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 and ANR-related 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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Diagnose and fix issues faster with better 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. These crash types include:

• Out Of Memory (OOM) errors on mobile: OOM errors happen on avg ~5x more than normal crashes
• iOS-specific crashes such as C++ Exceptions and SwiftUI Exception
• Network Crashes: Crashes due to Network errors (4xx, 5xx, and slow requests)

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. The 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 replay the interactions a user makes with your app up until a crash is reported grouped by each screen name.

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

As mentioned above, crashes and errors aren’t the only issues that can reflect badly on your app. Monitoring your app’s performance across versions and environments is key to improving the quality of your app. Instabug’s built-for-mobile APM tool helps you monitor network performance, UI hangs, app launch times, screen loading, user terminations, as well as custom app traces.

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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 app 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.