Instabug vs. Sentry

In this post, we will take a look at two of the top mobile app quality platforms out there, Instabug vs Sentry. These tools can help you monitor your app’s performance and crashes, as well as errors, network requests, battery consumption, and more.

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The worst-case scenario that can affect a user's experience is their session ending as a result of a crash or error. Both Instabug and Sentry help you avoid negative reviews with detailed crash reporting directly from your mobile app. With both, you will have full-stack monitoring on a large range of mobile platforms. On your dashboard, you will receive real-time updates and event alerts via email or customizable notifications.

Instabug and Sentry both allow you to track sessions, monitor general app stability, and provide indicators on release adoption. They both also detect a wide range of crashes including NDK, ANR, and OOM crashes.

To accelerate your workflow, both support a vast suite of third-party integrations such as Jira, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, and much more. This allows for seamless integration into existing workflows. They also support automated upload of mapping/dSYM files using any CI/CD tool.

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Effortlessly reproduce and debug issues with mobile-first crash reporting

The most important part of a crash reporting tool is being able to detect and diagnose a wide range of crashes. Instabug supports all crash types that you might encounter to ensure that any error is quickly identifiable and goes further to include high-impact stability issues that don't lead to a crash. These crash types include:

• Network crashes: Crashes due to Network errors (4xx, 5xx, and slow requests)
• Forced restarts: Instances when a user terminates the app and restarts it within five seconds

Instabug also gives you more information beyond just the crash. The conditions that led up to the crash are key to figuring out and fixing the issue and Instabug's session profiler captures the state and timeline of the device (memory, CPU, battery, and connectivity) in the last 60 seconds before the app crashes. Another useful feature is repro steps, which makes reproducing issues a breeze by replaying the interactions the user made with your app up until a crash is reported, grouped by each screen name.

For hard-to-debug issues like ANRs and app hangs, Instabug's powerful flame graphs engine gives you advanced debugging capabilities to quickly reveal their root cause.

You can take it a step further with powerful filtering across all data points of reported errors including custom key-value attributes. Instabug also supports filtering on feature flags and experiments (A/B tests) to help new features meet your standards for stability before they reach all of your users.

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Understand your users' actual experience with your app

Monitoring your app’s performance across versions and environments is key to improving the quality of your app and although Sentry offers basic app performance monitoring, Instabug’s built-for-mobile APM tool goes much further, helping you monitor overall release health, key flows, screen performance, as well as custom app traces.

Additionally, Instabug's Session Replay enable you to dig even deeper into your app's user experience through visual replays of user sessions that show you exactly what they encountered along with all the technical details and information that reveal what happened under the hood.

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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 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 automate staged releases on the Play Store.