Highlight
Open-source full-stack observability with session replay — error monitoring, logs, and traces, acquired by LaunchDarkly.
Acquired — still operating
Acquired by LaunchDarkly in April 2025. The standalone hosted service was shut down in February 2026; observability capabilities live on inside LaunchDarkly's Guarded Releases.
About
Highlight (highlight.io) was the open-source answer to Sentry plus LogRocket: error monitoring, frontend logging, OpenTelemetry-compatible distributed tracing, and session replay in one platform, with the signature trick of jumping from an error straight to the exact moment it happened in the replay. The code is Apache-2.0 licensed and the GitHub repo still shows 9,381 stars (verified via the GitHub API on 2026-10-16), with a free cloud tier that once covered 500 sessions a month and paid plans from about $50.
The product's future changed in April 2025, when LaunchDarkly announced the acquisition of Highlight to power its Guarded Releases vision (GlobeNewswire press release). Third-party trackers report the standalone hosted service shut down in February 2026, and the repo is described as effectively frozen despite recent commits. Highlight's observability capabilities are now being repackaged inside LaunchDarkly. Evaluate it as a LaunchDarkly component or a self-hosted fork base, not as the SaaS it was.
What it can do
- Session replay linked directly to the errors in each session
- Error monitoring with AI error grouping and source map support
- Frontend logging and OpenTelemetry-compatible distributed tracing
- Custom metrics and team collaboration with session annotations
- Field masking, URL filtering, SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR controls
- Docker-based self-hosted deployment from the Apache-2.0 codebase
Setup
- Do not sign up for the standalone cloud — it has been shut down.
- For LaunchDarkly customers: check the Guarded Releases observability packaging.
- To self-host: fork highlight/highlight on GitHub and deploy via Docker per the docs.
- Instrument with the Highlight SDKs (browser, Node, Go, Python, Ruby, Java, Rust) and the sourcemap uploader.
Prerequisites
A LaunchDarkly relationship for the packaged offering, or DevOps capacity to self-host the frozen codebase.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (METRICS tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: acquired by LaunchDarkly April 2025 per GlobeNewswire; highlight.io now redirects to launchdarkly.com (verified); third-party trackers report the hosted service shut February 2026; repo at 9,381 stars but described as effectively frozen. Strengths: genuinely good engineering (session-to-error linking), permissive Apache-2.0 license, self-hostable. Docked for: (1) the SaaS you would sign up for no longer exists; (2) development is frozen outside LaunchDarkly's packaging; (3) future documentation points to LaunchDarkly, not the open project. License: Apache-2.0 open source.
★ 9,381 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 6.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 4.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 5.5/10
- · Acquired by LaunchDarkly April 2025 (GlobeNewswire)
- · highlight.io redirects to launchdarkly.com; hosted shut Feb 2026 per third-party
- · 9,381 GitHub stars, Apache-2.0, effectively frozen
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.