Some time ago, we stumbled with this small story about an app that got some unforeseen problems:

“There was nothing different in that Friday. The application was running fine, apparently, so the company called it a day and left for the weekend. Little the developers knew that, as Monday came upon them, more than 4000 crashes happened during those two days!”

This “small” accident was just for illustrating why crash and event trackers are mandatory (true story, actually).

But what is an event and/or a crash tracker?

In short, an event is any interaction that a user does in your app/website. Tracking these little clicks, scrubs and scrolls will be valuable for understanding your customers and deliver the best experience to them.

A crash is an error in your app’s code that makes it shut down, without warning. A crash tracker is a tool made for finding where, when and who was affected by crashes.

For helping those in need, we came up with a list of good trackers to assist your development, as they did to us. Besides, there are some bonus services for other kinds of monitoring, such as server uptime. We know, it’s hard to believe, but developers aren’t perfect. They eventually make mistakes and some of them are pretty well-hidden between dozens of code lines. But with the right set of tools for your project (and your budget), you’ll be able to get rid of those crashes in no time.*

 

*The prices of those services are described here as month-to-month. Check the plans individually for yearly rates (which are cheaper in the long run).

Event + Crash Trackers

1.  Parse

Alexa Rank – World (US): 5,540 (6,758)

An event & crash tracking service from Facebook and it’s the little darling of mobile dev community. Parse has a pretty noticeable growth potential: the learning curve is simple and the development dashboard is easy to use. Also, you don’t have a limit of data points, which equals into more possibilities of tracking custom data (and you can also get more confused processing them). It’s true that it makes more sense using the whole stack of Parse’s products, but if your needs are simple, use Analytics only and you”ll be fine.

Pricing: FREE (Analytics only)

Integration: Mobile + Web

2. Mixpanel

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 9,160 (11,829)

Mixpanel is more detailed than Parse, as it’s been made just for event analysis. You have to configure your app events and its properties, seeing them separately or as a series (funneling). Another great feature is comparing data from web and mobile in a seamless manner. The bad thing is the limited data points that you can spend in the free version, but you can add more with their badge (about 175,000 + the initial 25,000) in your website.

Pricing: FREE plus 5 tiers of prices ($150 to $2000+)

Integration: Mobile + Web

3. Flurry

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 10,872 (21,238)

Yahoo recently bought Flurry to tackle the mobile dev market, delivering a new suite within the tool. It’s basically the same type of hardcore analytics from Mixpanel, but with a crash tracker – which isn’t the best, by the way: the crash/error is hard to identify in its stack trace and sometimes the crashes never arrive. Even so, you can create custom dashboards for events you want to track and it’s pretty complete, for a free tool.

Pricing: FREE

Integration: Mobile

4. Countly

Alexa Rank – World (US): 281,710 (182,111)

Countly is a fine analytics option for your mobile app, with a extensible framework that enables the writing of your own custom SDK. But it has a way too limited free option – just 10 sessions per month.

Edit: Countly has reached us in Twitter to warn us: it has 10,000 free sessions (we thought it was weird to have just 10 anyway). Thanks for the heads-up, Countly, and keep reading our blog!

Pricing: FREE plus 3 tiers of prices ($125 to $250+)

Integration: Mobile

5. MINT Splunk

Alexa Rank – World (US): 16,379 (6,820)

MINT stands for Mobile Intelligence, so you can guess what it’s about. This Splunk’s product suite allows devs to monitor HTTP requests, get access to crash reports, track events and transactions as well.

Pricing: FREE or Paid (needs applying for quote)

Integration: Mobile

6. Crittercism

Alexa Rank – World (US): 81,302 (66,927)

Crittercism is an event + crash tracker with the same functionalities from its competitors. Fast, easy and with a great human support behind it, the service captures most of the crash scenarios but it’s not perfect: it can’t detect moments such as out of memory, stack overflow and app not responding exceptions. It also has introduced support for Apple Watch.

Pricing: FREE and $300+

Integration: Mobile

7. Rollbar

Alexa Rank – World (US): 69,231 (43,147)

It not only tracks the error, but it also gets the user who experienced the crash, making solution and customer feedback incredibly fast. The prices are also very accessible, for what the service offer. And Rollbar made a comparison, telling why they’re better than its competitor, Airbrake.io.

Pricing: FREE plus 4 tiers of prices ($29 to $249+)

Integration: Web + Mobile

8.  HockeyApp

Alexa Rank – World (US): 25,705 (17,658)

Microsoft didn’t buy HockeyApp by chance. It’s a great service that rivals even against TestFlight – now part of iTunes Connect. You can analyse data, track errors and build beta versions of your application with HockeyApp.

Pricing: FREE Trial plus 8 tiers of prices ($10 to $30 – Personal/$30 to $500 – Business)

Integration: Mobile

9.  Applause SDK

Alexa Rank – World (US): 80,852 (42,004)

Applause provides a testing and development service through their SDK. The automated crash report is awesome and the beta testing is very easy to perform with it.

Pricing: FREE Trial and paid (depends of the project)

Integration: Mobile

10. Keen.io

Alexa Rank – World (US): 51,063 (50,485)

Keen.io is an event tracker that enables the developer to collect and store Big Data from your app – daily interactions to understand your user and your product. The platform is really flexible in its configuration and the prices are related to the number of events tracked.

