About
Highlight.io is an open source observability and monitoring platform built for modern web development teams. It unifies session replay, error monitoring, logging, distributed traces, and APM dashboards into a single pane of glass, giving developers deep visibility into both frontend and backend behavior. With **Session Replay**, teams can watch exactly how users interact with their application, including console and network recording, to reproduce hard-to-find bugs. **Error Monitoring** (powered by OpenTelemetry) captures exceptions across the entire stack, with custom grouping and alerting rules. **Logging** lets developers search and set alerts on logs from any part of their stack, backed by Clickhouse for scale. **Distributed Tracing** provides performance insights across requests and transactions. **Dashboards & APM** surfaces user analytics and performance visualizations in a fully customizable view. Highlight.io supports all major modern frameworks, integrates with popular issue trackers, support tools, and analytics platforms. For teams with strict data requirements, it offers self-hosting in Docker with just a few commands. It meets SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO compliance standards. It's ideal for startups and engineering teams who want full-stack observability without silos — and the ability to self-host for complete control over their data.
Key Features
- Session Replay: Record and replay user sessions with console and network capture to understand the real cause of bugs in your web application.
- Error Monitoring: Automatically capture and group exceptions across your full stack with customizable alerting rules, powered by OpenTelemetry.
- Logging & Tracing: Search logs and trace distributed requests across your entire stack with Clickhouse-backed performance and OpenTelemetry support.
- APM Dashboards: Build customizable dashboards to visualize performance metrics, user analytics, and observability data in a single view.
- Self-Hosting: Spin up highlight.io on your own infrastructure using Docker with just a few commands for full data control and compliance.
Use Cases
- Debugging production bugs by replaying the exact user session that triggered an error, including console logs and network requests.
- Monitoring application errors across the full stack and receiving alerts before issues escalate into widespread outages.
- Searching and alerting on logs from backend services to diagnose performance bottlenecks or failures in distributed systems.
- Providing hands-on customer support by reviewing session replays to understand exactly what a user experienced during an issue.
- Self-hosting a full observability stack for compliance-sensitive applications that cannot send data to third-party cloud providers.
Pros
- Truly Open Source: Fully open source and self-hostable, giving teams complete control over their data and infrastructure without vendor lock-in.
- Unified Observability: Combines session replay, errors, logs, and traces in one platform, eliminating the need to context-switch between multiple tools.
- Modern Framework Support: Supports all major modern web frameworks with widespread SDK coverage, making integration straightforward for most stacks.
- Compliance Ready: Meets SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO standards, making it suitable for regulated industries and enterprise environments.
Cons
- Self-Hosting Requires DevOps Effort: Running highlight.io on your own infrastructure requires Docker setup and ongoing maintenance, which adds operational overhead.
- Primarily Web-Focused: The platform is optimized for web applications; mobile or native app monitoring is not a primary use case.
- Newer Ecosystem: As a newer open source entrant, the ecosystem of third-party integrations and community resources is smaller compared to established APM incumbents.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is highlight.io really open source?
Yes. Highlight.io is fully open source and available on GitHub. You can clone the repository and self-host it using Docker with just a few commands.
Can I use highlight.io for free?
Yes. Highlight.io offers a free cloud tier to get started, and the open source version can be self-hosted at no cost beyond your own infrastructure.
What frameworks does highlight.io support?
Highlight.io supports all major modern web frameworks. They provide SDKs for widespread frontend and backend frameworks — check their documentation for a full list.
How does session replay work?
Highlight.io records user sessions in your web application, capturing DOM interactions, console logs, and network requests. You can replay these sessions to reproduce bugs exactly as users experienced them.
Does highlight.io meet compliance requirements?
Yes. Highlight.io is built with compliance in mind and supports SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO standards. It also provides privacy controls for session replay to help mask sensitive user data.
