Highlight.io review 2026: open-source session replay, error monitoring and tracing features, pricing plans, pros and cons, and alternatives like Sentry.
Highlight.io is an open-source, full-stack observability platform that unifies session replay, error monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing into one OpenTelemetry-native product. Founded in 2022 by CEO Jay Khatri and CTO Vadim Korolik, the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and raised an $8 million seed round led by Afore Capital and Craft Ventures before being acquired by LaunchDarkly in early 2025.
Headquartered in San Francisco with a presence in Seattle, Highlight.io built its reputation on offering session replay and error monitoring at feature parity with dedicated point solutions, while adding integrated logging and tracing that most session-replay or error-tracking tools don't include natively, all within a single self-hostable, open-source codebase.
Highlight.io's session replay engine captures clicks, scrolls, navigation, form inputs, network requests, console logs, and DOM mutations, giving engineers a full picture of what a user experienced before encountering a bug. This is combined with full-stack error monitoring that links frontend errors to backend traces, a structured logging pipeline, and distributed tracing across services, unified in a single dashboard.
Because the platform is open source and built on OpenTelemetry, it integrates across a wide range of frameworks and languages including React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, and Go, and can be deployed either as a fully self-hosted instance with no licensing cost or consumed as a managed Highlight Cloud service, including availability through AWS Marketplace.
Highlight.io offers a free tier with reasonable usage limits across session replay, error monitoring, logging, and tracing, suitable for small projects and evaluation. Paid plans start around a $50/month base fee that includes a defined usage quota, such as 500 session replays and 1,000 errors with 3-month retention, plus 1 million log events and 25 million trace events with 30-day retention.
Usage beyond the included quota is billed on top of the base fee, and broader paid tiers commonly scale from roughly $150 per month upward depending on volume. Enterprise plans add single sign-on, advanced access controls, extended retention, and dedicated support for larger organizations, and the fully self-hosted open-source version remains free with no licensing cost.
Highlight.io is used for full-stack observability, combining session replay, error monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing to help engineering teams debug issues faster.
Yes, Highlight.io is open source and self-hostable, with its code publicly available on GitHub, built on the OpenTelemetry standard.
Highlight.io offers a free tier with usage limits, and paid plans start around $50/month with defined usage quotas, scaling to roughly $150/month and higher based on volume.
Highlight.io was acquired by LaunchDarkly in early 2025 and now operates as 'Highlight, a LaunchDarkly company.'
Highlight.io was founded in 2022 by CEO Jay Khatri and CTO Vadim Korolik, and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch.
Highlight.io's main competitors include Sentry, LogRocket, Datadog RUM, FullStory, Smartlook, and PostHog.