Pricing: FREE plus 7 tiers of prices ($20 to $2000+)

Integration: Web + Mobile

11.  New Relic

Alexa Rank – World (US): 4,348 (5,452)

New Relic has an entire family of softwares on application performance management. From analytics insights, A/B testing to crash monitoring, they got it all covered. The prices are salty, though, since the products are all charged separately.

Pricing: FREE (Lite), $999/per app (New Relic Mobile), $250 (New Relic Insights)

Integration: Mobile + Web (depending of the product)

12.  Kissmetrics

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 6,174 (8,881)

Kissmetrics is very similar to Mixpanel, with the addition of an engaging platform, for creating landing pages and monitoring user conversion. You have the choice of buying only the engage product, instead of both services.

Pricing: FREE Trial plus 4 tiers of prices ($200 to $2000+); $150 for only the Engage product.

Integration: Mobile + Web

Crash Trackers only

13.  Crashlytics

Alexa Rank – World (US): 23,047 (41,284)

Crashlytics offers a great deal of session-specific and detailed logs about the crashes, not just a stack trace and an interaction trail. That makes easier to understand not only where the crash happened, but how did the user get in there. It’s very visual and intuitive too. We personally love it.

Pricing: FREE

Integration: Mobile + Web

14.  Sentry

Alexa Rank – World (US): 56,319 (44,940)

Sentry is not just a great crash tracker but it’s also open source. They’re used by many great companies such as Disqus, Pinterest, IFTTT and Hubspot (and we’re using it as well).

Pricing: FREE plus 5 tiers of prices ($9 to $249+)

Integration: Mobile + Web

15.  Instabug

Alexa Rank – World (US): 236,891 (549,839)

Instabug automatically creates a ticket for a crash or other bugs with a shake gesture within the application. You can customize it changing it to a button or a swipe if you like, so it’s really more straightforward than its competitors.

Pricing: FREE plus 4 tiers of prices ($29 to $149+)

Integration: Mobile

16.  Raygun

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 122,579 (103,648)

Mindscape’s Raygun is one of the good options for crash tracking. It supports lots of programming languages, such as Java, Python, Go, .NET and more. The manual Java setup can be a pain, but it’ll worth the while.

Pricing: FREE Trial plus 3 tiers of prices ($49 to $499)

Integration: Mobile + Web

17.  Airbrake

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 75,952 (41,139)

Airbrake is a tool for crash tracking with a rock-solid performance and over 40,000 companies that use it. They work with over 18 languages, including Ruby, PHP, Python and Node.js.

Pricing: FREE plus 4 tiers of prices ($39 to $199+)

Integration: Mobile + Web

18.  Bugsnag

Alexa Rank – World (US): 50,839 (43,023)

With Bugsnag, once a crash is detected, a notification is sent for the site owners about it, with data about the time of the crash and how many users were affected by it. They also have a nice, Slack-style collaboration interface.

Pricing: FREE plus 4 tiers of prices ($29 to $249+)

Integration: Mobile + Web

19.  Honeybadger

Alexa Rank – World (US): 134,493 (43,046)

This tool is focused on Ruby/Rails, which is good for those developers in particular: the backtraces in Honeybadger filter out lines outside your app and strip the Rails root out of the file paths.

Pricing: FREE plus 4 tiers of prices ($49 to $249+)

Integration: Web

20.  Track:js

 

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 237,981 (238,876)

Track:js aims at tracking crashes on JavaScript, different from other solutions better tailored for performance tracking – like Google Analytics, for instance. Track:js offers stack tracing, error grouping and user action reports.

Pricing: FREE (for open-source) plus 3 tiers of prices ($29 to $249)

Integration: Web

Other Monitoring Services

21.  Pingdom

 

 

Alexa Rank – World (US): 2,086 (8,131)

With Pingdom, you’ll know when your website is offline or if your users are experiencing slow-downs. If you pay for it, of course. They apparently used to have a free account somewhere, but all that we could find was the 30-day trial.

Pricing: FREE Trial plus 4 tiers of prices ($14,95 to $495)

Integration: Web

22.  Uptime Robot

Alexa Rank – World (US): 16,863 (37,968)

This tool is also used for monitoring your website’s uptime. This quick alert service can warn you about server or plugin issues that might occur. The free plan is only with a 5-minute interval and 50 monitors.

Pricing: FREE or paid (up to $746 w/ 20,000 monitors)

Extra:  Segment

Alexa Rank – World (US): 29,593 (21,380)

This is a very useful service for any application you might develop. It integrates your data with over a hundred tools with a few clicks. Analytics, user testing, developing tools, you name it.

Pricing: FREE plus 3 tiers of prices ($39 to $445+)

Integration: Mobile + Web

 

Whew, that was a long reading! We’re already using some of these services for our applications, but in the end, it all comes to understand the threshold for each project and what tools do you require for the end-product, during its development or after shipping it to production. We’re building something to integrate the best functionalities of those tools, as you’ll see very soon, so stay tuned in our blog for more info about the next great crash tracker for mobile!