Mobile crash reporting has evolved. If your crash reporting still only relies on stack traces, you’re likely missing the bigger picture—and wasting valuable developer time.
Crashlytics, Google’s crash reporting tool bundled with Firebase, is the default for many mobile teams. It’s reliable, quick to integrate, and covers the basics. But if you’ve ever had to ask a user, “Can you tell me what happened before the crash?”, you’ve already reached its limits.
Bugsee takes a different approach. It’s built for developers who need complete context: video replay, touch events, network logs, and UI state—all automatically captured before and after every bug or crash.
In this guide, we’ll compare Bugsee and Crashlytics across the areas that matter the most to mobile developers: crash reporting depth, debugging speed, platform support, integration experience, and pricing. If you’re evaluating tools that actually save you hours in QA and post-mortems, this breakdown is for you.
What’s the Key Difference Between Bugsee and Crashlytics?
At a glance, both Bugsee and Crashlytics deliver mobile crash reports with stack traces—but only one tells the full story.
Crashlytics is widely adopted and built for speed. It provides lightweight reports that highlight where a crash occurred, along with device and session metadata. Developers can also log custom events using breadcrumbs or key-value pairs—but the rest is up to them. It’s effective for answering what crashed and where, but not necessarily why.
Bugsee, by contrast, captures the full context surrounding every crash or bug. It continuously records screen activity, touch events, console output, and network traffic. When something goes wrong, Bugsee delivers a replay of what the user saw, did, and triggered—so developers don’t need to guess or ask users to retrace their steps. It also includes advanced features like UI hierarchy inspection, giving you insight into the exact state of the interface at the moment of failure.
Let’s start with a side-by-side look at their core capabilities:
| Feature | Bugsee | Crashlytics |
|---|---|---|
| Crash stack traces | Yes | Yes |
| Video replay of user session | Yes (auto-captures prior to crash; configurable) | Not supported |
| Touch and gesture tracking | Yes (integrated into video replay and logs) | Not supported |
| Network request capture | Yes (full request/response payloads with headers) | Partial (requires manual logging via custom keys) |
| UI hierarchy inspection | Yes (available on supported platforms) | Not supported |
| Console and system logs | Yes (device logs, custom logs auto-captured) | Custom logs only (developers must use Crashlytics APIs) |
| Custom logs/non-fatal errors | Yes | Yes (via log() and recordException()) |
| Supported platforms | iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Unity | iOS, Android, Flutter, Unity |
| Analytics Integration | Limited (custom metadata only) | Native integration with Firebase Analytics |
Table 1: Crash Reporting Capabilities: Bugsee vs Crashlytics
Clarifying Notes
Here are a few important technical details to keep in mind when interpreting the comparison table set out above:
- Bugsee’s session replay window is configurable: By default, Bugsee captures up to 60 seconds of app activity before and after a crash event or bug report. However, this duration can be adjusted based on performance needs or use case.
- Crashlytics does not record user interactions or screen content: While Crashlytics supports manual logging through Crashlytics.log() and custom keys, it does not automatically capture touch gestures, UI state, or video of the user session.
- Bugsee provides full payload visibility for network traffic where permitted: Bugsee records request and response headers and bodies unless restricted by platform permissions or app-level redactions. This is especially useful for debugging API errors and latency issues.
- Crashlytics benefits from native Firebase Analytics integration: This allows developers to correlate crashes with user events, properties, and cohorts (e.g., revenue segments or user funnels). Bugsee supports tagging and metadata capture via its SDK but does not offer built-in analytics dashboard integration.
How Bugsee and Crashlytics Compare in Real-World Debugging Workflows
When a crash occurs in production, the difference between Bugsee and Crashlytics isn’t just technical—it’s procedural. It directly affects how much time your team spends tracking down the root cause, whether you can reproduce the issue at all, and how fast you can ship a fix.
With Crashlytics, the typical workflow starts with a stack trace. From there, developers often need to:
- Reconstruct what the user was doing.
- Ask for reproduction steps or logs.
- Guess the app state and UI flow at the time of the crash.
- Manually add logging after the fact to capture more context.
In cases where the issue is intermittent or user-specific, such as network failures, edge-case interactions, or device-specific bugs, this guesswork results in longer debug cycles or, worse, unresolved issues.
With Bugsee, the workflow looks different. When a bug is reported or a crash occurs:
- A video replay shows exactly what the user did and saw before the failure.
- Touch interactions, screen transitions, and UI changes are recorded.
- Network requests and logs are auto-captured alongside the session.
- Developers immediately see the conditions leading up to the failure—without needing to ask the user for details.
This results in fewer back-and-forths between QA and developers, less reliance on reproducing hard-to-replicate crashes, and a significantly shorter time-to-resolution. For teams that push regular updates or support complex mobile workflows, this level of visibility can shave hours (or even days) off every debugging cycle.
How Well Do Bugsee and Crashlytics Support Cross-Platform Teams?
