Flurry error reporting vs other error reporting services such as Crittercism & Crashlytics etc

Question

We are evaluating various error reporting services for iOS and Android apps. Our app uses webservices to connect to the server.

We currently use Flurry analytics but have not yet used their new error reporting feature.

What is your feedback on Flurry error reporting, if you are using that today?

I am trying to compare it with Crittercism and Crashlytics. So, if anyone out there have experience using Flurry error reporting and Crittercism or Crashlytics, it would be great to hear your feedback.

Thanks.

Lethe

Please see the help. This is off-topic here. – Labyrinth

Thanks everyone for your response. Is there any limit to the number of error logs or the size of the error log that could be stored for Crashlytics? Also, I just tried to sign up for it and it seems that they put you on a wait list. Do you know how long it takes to get an invite to join Crashlytics? Thanks. – Lethe

Marc from Crashlytics here. Just checked - you should have an invite now. There's a 64kb rolling logfile for reporting arbitrary info with your exceptions, but there's no limit to the number of crashes we'll store for you. Go ahead, give us your best shot. ;) – Thyestes

@Thyestes I am also waiting for invite. Could you please send me one too. Thanks – Memphian

Answer 1

While this question is likely more suited for a forum, I'll do my best to answer your question from my experience with these technologies as well as what I've heard from others. First lets look at what these services provide for Crash Reporting, then lets look at what they provide that ties into Crash Reporting.

Flurry provides (at a high level):

• Analytics of event based metrics (this includes optional basic crash reporting)
• server-side symbolication (however uploading symbols is a manual process)

All this is great, but they really don't focus on crash reporting at all or how that ties into other metrics.

Crittercism provides (at a high level):

• real-time insights on reports (system diagnostics, logs, etc)
• smart crash/error grouping
• error monitoring with actionable diagnostic information
• logging non-volatile errors
• server-side symbolication for stack traces
• location correlation with above metrics
• session based metrics for a crash report
• client perspective network performance data (note: this would be great to keep track of your web services and other 3rd party services, such as Flurry, to see how they're performing)
• trends of above metrics and data
• connection between network calls and crash/error reports (look at breadcrumbs)

See the above link for more details on the full package that Crittercism provides. For more details on some of the features, check out this page.

All of these are focused on giving you full visibility on how your app is performing for each of your users.

Crashlytics provides (at a high level):

• smart crash/error grouping
• error monitoring with actionable diagnostic information
• server-side symbolication for stack traces
• logging non-volatile errors
• real-time insights on reports (system diagnostics, etc)

Flurry can be paired with more robust solutions for Crash Reporting and in my experience most end up taking this route.

Crittercism provides a lot more than just Crash Reporting that ties back to optimizing the performance of your applications with actionable data. They also hook into Mobile-ready support systems (such as UserVoice and HelpShift) for better customer communication, and several task management systems for engineering (JIRA, Github, Pivotal). Server-side symbolication, APIs to pull data, simple integration with build tools (such as Jenkins) provide a much more mature solution.

Crashlytics provides an easy integration for the average developer. I've heard complaints from developers with more defined build processes (such as something that uses Jenkins) that their app integration for uploading symbols for symbolication gets troublesome.

They also provide integrations with JIRA and Github. Not sure at what level.

Some love the UI for Crashlytics, whereas others have stated that it gets in the way.

Hope this helps.

Vanlandingham

We recently switched our Android app over to Crashlytics and have never been happier. The plugin requirement is a little strange, but is easily bypassed. Their support has been very receptive to feedback. We love the smart crash/error grouping and the ability to log caught exceptions. We won't be switching to another service anytime soon. – Peculate

About Crashlytics auto-build integration. I've managed to create an auto-integration of Crashlytics into my own build system. It works awesome. The only thing about Crashlytics I can complain about, is multiple projects events configuration. Having to disable notifications for every new project is a pain. Everything else is a pleasure. My vote definitely goes to Crashlytics. – Twophase

If you're using Gradle or Ant the Crashlytics plugin works great, otherwise you might need to roll something custom. – Peculate

Just chiming in also. I've never used Flurry before but I've been using Crashlytics since December of last year and it's a really great tool. It's by far the best crash reporting tool I've come across. – Windermere

+1 for Crashlytics. We're quite happy with it in our iOS apps. Pretty happy with the web interface but the Mac app might be a little confusing to some. I've not had the need to try Flurry or Crittercism. – Unerring

Answer 2

I have been using Crashlytics pretty much since it first launched for Android and iOS. It's a pretty impressive system with some massive pros:

• Extremely lightweight library
• Compatible with major development environments
• Real time insights
• Crash grouping
• Individual crash breakdown
  • Tagged with user information
  • Custom keys/logging
• Email alerts
  • Impact level changes
  • New bugs
  • Daily summary reports
• User management for sharing access
• It's free

