You caught the error. Now what?
Sentry is built to help teams monitor and track errors across web, mobile, and backend services. It sends alerts, groups issues, and displays stack traces when an error occurs. This is useful—but not always enough.
On mobile, where crashes can be silent, subtle, device-specific, or unreproducible, stack traces alone often fall short. Sentry shows where the failure occurred. Bugsee helps you understand why — with a visual timeline of the app’s behavior, user interactions, and network activity that led up to the crash.
If your mobile team is evaluating tools that extend beyond crash detection to root cause diagnostics, this guide is for you.
In this article, we’ll compare Bugsee and Sentry across mobile SDK capabilities, developer experience, platform coverage, and pricing — so you can choose the tool that fits the way your team actually debugs.
| 💡Editor’s Note This article compares Bugsee to Sentry’s mobile SDKs, not the full-stack Sentry platform. The focus is on mobile-specific workflows, across iOS, Android, and hybrid frameworks, not web or backend observability. |
What’s the Real Difference Between Bugsee and Sentry?
At first glance, both Sentry and Bugsee seem to solve the same problem: identifying and resolving mobile app crashes. But under the hood, they take fundamentally different approaches — especially when it comes to visibility, developer effort, and debugging speed.
Sentry is primarily a monitoring tool. Its mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter capture crash reports, stack traces, and breadcrumbs (user-defined log markers). When an error occurs, Sentry logs it, groups it, and alerts the team. Sentry allows developers to review traces and add breadcrumbs, but it doesn’t capture a visual timeline of what led up to the issue.
Bugsee is a debugging tool, not just an alert system. Its mobile SDK continuously captures the app session in the background, including video, user interactions, logs, and network traffic, and generates a complete report when an issue occurs. This gives developers immediate access to what happened before the crash, eliminating the need for manual instrumentation or guesswork.
| Capability | Bugsee | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| Crash reporting with stack traces | Yes | Yes |
| Session replay (screen recording) | Yes | No |
| Touch and gesture tracking | Yes | No |
| Network traffic capture (headers & payloads) | Yes | Partial (manual SDK logging required) |
| Breadcrumbs (user or app events) | Yes (auto-captured) | Yes (manual) |
| UI flow reconstruction (via video replay) | Yes | No |
| AI-powered insights | Yes (via MCP & contextual analysis) | Yes (AI issue grouping & triage) |
| MCP integration | Yes | Yes (via Performance Profiling tools) |
For many mobile teams, the key difference is time-to-resolution. Sentry tells you where the app crashed. Bugsee tells you how and why. This difference can reduce debug cycles from days to minutes, especially for edge-case issues, user-specific crashes, or bugs that cannot be easily reproduced.
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How Do Sentry and Bugsee Handle Diagnostic Context?
The value of a crash report isn’t just in knowing that something broke; it’s in understanding why. Especially on mobile, context is critical. Developers need insight into what led to the failure, not just a report after the fact.
Sentry: Stack Traces Plus Optional Manual Context
Sentry’s mobile SDKs log crash reports and stack traces, including error type, call stack, and device-level metadata. Developers can enhance this with manual context using APIs like Sentry.addBreadcrumb() or Sentry.setUser() to track actions or user sessions.
Breadcrumbs allow teams to log relevant steps manually (e.g., navigation events or button taps), but Sentry doesn’t include native screen recording or automatic interaction capture. If a crash is triggered by complex user behavior or subtle UI states, reproducing it may require additional logging, QA input, or user feedback.
While the dashboard offers structured error grouping, timelines, and metadata fields, its visibility is mostly retrospective; you analyze what was captured, rather than observing how the app behaved in real time.
Bugsee: Automatic Session Capture with Visual Replay
Bugsee takes a proactive approach by automatically recording a timeline of the user’s session. Without any manual input, the SDK logs:
- Screen video showing UI activity and user flow.
- Touch and gesture tracking.
- Network request and response payloads (including headers and bodies, where platform permissions allow).
- Console and device logs.
- UI hierarchy inspection and app state.
When a crash or bug is triggered, this timeline is saved and sent as a unified report. Developers can view exactly what the user saw, interacted with, and how the app responded, before, during, and after the issue.
This continuous capture eliminates the need to manually reproduce bugs. It’s particularly helpful for investigating race conditions, non-fatal errors, or bugs that depend on timing, state, or user behavior that’s difficult to simulate.
How Do Bugsee and Sentry Compare on Mobile SDK Support?
Choosing a mobile crash reporting tool often comes down to one practical question:
“Can we use it across every platform we develop for?”
SDK availability is just the starting point. Teams need reliable implementation, consistent context capture, and clear documentation across both native and hybrid environments.
Platform Coverage and Official SDK Support
The following table outlines official SDK support for each platform:
| Platform | Bugsee | Sentry |
|---|---|---|
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| React Native | Yes | Yes |
| Flutter | Yes | Yes |
| Unity | Yes | Community-maintained only |
| Xamarin | Yes | Community-maintained only |
| Cordova | Yes | Not supported |
| .NET | Yes | Not supported |
| 💡Note Sentry’s support for Unity and Xamarin relies on community-driven SDKS (Sentry-Unity and Sentry-DotNet). These may lack full feature parity and often lag behind official updates. Bugsee, in contrast, provides officially maintained SDKs with clear documentation on feature support and known platform limitations. |
Documentation and Integration Confidence
Bugsee’s SDKs are designed for parity across platforms. Its SDK documentation includes platform-specific capability tables, simulator and device support notes, and known edge case handling (such as Instant App constraints or background state behavior). This transparency helps developers plan, develop, and deploy apps with fewer surprises.
