Honeybadger alternative: Vigil
Updated · prices checked September 2026
People look for a Honeybadger alternative when 5 uptime monitors and 1 status page are not enough, or when cron expressions need the $80 plan. Vigil Starter is $19/month for 50 monitors, heartbeats with cron and timezone, 3 servers, logs and 3 private status pages, and it takes Sentry SDK events. If you love Honeybadger's error workflow, it is still a good product.
Why people look for a Honeybadger alternative
Honeybadger pricing September 2026
- Developer: free. 5,000 errors a month, 1 uptime monitor, basic cron and heartbeat monitoring, 50 MB/day of logs, 1 user, 15-day error retention, 1 status page.
- Team: $26/month or $286/year. 50k errors a month, 5 uptime monitors, 100 MB/day of logs, unlimited users, 90-day retention; $0.0003 per error over quota.
- Business: $80/month or $880/year. 50k errors, 5 uptime monitors, advanced cron schedule monitoring, 180-day retention; $0.0006 per error over quota.
Source: as of September 2026, from honeybadger.io/plans. Vendors change prices; the Honeybadger site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $49 Pro plan unless stated.
| Honeybadger | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ~ 1 uptime monitor free, 5 on Team and Business | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✕ No host agent | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✓ Insights: 50 MB/day free, 100 MB/day on paid plans | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | Check their docs; the core product is errors, uptime, check-ins and logs | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling |
| Kubernetes | ✕ Not offered | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ✕ Not offered | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ~ 1 status page on every plan | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on every paid plan. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ✓ 1 user free, unlimited on paid plans | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ Email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhooks and more | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account |
| Self-hosted option | ✕ SaaS only | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ✕ No incident root-cause analysis; check their site for current AI features | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 analyses a month |
| Error tracking | ✓ 5k errors free, 50k on Team and Business, small per-error overage | ✓ Any Sentry SDK works: create a project and point the SDK's DSN at Vigil. Issues grouped by fingerprint with stack traces, breadcrumbs, users and releases; alerts on new issues, regressions and spikes. 1k / 20k / 200k / 2M events a day and 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 projects. No session replay or profiling |
| Cron job / heartbeat monitoring | ✓ Check-ins on every plan; advanced cron schedules on Business | ✓ Heartbeats count as monitors (20 / 50 / 200 / 1,000). Fixed period with grace time or a cron expression with timezone; /start for run time, /fail, /<exit-code>; POSTed job output kept as a log; maximum run time |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | Team $26/month covers errors and 5 uptime monitors; 50 monitors and servers are not available on the plan | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Honeybadger does well
- Errors, uptime, cron check-ins, logs and a status page in one product, like Vigil.
- Unlimited users from the Team plan and small, clear overage prices.
- Well-liked by Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript teams for its simplicity and support.
Where Vigil is ahead
Limits of Honeybadger that Vigil does not have:
- Only 5 uptime monitors on paid plans; no server metrics, Kubernetes or RUM.
- Advanced cron schedule monitoring needs the $80 Business plan.
- One status page on every plan.
- Uses its own SDKs; Vigil takes Sentry's SDKs.
When to pick Honeybadger instead
Pick Honeybadger if error tracking is the centre of your monitoring, you want its SDKs and workflow (especially in Ruby or Elixir), and a handful of uptime checks with one status page is enough.
What Vigil does not do
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Honeybadger to Vigil
1. Create a project
In Vigil, open Errors and create a project per app to get a DSN.
2. Swap the SDK
Replace the Honeybadger gem or package with the official Sentry SDK and set the DSN.
3. Move checks
Recreate uptime checks as monitors and check-ins as heartbeats (new ping URLs), then build a status page from them.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Can I send Honeybadger SDK events to Vigil?
No. Vigil speaks the Sentry protocol; switch to the official Sentry SDK for your language and use your Vigil DSN.
How do cron check-ins compare?
Vigil heartbeats take a fixed period with grace time or a cron expression with timezone on every plan, plus /start (run time), /fail, /<exit-code> and POSTed output kept as a log.
How many uptime monitors do I get?
Vigil: 20 on Free (5-minute checks), 50 on Starter ($19), 200 on Pro ($49), all at 1-minute intervals on paid plans. Honeybadger: 1 free, 5 on Team and Business.
Is error tracking as good?
For grouping, stack traces, breadcrumbs, releases and alerts, it covers the basics well. Honeybadger has more polish in its error workflow and first-party SDKs.
Ready to leave Honeybadger?
Start free: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
Vigil vs Honeybadger · All comparisons: Better Stack · UptimeRobot · Freshping · Uptime Kuma · Pingdom · StatusCake · Hyperping · Checkly · Atlassian Statuspage · Instatus · OpenStatus · Cronitor · Healthchecks.io · Sentry · GlitchTip · BugSnag · Rollbar · PagerDuty · Opsgenie · Datadog · New Relic · Grafana Cloud · AppSignal · Dynatrace