There is also a split between crashes and non-fatals which means you can report handled exceptions back without having the app crash. For example, in our Logging class we have this method which gets called when an exception could happen, but shouldn't. This means that we have a breakdown of how often this happens and we can work towards resolving it:

// Android
public static void log_wtf(Throwable throwable)
{
    Log.wtf("Log", throwable.toString());

    // Also log this exception to Crashlytics
    Crashlytics.logException(throwable);
}

I particularly like the crash breakdown which lets you see each individual crash report from a group of reports. You can ask the users to use their name, or do what we do and sign it with their login credentials for our service (see the user info on the right):

This is invaluable information for us which allows us to easily and quickly reproduce the error.

You also get a version breakdown which you can disable at a later point. For example, if we have just finished a test of alpha version 0.1 (1), you can turn logging off for that version and launch version 0.2 (2). If someone forgets to update their application you will not be notified of anything from that point. Obiviously this isn't good when your app is in production, but useful for testing phases.

While I haven't tested it they have integrations for other services including your own web hooks if you wish to develop something to support it. It's in my plans to do this to automatically create trac bug tickets, however I haven't got around to it yet!

Oh, and finally, let's not forget the sweet animations crashlytics employs throughout it's software.

Northerly

Why the downvote eh? As far as I know this information is correct. Please let me know what bothers you and I'll modify if necessary. – Northerly

Answer 3

I would recommend going with Crashlytics. They have the smoothest onboarding process of any error reporting software. It's very easy to setup and incredibly intuitive to use. The reporting is immediate and spot on. They also have the best console UI of the bunch. I've used them now at Evernote, HomeAway, and my own apps and I've never ran into any problems. They also have a great support team that responds very very quickly, normally within minutes to inquiries.

I've also used Flurry in the past, for event tracking, with mixed results. Their numbers always seemed to be a bit off. You also have to go through and add start/stop events in every activity which can be a pain.

Chamberlain

Answer 4

I exclusively use Crashlytics for my day to day app crash reporting. The UI at times can be a little flashy and navigating the site is sometimes a hassle but overall they provide a reliable and well built product. It's certainly useful when distributing app betas and as an intermediate to advanced iOS developer, I've never had any problems integrating their SDK.

Pros:

• immediate crash reports
• real time insights
• interaction time is minimal i.e. the time spent once a crash email is received to the bug being fixed is small. On average I spend 30 seconds - 5 minutes on every crash report simply because Crashlytics makes it very easy to find my bugs.
• great customer support
• installation is a breeze
• lightweight

Cons:

• UX on the website isn't as refined as it could be
• navigating the website takes some getting used to.

I work for Grid, an iOS app startup based in San Fran and we use Crittercism there but all in all, Crashlytics is the one I end up using. It comes down to ease of use and they've got that nailed down.

EDIT:

Crashlytics was also recently bought by Twitter so there's plenty of talent and infrastructure there.

Delciedelcina

Answer 5

As said before Flurry don't focus on crash reporting at all or how that ties into other metrics

Before Crashlytics android's release I was using Flurry but had some problems with documentation and support (you can see here) and they didn't corresponded as I wished.

In my case, crash and errors are a very critical point cause, so Crashlytics worked like a charm.

• A good documentation
• Great support
• Easy Configuration
• Real time insights (Flurry hasn't)

In short, I have not experienced nothing better than Crashlytics yet (Talking about Error Reporting)

Wolsky

Answer 6

I've not used Crittercism or Flurry for crash/error reporting, but have been using Crashlytics since its inception. I'm not convinced there's a better crash reporting solution at this point.

Reasons why I think Crashlytics is great:

• Super lightweight
• Super easy integration
• Awesome stack unwinding
• Ability to provide custom logging
• Web UI response has greatly improved
• Provides symoblicated stack trace
• Smart culling of crashes on web UI
• Easy crash searching on web UI
• Basic stats via web UI

At the end of the day, it comes down to what tool works best for you.

Bedraggle

Answer 7

I use Crashlytics since a year now (edited July 2014), and the system is really awesome.

Realtime crash report works very well, with their reports we are able to fix them really quickly, it's a huge & priceless feature ! CL solution is available on multiple platforms, it's really easy to plug it in XCode 5, Eclipse or IJIdea with less than 5 lines of code.

You can create multiple enterprise, to separate your projects, just with a couple of clicks

I have to mention that support team is fabulous, I've exchange dozen of mail about it and their answer always solve my little probs.

It's completely free, own now by Twitter, and very very light.

I gave a conference about Craslytics solution a month ago, slides are available on my speakerDeck profile here.

Cuzco

Please complete your sentences and clarify your answer a bit. Thanks! :) – Vanlandingham