Bugsnag (owned by SmartBear) is an application stability monitoring tool. Its job is simple and important: catch errors and crashes in production before users notice them, and give developers enough context to fix things fast.
Setup in 15 minutes
Getting started really is simple. You install the SDK for your platform — iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, JavaScript, Node.js, Ruby, Python, Go and a dozen more stacks are supported. Add an API key, rebuild, and errors start flowing into the dashboard.
Mobile crash handling deserves special mention. Bugsnag shows not only the stack trace but also the OS version, device model, memory and battery state, and the steps that led to the error (breadcrumbs). This turns “it crashes for me” into a concrete reproduction guide.
Key features
- Stability Score — a release “health” metric from 0 to 100;
- Release tracking — comparing stability across versions;
- Feature flags and experiments — integration with flag platforms;
- Alerting — to Slack, email, PagerDuty;
- Sessions — replay of the user path leading to an error.
Pricing
The free plan covers basic error monitoring (up to 5,000 events/month on Lite). Paid tiers start at roughly $29/month and grow with the number of tracked errors and sessions. That’s plenty for a small team.
What’s missing
Bugsnag is strong specifically in error monitoring, but it is not a full APM: there are no end-to-end performance traces on the level of New Relic or Datadog. If you need both error monitoring and latency measurement across services, you’ll need a second tool.
Partner program
Bugsnag/SmartBear has no public affiliate program — the company works with enterprise partners and integrators. For content projects, monetization through direct referral commissions is unavailable, but error-monitoring reviews collect good organic traffic.
Verdict
Bugsnag is one of the best specialized error monitoring tools, especially for mobile teams. If your main pain is crashes in production and confusing bug reports, it will cover that entirely.