sessions, DOM changes, network requests, console logs and more.
  • Error Monitoring: capture exceptions/errors (frontend + backend), enhanced stack traces, user context, grouping, alerts.
  • Logging & Traces: collect logs, perform searches and set alerts, and distributed tracing — tying together frontend events and backend logs/traces.
  • An open-source repo, with a “hobby self-hosted” option for small usage, plus enterprise self-hosted setup for heavier use.

In short: Highlight pitched itself as the “do-it-yourself but modern full-stack monitoring” — a compelling alternative to closed SaaS-only solutions.

What’s actually happening now

In April 2025, Highlight was acquired by LaunchDarkly. Since then, Highlight is being rebranded as LaunchDarkly’s “first-party observability solution” — part of a broader platform combining feature flags, experiments, and now observability.

On the public side, the announcement says that while the repo remains open-source, the team’s focus has shifted to the integrated LaunchDarkly product, and that Highlight-as-yet-separate will eventually be deprecated.

Indeed, the deprecation is scheduled: February 28, 2026 is the cutoff.

In practice: after that date, the “open-source monitoring platform” that many picked for freedom will no longer function unless you migrate to LaunchDarkly. The self-hosted version remains just a repo — no official upstream, no infrastructure, effectively a museum artifact.

Why many will feel betrayed

There’s a mismatch between what people signed up for and what’s left now.

  • Highlight’s public repo and docs painted a path for self-hosting: hobby and enterprise modes.
  • Many developers and organizations — especially those valuing control, privacy, compliance (fintech, internal tooling, EU GDPR concerns) — picked Highlight specifically because it could be self-hosted.
  • With the acquisition, the infrastructure is shutting down. There is no official self-hosted alternative to keep the original Highlight running.
  • What remains is a closed, proprietary platform under LaunchDarkly — precisely what a subset of users tried to avoid.

The promise of open, self-hostable monitoring is gone. The “open-source monitoring platform” is no more; only the code remains, without the backend it depends on.

What you can do now

Depending on what you need, there are still paths forward.

  • Adopt a self-hosted error-tracking / crash-reporting tool instead. If your primary need was error monitoring (exceptions, stack traces, grouping, alerts), then a lightweight self-hosted tool makes sense — no vendor lock-in, no risk of sunset. Bugsink is one such option, compatible with Sentry SDKs.
  • Switch to LaunchDarkly Observability (SaaS). Smooth for teams already using LaunchDarkly or okay with vendor-backed SaaS.
  • Migrate to another full-stack SaaS observability product. If you want session replay + logs + errors + tracing under one roof (but again, SaaS).

If what you used in Highlight was mostly about catching exceptions and grouping errors — not replay or tracing — the self-hosted path is probably the safest long-term bet.

Bottom line

Highlight.io — once a promising open-source full-stack monitoring platform — is being sunset in favor of a closed, integrated observability product under LaunchDarkly. For many who valued control, transparency, or compliance, that means the core value they picked Highlight for is gone.

If all you truly needed from Highlight was error tracking, you’re already on the right site. Bugsink is self-hosted, simple to run, and compatible with the same Sentry SDKs you may already be using. Point your DSN at a server you own, and you’re done.