nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Sidekick - Live application debugger is now open source

Sidekick is a live application debugger that lets you troubleshoot your applications while they keep on running. It allows you to add dynamic logs and put non-breaking breakpoints in your running application without the need of stopping & redeploying. Currently supporting Java, Python & Node.js runtimes. Sidekick Open Source is here to allow self-hosting and make live debugging more accessible. Built for everyone who needs extra information from their running applications.

Sidekick is a live application debugger that enables developers to troubleshoot Java, Python, and Node.js applications without stopping or redeploying them. It allows users to add dynamic logs and insert non-breaking… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Sidekick - Live application debugger is now open source launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Sidekick▲263

    Like Chrome DevTools for your backend, now open source

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Trace and de-bug microservices remotely for $0

    2021 · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Bringing the simplicity of print() to production debugging!

    2022 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    A productivity browser for becoming focused and unstoppable

    2020 · perplexity.ai · its alternatives →

  5. 5AW

    Hey HN, I wanted to show you a product a small team and I have been working on for 4 years. https://jam.dev It’s called Jam and it prevents product managers (like I used to be) from being able to create vague and un-reproducible bug tickets (like I used to create). It’s actually really hard as a non-engineer to file useful bug tickets for engineers. Like, sometimes I thought I included a screenshot, but the important information the engineer needed was what was actually right outside the boundary of the screenshot I took. Or I'd write that something "didn't work" but the engineer…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Capture bugs, record sessions, and fix with AI

    2024 · betterbugs.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Sidekick▲480

    Build Zapier-style automations using only a chat interface

    2025 · sagekit.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8DA

    Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…

    2023 · driftdb.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Your agentic CLI developer. Contribute to geekforbrains/sidekick-cli development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10WM
  11. 11

    React Native library to backtrace your testing steps

    2022 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hey HN, I just built an experimental VSCode extension called LLM Debugger. It’s a proof-of-concept that lets a large language model take charge of debugging. Instead of only looking at the static code, the LLM also gets to see the live runtime state—actual variable values, function calls, branch decisions, and more. The idea is to give it enough context to help diagnose issues faster and even generate synthetic data from running programs. Here’s what it does: * Active Debugging: It integrates with Node.js debug sessions to gather runtime info (like variable states and stack traces). *…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Fix bugs faster with open source, AI native observability

    2025 · traceroot.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    errsole▲133

    First open-source Node.js logger with a built-in log viewer

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Interact with your business apps in a ChatGPT-style

    2023 · jigso.io · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    superlog▲497

    Hey HN, we’re Nico and Arseniy, co-founders of Superlog (https://superlog.sh). We're building a self-installing, self healing observability tool meant not to be opened. It has a wizard that daily sets up proper logging and an agent that investigates errors and opens PRs. Super short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFhU9Mk247M. In our earlier startups, we tried Sentry, Datadog, Grafana, Dash0, and nothing was good enough. Proper telemetry and alerting still requires a ton of manual setup. We struggled with adding good logs, so debugging was tough, especially as…

    Jun 2026 · superlog.sh · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Instantly see user actions that lead up to a bug, in Slack

    2017 · kuoll.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN! We’re Adrien and Kanav. We met at our previous job, where we spent about a third of our lives combating a constant firehose of bugs. In the hope of reducing this pain for others in the future, we’re working on automating debugging. We’re currently working on a platform that ingests logs and then automatically reproduces, root causes and ultimately fixes production bugs as they happen. You can see some of our work on this here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528087 As we were building the root-cause phase of our automated debugger, we realized that we developed…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Automation testing made ultra-simple

    2022 · bugbug.io · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    OpenBug▲106

    Ticket in, fix out. Every solution trains the next one.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A macOS menu bar app that provides quick access to zot from anywhere on your system. - patriceckhart/zot-sidekick

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Dynamically instrument Live applications from your IDE

    2023 · lightrun.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Free 1:1 live chat help for react developers

    2022 · simplydebug.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Aggregate logs, discover and fix errors in real time

    2021 · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →