Tool profile
Open-source full-stack monitoring platform that combines session replay, error tracking, logging, and traces in a developer-friendly package.
Full-stack monitoring
Highlight.io belongs in the catalog because it is one of the clearer attempts to collapse several observability workflows into a single product aimed at product and engineering teams. The official positioning is full-stack monitoring, but the real editorial value is the combination: session replay, error monitoring, logs, traces, dashboards, and self-hosting options under one open-source umbrella. That creates a compelling alternative for teams that want richer debugging context than a pure APM tool provides but do not want to assemble a replay vendor, an error tracker, and a log platform separately.
It also deserves inclusion because the pricing is public and understandable. Highlight currently lists Free at $0 per month, Pay-as-you-go starting at $50 per month, Business starting at $800 per month, and Enterprise through sales, plus a self-hosted enterprise offer. The official page also exposes usage assumptions around sessions, errors, logs, and traces, which is unusually helpful for teams trying to estimate real monthly cost rather than just compare list prices.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Highlight should be judged as a bundled debugging surface. The product becomes more valuable when the same team wants to jump from user session context into application errors and traces without changing tools.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Highlight.io lists Free at $0/month, Pay-as-you-go starting at $50/month, Business starting at $800/month, and Enterprise via sales. The free plan includes 500 sessions per month, while paid tiers bundle larger usage and then add overages.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
