When a user reports a bug—or worse, abandons the app entirely—your team has two choices: Spend hours retracting what happened, or use a tool that already knows.
| 💡Editor’s Note Instabug has officially rebranded as Luciq, signalling a broader shift toward mobile observability and intelligence tooling. While new SDKs are being introduced, the legacy Instabug SDKs remain supported and widely used, with documentation now hosted at docs.luciq.ai. |
Instabug and Bugsee both support in-app bug reporting and crash diagnostics. However, they approach developer visibility in very different ways. Instabug captures crashes and allows users to submit detailed bug reports. Bugsee, on the other hand, automatically records the full app session leading up to the issue, giving engineers complete context, even when the user provides none.
In this article, we’ll compare Bugsee and Instabug across development workflows, session capture, platform support, and pricing — so you can choose the tool that helps you fix bugs, not just report them.
What’s the Core Difference Between Bugsee and Instabug?
At a high level, both Bugsee and Instabug offer mobile SDKs that support crash detection and bug reporting. However, their core assumptions about how issues are surfaced and resolved differ significantly.
Instabug combines automatic crash reporting with user-driven feedback. Its SDK captures stack traces, logs, and network data when crashes occur—and provides users with a reporting interface to submit bugs manually, typically by shaking the device or tapping a menu. These reports are sent to the dashboard and can be forwarded to tools like Jira, Zendesk, or Slack. This makes Instabug particularly useful for product teams gathering feedback alongside crash data.
Bugsee takes a developer-first approach. Its SDK continuously records the app session in the background and captures key signals: video, touch events, console logs, and network traffic. When a bug or crash is detected, this data is automatically compiled into a full-context report, giving engineers an objective view of what happened before and during the issue.
In summary, Instabug tells you a crash has occured and provides supporting logs. Bugsee shows you why it occurred — without relying on users to describe anything.
How Do Bug Reporting Workflows Compare?
While both Bugsee and Instabug help teams identify and triage bugs, the way each tool fits into your workflow is fundamentally different—especially when it comes to who initiates the report, what data is captured, and how this information flows to engineering.
Instabug: User-Initiated Reports with Product-Centric Context
Instabug’s model depends on users taking the initiative to report bugs. Once triggered (typically by shaking the device or tapping a configured menu option), the SDK opens an in-app reporting screen where users can describe what went wrong. Depending on the implementation, these reports may also include reproduction steps, device metadata, console logs, and network request details.
While this workflow supports product and support teams with structured user feedback, it can create blind spots for developers. If the user doesn’t report the issue or submits vague or incomplete information, engineers may struggle to identify root causes or reproduce edge cases.
Bugsee: Automated Capture Without User Involvement
Bugsee removes the need for user-initiated reporting entirely. Its SDK continuously captures technical signals from the app (including screen activity, touch interactions, network traffic, and console logs) without requiring any user action. When a crash or bug occurs, Bugsee automatically packages this data into a structured report and uploads it to the dashboard.
This proactive model enables developers to investigate bugs promptly, eliminating the need for guesswork and reliance on vague user descriptions. Instead of waiting for a report, teams receive a complete timeline of what the user saw and did, along with the app’s internal state at each step.
Bugsee is particularly effective in identifying hard-to-reproduce issues, such as crashes triggered by rapid taps, network edge cases, silent failures, or bugs missed by QA. Automating the entire capture process shortens triage time, reduces the dependency on manual logs, and accelerates time-to-fix across the board.
What to see what full-context debugging actually looks like?
Bugsee offers a 30-day free trial — no credit card required.
What’s the Difference in Developer-Facing Context?
For engineering teams, a bug report is only as useful as the context it captures. While both Bugsee and Instabug can include technical data, like logs and device state, the type, quality, and completeness of this context vary significantly.
Bugsee: Session Replay and Full Diagnostic Context
Bugsee automatically records a continuous stream of diagnostic data that developers can inspect when a crash or bug occurs. This includes:
- Video replay of the user’s session leading up to the issue.
- Touch and gesture tracking to show exactly how the user navigated.
- Full network request and response payloads (including headers and bodies where platform permissions allow).
- Console and system logs, natively captured on iOS and Android.
- UI hierarchy inspection on supported platforms.
Because the Bugsee SDK records proactively (not reactively), developers aren’t limited to static snapshots or partial logs. This provides developers with access to not only what happened, but also how the app behaved under the hood—across UI state, logs, and network activity—before, during, and after the issue. It’s especially useful for debugging silent crashes, unexpected UI states, or edge-case behaviors that can’t be reliably reproduced.
Instabug: Logged Metadata and User-Supplied Annotations
Instabug offers useful metadata about the app and device at the moment a user submits a bug report. Depending on how the SDK is configured, reports may include:
- Console logs.
- Network request logs.
- Reproduction steps, if auto-tracking is enabled.
- Annotated screenshots provided by the user.
This context can be valuable, especially when users are engaged and take time to explain what happened. However, Instabug does not support session replay or real-time video capture. The completeness of the diagnostic context depends on when the report is filed, what the user includes, and whether the issue is even noticed.