Sentry also offers clear documentation for its officially supported mobile SDKs. However, cross-platform implementations may require additional configuration to achieve consistent results, particularly when working with hybrid frameworks or community SDKs.
Curious about platform fit?
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How do Debugging Workflows Compare?
Bugsee and Sentry take very different approaches to debugging workflows, especially in how crashes are reported, context is captured, and fixes are prioritized. For mobile teams, these differences directly impact how quickly issues are resolved, the resources required to investigate them, and the frequency of bugs going unnoticed.
Sentry: Stack Traces First, Context Later
Sentry’s mobile SDKs focus on capturing and surfacing stack traces. When a crash occurs, the SDK logs the exception, the call stack, and relevant breadcrumbs, such as the navigation events or user actions (if these are configured). Developers can use the Sentry dashboard to explore crash details, trace errors through stack traces, and supplement reports with custom tags, environment metadata, or additional context.
This model is useful for surfacing patterns across user sessions, spotting high-frequency issues, and aligning errors with releases. But it often requires additional instrumentation, retroactive debugging, and sometimes guesswork—especially for one-off crashes or complex interaction bugs.
Sentry integrates well with issue tracking tools (like Jira, GitHub Issues, and ClickUp) and offers release health metrics, but it assumes you’ll do the heavy lifting when it comes to reproducing and resolving mobile-specific crashes.
Bugsee: Context-First, Guesswork Free
Bugsee flips the workflow. It captures everything developers need in a single report (automatically and in real time). When something goes wrong, developers get a complete view of the session: what the user saw, where they tapped, how the UI behaved, and what the app was doing internally.
There were no breadcrumbs to configure, no retroactive log insertion, and no need to wait for the issue to recur.
For mobile teams working with hard-to-reproduce bugs, flaky devices, or complex navigation flows, this is often the difference between “let’s investigate” and “let’s fix it now.”
What About Pricing and Cost Predictability?
Pricing models can shape more than just your budget—they influence how your team logs, reports, and prioritizes issues. While both Sentry and Bugsee offer free trials and scalable plans, their billing philosophies differ significantly.
Bugsee: Predictable Pricing with Full Debugging Access
Bugsee operates on a subscription-based pricing model with transparent, usage-based tiers. All plans include full access to Bugsee’s debugging capabilities. The differences between plans lie in usage limits (number of devices), data retention, and support (not in the available features themselves).
- LITE (Free): Up to 5 unique devices/month, 3-day data retention, all core features.
- PRO ($99/month): 50 devices/month, 30-day data retention, priority support, everything in LITE.
- CUSTOM: For larger teams needing SSO, extended retention, or enterprise features.
Every new Bugsee account starts with a 30-day free trial of the PRO plan (with no credit card required). This gives teams full access to all features for evaluation and onboarding.
| 💡Note Bugsee does not charge based on monthly active users (MAUs) or event counts—making costs easier to predict, especially for teams with growing usage or variable testing workloads. |
Sentry: Usage-Based Pricing That Scales with Volume
Sentry’s mobile pricing is event-based. Teams are billed according to the number of error events, transactions, and sessions their apps generate. While this model offers flexibility for small apps or low-volume projects, costs can rapidly increase as your user base grows or crashes spike.
Plans start with a free developer tier, which includes limited volume and access to core features. Paid plans unlock advanced workflows, team collaboration features, and higher retention limits.
Pricing scales with event volume, not team size. Your quote includes:
- Crash and error events.
- Performance traces and transactions.
- Session tracking.
Sentry does not bill separately for individual platforms (such as iOS vs Android). Events from all platforms share the same quota, unless teams configure them separately.
Conclusion
Both Sentry and Bugsee help mobile teams respond to app crashes—but they take fundamentally different approaches to visibility, context, and resolution speed.
If your debugging process begins with alerts and stack traces, and you are comfortable instrumenting custom breadcrumbs or manually investigating crash causes, Sentry is a reliable monitoring tool.
However, if your team requires complete visibility (both visually and technically) into what actually caused a crash, without relying on guesswork or retroactive logging, Bugsee automatically delivers this clarity out of the box. It’s not just a crash reporter—it’s a developer-first debugging assistant that helps you fix issues faster.
Still comparing tools?
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FAQs
1. Can I use Bugsee and Sentry together in the same mobile app?
No. Most mobile crash reporting tools (including Bugsee, Sentry, and Crashlytics) hook into the same low-level crash handlers. Running multiple crash reporters in the same app can lead to conflicts, missed reports, or unpredictable behavior. To ensure stability and accurate crash capture, it’s best to only use one crash handling SDK per app build.
2. Does Bugsee work offline or during flaky network conditions?
Yes. Bugsee caches captured session data locally on the device. If a network connection isn’t available when the bug occurs, the report is automatically uploaded once the connection is restored. This ensures you don’t miss crashes from users with poor connectivity.
3. Why is Bugsee’s pricing more predictable for mobile teams?
Bugsee charges based on the number of unique devices, not the number of crashes, sessions, or events. This means your cost remains stable even if a crash volume spikes during a buggy release or a testing surge. Unlike event-based models (like Sentry’s model), which can become unpredictable at scale, Bugsee’s fixed-tier pricing helps teams budget confidently—without limiting visibility during critical periods.