Platform support is more than just a checkbox; it determines how cleanly your crash reporting tool fits across your stack, especially when you’re maintaining apps on iOS, Android, and cross-platform frameworks like React Native, Flutter, or Unity.
Crashlytics offers native SDKs for iOS and Android, along with modules for Flutter and Unity. It also provides a React Native module via @react-native-firebase/crashlytics, which wraps the native Firebase SDKs and supports standard crash reporting features such as stack traces, non-fatal errors, and logging.
Bugsee supports multiple platforms, including native (iOS, Android) and hybrid frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Unity, Xamarin, and .NET. Its React Native SDK can hook into console logs and internal logging, allowing automatic capture of logs and events. As with most cross-platform SDKs, some advanced features may vary depending on platform capabilities or integration depth.
Because both tools rely on platform bridges in hybrid environments, advanced functionality (such as video replay or UI hierarchy inspection) may only be available in certain configurations or may require additional implementation effort. Teams evaluations cross-platform compatibility should consult each tool’s documentation to confirm feature support on their target platforms.
For the most up-to-date platform-specific details, explore Bugsee’s SDK documentation for setup guides, feature availability, and integration notes across iOS, Android, and hybrid frameworks.
What Are the Pricing Models and Total Cost of Ownership?
At first glance, the difference in pricing between Crashlytics and Bugsee seems clear: Crashlytics is free, while Bugsee is a paid solution. However, when evaluating crash reporting tools, the real cost isn’t just the subscription—it’s also the developer time, debugging effort, and how each platform affects product stability.
Crashlytics, as part of Google’s Firebase suite, doesn’t charge for basic usage. This makes it an appealing choice for small teams or early-stage apps. However, the time and effort required to manually instrument and investigate crashes can still add up—especially when visibility into user behavior is limited.
- Developers must manually log context (e.g., user actions, app state, custom events).
- Without session-level visibility, teams often spend extra time reproducing crashes manually.
- QA loops can take longer due to missing information about user flows or interactions.
- Some bugs may remain unresolved if stack traces don’t explain the root cause.
Bugsee operates via a paid model (except for its LITE plan) but provides substantial time savings and faster issue resolution out of the box. By automatically capturing:
- User session video,
- Touch events,
- Network traffic (with payloads),
- Console logs, and
- UI state,
Bugsee reduces the need for guesswork, minimizes user follow-up, and shortens the debug-fix-verify loop. For any team looking to reduce time spent on debugging and improve release efficiency, this translates into a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
The equation is simple: free tools save budget but cost developers hours. Bugsee trades a subscription fee for faster fixes and fewer QA cycles.
Should I Switch from Crashlytics to Bugsee?
If you’re building a simple app, don’t mind adding manual logs, and rarely struggle to reproduce bugs, Crashlytics is likely good enough. It’s lightweight, free, and easy to integrate into Firebase-centric stacks.
However, if you are spending unnecessary time piecing together crash details, chasing user feedback, or repeating QA cycles due to missing context, Crashlytics is no longer adding value to your mobile application development lifecycle.
Bugsee is built for developers who want instant visibility into what went wrong—without relying on guesswork or user feedback. Ergo, switching to Bugsee isn’t just a feature upgrade—it’s a workflow transformation if your team values:
- Faster triage of crash reports.
- Fewer QA back-and-forths.
- Consistent debugging context across native and hybrid apps.
- Predictable development velocity and fewer delayed releases.
The best crash reporting tool isn’t the one that saves a few dollars. It’s the one that saves your team time, frustration, and product risk.
[Mid-article CTA] Ready to upgrade your debugging workflow? Start using Bugsee for free — no credit card needed — and get full-session context, instantly.
FAQS
1. Will Bugsee impact my app’s performance?
Bugsee is optimized to run in production environments with minimal overhead. Session replay and log capture are performed in the background and are configurable to strike a balance between data depth and performance needs. You can control video duration and frames per second (FPS), network logging, and log verbosity via SDK settings.
2. Does Bugsee support hybrid frameworks like React Native or Flutter?
Yes. Bugsee offers dedicated SDKs for React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Unity, Xamarin, and .NET. While feature parity may differ slightly between platforms, most core capabilities—such as video replay, logs, and network traces—are consistently supported across all environments.
3. Is Bugsee compliant with GDPR and other data privacy regulations?
Bugsee offers tools for compliance, including PII masking, user opt-in controls, and configurable data retention policies. It’s used by teams in regulated industries, but ultimate compliance depends on how you configure the SDK and your broader data handling policies.
4. What kind of support does Bugsee offer?
Bugsee provides email and in-dashboard support, as well as SDK documentation for every platform. Teams on paid plans also receive access to onboarding assistance and performance tuning advice to help integrate Bugsee seamlessly without disrupting their existing stack.
Still deciding? Try Bugsee free for 30 days and discover what full-context debugging is all about.