In scenarios where bugs are subtle, silent, or without a user-triggered report, engineers may be left without the data needed to understand or reproduce the problem.
How do Bugsee and Instabug Compare on Platform Support?
When choosing a bug reporting tool, SDK availability is only the starting point. What matters more is whether the tool delivers consistent features, predictable behavior, and reliable session context capture across every platform your team supports.
Bugsee: Consistent Access Across Native and Hybrid Apps
Bugsee provides official SDKs for a wide range of platforms, including:
- Native SDKs for iOS and Android,
- React Native,
- Flutter,
- Cordova,
- Unity,
- Xamarin, and
- .Net.
What sets Bugsee apart isn’t just coverage; it’s how it maintains a coherent developer experience across these native/hybrid environments. Each SDK is engineered to capture core diagnostic signals (such as session replay, touch tracking, network playloads, and console logs) tailored to the capabilities of each platform.
The documentation clearly outlines which features are supported, limited, or unavailable across iOS, Android, and hybrid frameworks—helping developers plan integrations with confidence.
| 💡Note Curious how Bugsee fits in your stack. The SDK documentation includes platform-specific capability tables— so you can see exactly what’s supported in iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and more. Try it free for 30 days and validate the integration in your own environment. |
Instabug: Robust Native SDKs with Partial Parity in Cross-Platform Use
Instabug (now maintained under Luciq) offers SDKs for native SDKs for iOS and Android apps, along with cross-platform support for:
- React Native,
- Flutter, and
- Unity.
These SDKs are widely used and continue to support user-triggered bug reports, logs, and feedback flows across different environments.
However, the feature set isn’t always identical across platforms. Some capabilities (such as automatic reproduction steps, invocation options, or in-app surveys) may behave differently depending on the SDK or integration layer. In hybrid stacks, additional configuration may be required to align functionality with native implementations.
Luciq’s documentation includes detailed feature matrices that compare SDK capabilities across supported platforms. These tables clearly indicate which features (such as session replay, network logging, or feedback workflows) are available on each platform.
However, some features may behave differently depending on SDK version, platform limitations, or required configuration. Developers working in hybrid stacks should refer to the documentation and validate implementation to ensure expected parity.
How do Pricing and Total Cost Compare?
Bugsee and Instabug differ not only in features but also in their pricing approaches. One offers predictable platform costs. The other charges are based on the number of users who report bugs.
Bugsee: Fixed Pricing, Full Context
Bugsee operates on a subscription-based pricing model. Plans are based on usage tiers, not on team size or monthly active users (MAUs). All of Bugsee’s plans include its core debugging capabilities. Tier differences affect scale, data retention, and support—not what’s captured.
The goal is to reduce the time developers spend reproducing bugs or gathering context manually. By bundling full visibility into every report, Bugsee shifts the cost from time to platform.
Bugsee offers three clearly defined plans that scale with your team’s needs:
- LITE (Free): Includes core debugging features such as video replay, crash reporting, session logs, and in-app bug reporting with up to 5 unique devices per month. Data is retained for 3 days. Ideal for small projects or early evaluation.
- PRO ($99/month): Expands the device limit to 50 unique devices per month and extends data retention to 30 days. Includes priority support for engineering teams under production load.
- CUSTOM (Contact Sales): Designed for larger organizations or regulated teams that need enterprise features such as SSO, custom terms, REST API access, or unlimited data retention.
Every new account is automatically upgraded to the PRO plan for the 30-day free trial, giving teams full access to Bugsee’s advanced feature set during evaluation.
Instabug: Usage-Based Pricing With Tiered Features
Instabug’s pricing is tied to the number of monthly active users (MAUs) and the features accessed. Plans scale based on app usage, team collaboration features, and data retention requirements. According to Luciq’s published documentation, Instabug’s plans include:
- A free trial or limited plan for small-scale usage.
- Paid tiers that unlock advanced workflows, integrations, and analytics.
- Enterprise pricing starting at approximately $1,200/month for large teams or regulated use cases.
While usage-based pricing can be flexible for small apps, it may introduce cost variability at scale, particularly for teams with large install bases or rapidly growing user engagement.
Conclusion
Which tool gets you to the fix faster?
Bugsee and Instabug both help mobile teams surface bugs, but only one gives developers the context they need to resolve them quickly.
If your workflow relies on user-submitted reports, in-app surveys, and customer-facing feedback, Instabug offers a structured approach to collecting and managing product insights. However, when debugging speed, crash reproduction, and engineering efficiency are the top priorities, Bugsee offers more.
By automatically recording sessions, capturing touch events, network activity, and logs, and generating comprehensive reports without user involvement, Bugsee removes the guesswork from mobile debugging. It’s not just a reporting tool; it’s a developer-first visibility layer that reduces triage time and shortens your debug-to-fix loop.
Still comparing options?
Try Bugsee free for 30 days and see what full-context debugging looks like—before your next crash slows you down.