Instabug vs. Crashlytics

For mobile apps, the benchmarks for acceptable crash rates are not forgiving. Mobile app users have no patience for apps that crash. According to Qualitrix, app crashes per user and per session should be:

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In general, average crash rates for mobile apps are around 1-2%. It's clear that even after a long process of testing and debugging, apps are still likely to crash, and these crashes will result in negative app reviews. Users will be quick to abandon apps after it crashes, so it's imperative that crashes are handled as fast as possible. To know when and to understand why your app is crashing, you need a crash reporting tool to monitor app health.

This article highlights the differences between Instabug and Firebase Crashlytics, the two leading crash reporting tools on the market.

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Whenever your app crashes, Instabug and Crashlytics report all the stack trace information on all the running threads. You can also use these tools to log your handled exceptions or errors even if it doesn’t crash the app.

With each crash report, Instabug and Crashlytics capture a detailed report of the running environment, the different threads’ states, and the steps to reproduce the crash.

Instead of viewing thousands of crashes one by one, with Instabug or Crashlytics, you can view them aggregated into charts. This will help you get an overview of your app performance and how it changes over time.

With both tools, you can also integrate with third-party bug tracking or project management tools. Crashlytics supports Jira and Slack integrations. Instabug supports Jira, Slack, and much more, including GitHub, Zendesk, Trello, PivotalTracker, Bitbucket, and Asana.

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Capture every type of crash your users experience

Instabug helps you get the full picture by capturing all possible crash types that may occur in your app. In addition to ANR errors and NDK and C++ crashes, Instabug also captures OOM errors, SwiftUI exceptions, crashes due to network errors, app hangs, and forced restarts.

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Reproduce issues with ease

With each crash or bug report, Instabug captures a wealth of useful information that can help you fix issues faster. In addition to all the information Firebase includes with their crash reports, Instabug also includes “repro steps” which maintains a visual record of every step your user has taken on each app view before the crash to help you reproduce issues effortlessly. Instabug also includes a session profiler that captures the state of the device’s CPU, memory, storage, battery, network connectivity, and orientation for the 60 seconds leading up to the crash.

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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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Advanced filters

Instabug offers powerful, advanced filters that can help you find the exact issue you are looking for no matter how obscure. You can filter your issues by all data points and create saved filters for quick access to commonly used filters.

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Advanced and fully customizable alerts and notifications

Instabug helps you stay on top of incoming issues with a powerful and fully customizable rules engine that allows you to create custom alerts and notifications for virtually any scenario. This will help you keep track of emerging issues and understand their impact on your users as well as enable you to quickly any regressing issues.

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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 automate staged releases on the Play Store.

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Integrate with your favorite tools

In addition to all the tools that Firebase integrates with, Instabug integrates with a suite of other popular tools like OpsGenie, Zendesk, Asana, Webhooks, and more.

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24/7 support

Our customer happiness team is available around the clock and throughout the week to help you with any issues you might face and provide you with any needed help or support to get set up. No matter what you need or when you need it, our team will be available to assist you with a quick response and resolution.

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Your data is your own

With Instabug, data privacy is our utmost concern. Your data is 100% yours. At no point will Instabug share, monetize, or access your data. Instabug is also compliant with major privacy laws and offers enterprise-grade security to ensure the privacy and security of your app and its users. And with easily customizable auto-masking of user data as well as granular manual customization, you have full control over what data is and isn’t collected from your users.