An in-depth review of CatchJS, the lightweight JavaScript error tracking and performance monitoring tool: features, pricing, pros and cons, and Shopify…
CatchJS focuses on three connected problems web developers face after shipping code to production: knowing when JavaScript actually breaks for real users, understanding how pages perform for those same real users, and getting lightweight usage analytics without deploying a heavier tracking suite. After adding a single script tag, CatchJS automatically listens for unhandled JavaScript errors across a site and reports them with full stack traces and surrounding context, similar in concept to larger error-tracking platforms but built around a dramatically smaller script footprint, reported at under 1.8KB after compression, which the company markets as up to 20 times lighter than typical competing error trackers.
Alongside error capture, CatchJS records real-user performance metrics tied directly to Core Web Vitals and user experience, including Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay, plus simple, privacy-conscious analytics covering pageviews and time on page. This combination lets a small team get error visibility, performance monitoring, and basic analytics from one lightweight tool instead of running three separate services, which is part of why CatchJS is also distributed as a dedicated Shopify app for store owners who want the same visibility without custom development work.
CatchJS's three pricing tiers scale primarily along logged error volume and the number of URLs being monitored for performance and pageviews, rather than along team seats or feature gating, which keeps the plans simple to reason about. The Development plan (from $44/month annually) fits small sites, staging environments, or early-stage products with modest error and traffic volume, covering 1,000 logged errors and 100 monitored URLs per month. The Production plan (from $79/month annually) is aimed at live, revenue-generating websites with higher error and traffic volume, offering 100x the error and pageview allowances of the Development tier. The Enterprise plan (from $449/month annually) is built for high-traffic applications or agencies managing many domains, supporting up to a million logged errors a month and coverage across 25 domains with unlimited subdomains.
Given its small script size and simple setup, CatchJS tends to suit small-to-midsize engineering teams, indie developers, and Shopify merchants who want error visibility and basic performance monitoring without the cost, complexity, or page-weight overhead of enterprise observability platforms like Sentry or Datadog. Its Norway-based, apparently small and independently run team also suggests a product built for a focused niche, script-weight-conscious error tracking, rather than an attempt to compete head-on with full-scale application performance monitoring suites.
CatchJS is a JavaScript error tracking, performance monitoring, and simple analytics tool. After adding a single lightweight script tag to a website, it automatically captures unhandled errors with stack traces, tracks Core Web Vitals performance metrics, and records basic, privacy-respecting page analytics.
CatchJS reports its script as under 1.8KB after compression, which the company describes as up to 20 times smaller than many competing JavaScript error-tracking scripts.
CatchJS has three tiers: Development starting at $44/month billed annually ($49/month monthly), Production starting at $79/month annually ($89/month monthly), and Enterprise starting at $449/month annually ($499/month monthly), each scaling by logged error volume and monitored URLs.
Yes. CatchJS is available as a dedicated Shopify app called Error Tracking with CatchJS, listed in the Shopify App Store, letting store owners monitor JavaScript errors on their storefronts without custom development.
CatchJS tracks real-user Core Web Vitals metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay, alongside pageviews and time-on-page analytics.
Yes, every CatchJS plan includes a 14-day free trial to evaluate the product before committing to a paid subscription.
CatchJS is based in Trondheim, Norway, and was founded in 2018.
CatchJS can be a good fit for teams that specifically want a very lightweight script and simple, transparent pricing, though larger platforms like Sentry offer deeper feature sets and larger integration ecosystems that may suit bigger or more complex engineering organizations better.