Instabug vs Bugsnag

In this post, we will take a look at two of the top error reporting tools out there, Instabug vs Bugsnag. These tools can help you monitor not only your app’s crashes and errors and also improve your app’s performance.

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The main similarity between Instabug and Bugsnag is error reporting for mobile apps, including cross-platform solutions. Both capture a detailed report of the running environment, as well as the different threads’ states. And to help solve issues both provide all the stack trace information on all the running threads. This includes highlighting the line of code that resulted in the error or crash.

Both collect the user steps taken leading up to the crash. But while Bugsnag only lists the steps, Instabug’s Repro Steps provide screenshots capturing UI interactions. This helps you narrow down the reason behind the crash by easily being able to reproduce it.

With both tools, you can receive alerts on critical crashes to stay ahead of issues. They also provide a general score indicating how stable each release is. You can also integrate with a huge array of third-party issue tracking or project management tools. Instabug supports flexible integrations with Zapier and Webhooks.

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Reproduce issues with ease

Instabug’s Crash Reporting goes a step further by ensuring you’re getting all the information you need. Detailed logs, including network logs, help you assess finer details and help narrow down why a crash occurred. Instabug also includes “repro steps” which maintains a visual record of every step your user has taken on each app view before the crash.

The session profiler gives a quick glimpse into device-related metrics 60 seconds prior to a crash. You will be able to see memory and CPU usage in order to quickly diagnose the error. Also included with every report is a 3D view hierarchy inspection to help diagnose UI errors. And when a crash does occur, you will be able to reply to the affected users to help get more information on the matter or let them know that it’s being attended to.

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Understand your users' actual experience with your app

As mentioned above, crashes and errors aren’t the only issues that can reflect badly on your app. Monitoring your app’s performance across versions and environments is key to improving the quality of your app. Instabug’s built-for-mobile APM tool helps you monitor network performance, UI hangs, app launch times, screen loading, user terminations, as well as custom app traces.

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Align your team on a north-star performance metric

App performance can be difficult to assess when taken as a big picture. Assessing whether or not precious engineering resources need to be devoted to improving performance is one of the biggest challenges mobile teams face. Instabug’s apdex score helps you do just that. With one tell-all score that encompasses app, network, and UI performance as well as app stability, you can make actionable decisions faster. The app apdex score will tell you right on the dashboard whether your users are seeing a satisfying, tolerating, or frustrating experience.

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Best-in-class bug reporting

Instabug offers the most powerful bug reporting tool for mobile apps on the market. With Instabug’s bug reporting features, your users can easily report bugs that don’t actually crash the app with a simple shake of their phone. For each bug report, Instabug captures a screenshot and lets your users annotate it or add more screenshots or a video recording to explain further. Instabug also automatically captures all the device and environment details, console logs, network logs, user attributes, repro steps, and session profiler to help you quickly reproduce and fix the bug.

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Monitor and debug your app store reviews

Instabug's App Ratings and Reviews captures all the ratings and reviews your app receives, enabling you to monitor the app store performance of each release and quickly identify emerging issues. More importantly, Instabug automatically identifies sessions that submit in-app ratings and allows you to watch exactly what led to them through Session Replay.

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Actively gather user feedback and app reviews

Often the best way to understand what your users think is to simply ask them. Instabug's In-App Surveys gives you the power to actively source valuable user feedback to inform your roadmap and ensure it is aligned with your users' expectations. Additionally, you can prompt happy users to rate and review your app on the store and replay the sessions of unhappy users to find the source of their frustration.

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Automate rollout monitoring and management

Instabug's Release Management gives you full control over the progress, adoption, health, and app store performance of your version rollouts in one place to help you quickly catch problematic releases and mitigate their impact. You can also set rules to automatically pause a version rollout when it falls below specified stability, performance, and app store rating thresholds, as well as create a rollout schedule to automated staged releases on the Play Store.

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Built for mobile

While New Relic is built with backend and DevOps teams in mind, Instabug understands the unique challenges of mobile development and is built for mobile developers and engineers. Instabug detects all critical issues affecting your users, whether it is a crash, slow network call, slow transition, or app hang.

With strong mobile experience, Instabug’s APM goes a lot deeper. App launch time monitoring helps you set a good first impression which is key with mobile users. You will also be able to track ANR errors, OOM errores, app hangs, and forced restarts to make sure users aren’t having a frustrating experience with your app. Additionally, Instabug automatically captures the performance of your app's key flows and enables you to create custom execution traces to track the performance of specific logic and code traces.