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:

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.

Similarities between Crashlytics and Instabug

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.

Instabug’s Strengths

Comprehensive crash reports

The most important aspect of any crash reporting tool is the content of the crash reports themselves. Instabug offers more detailed logs, including Network Logs, and a 3D View Hierarchy inspection for UI errors. Also with each crash occurrence, you’ll receive a detailed environment profile covering the last 60 seconds before the report was sent. This Session Profiler includes device data like memory load and battery state. Having this extra data will help you diagnose faster and fix your app’s crashes.

With all this detail included in crash reports, you’ll need to prioritize your backlog to know which crash to address first. Instabug helps identify critical crashes at a glance with its Crash Severity metric. The severity is based on several parameters including the frequency of the crash, the number of affected users, and the recency of its occurrence.

Engage with your users

Unlike bugs that contribute to a poor user experience, crashes completely end the user experience. A study shows that 80% of users will only attempt to use a problematic app three times or less before uninstalling. Instabug lets you reply back to your users who have experienced a crash in order to retain them.

You can ask your users for more details to help fix the error, or you can let them know that you’ve fixed the issue so they can come back to your app. Users will be notified through email, push notification, and in-app chat. This allows you to keep your users engaged and let them know that you care about their experience.

React Native support

The Instabug SDK aims to save you time. Normally, you would spend hours locating the source of a problem and chasing information from your testers and users on separate platforms. Instabug makes this process easier and faster for cross-platform applications like React Native, in addition to iOS and Android. Instead of chasing feedback and filtering crashes, you can spend your time building awesome features and improving your application quality.

The best is yet to come

Don’t settle for less when it comes to your app’s quality. Make sure you are getting the right feedback at the right time. Instabug’s crash reporting and suite of other products are the best tools for the job. Get detailed information sent with your crash reports to easily diagnose and fix issues so your team can move fast and deliver a pleasant experience for your customers.