Alternatives to UsabilityHub

One of the challenges we've had to deal with as our product surface area has grown, is identifying and reproducing bugs. We use Sentry for exception monitoring, however, it's usually difficult to try to reproduce bugs. I first heard about FullStory from our friends over at Flexport (check out the Stack Story and you'll hear them mention it: https://stackshare.io/posts/how-flexport-builds-software-to-move-over-1-billion-dollars-in-merchandise). FullStory let's you record user sessions, and play them back to help you identify bugs and UX issues. You're even able to view the console errors live as they happen during the sessions!

We were pretty blown away at how comprehensive the product was at first, and it seems to be getting better every time I use it. Only complaint is that it's super expensive once you're in the hundreds of thousands of sessions so we had to stop trying to record logged out sessions, we only use it for auth'd sessions. We also started out using it via Segment but once we needed to watch out for the number of sessions we were recording we realized that it was impossible to restrict FullStory recordings on a per-page basis without ripping it out of Segment, so we ended up just using their JS snippet and putting that in the Rails views that we wanted to monitor closely.

The ability to share specific portions of sessions, speed them up, skip inactivity, and all sorts of other little features all add up to a really solid product that helps both our PMs and engineers improve our own product much quicker. I officially requested a Sentry + FullStory integration a while back https://twitter.com/yonasbe/status/871987738777616384, still waiting on this! #UserFeedbackAsAService #reproducing-bugs #sessionrecording #bug-squashing

We chose Webflow to build up websites faster and to make possible for particular employees to fix some misspellings or add an easy element to the page on their own - it is like Adobe Photoshop. To work with the incoming traffic we use our own product, that I can't pin here. It helps to make nurture visitors from the first session into the signing up and further activation into the product. In addition to @Carrrot we use Google Analytics to traffic source awareness, to monitor customers inside the product FullStory helps is a lot with its fury clicking and abandoned links. Activation and retention are done by our own product through the pop-ups, live chat, and emails that all based on customer behavior.

For my portfolio websites and my personal OpenSource projects I had started exclusively using React and JavaScript so I needed a way to track any errors that we're happening for my users that I didn't uncover during my personal UAT.

I had narrowed it down to two tools LogRocket and Sentry (I also tried Bugsnag but it did not make the final two). Before I get into this I want to say that both of these tools are amazing and whichever you choose will suit your needs well.

I firstly decided to go with LogRocket the fact that they had a recorded screen capture of what the user was doing when the bug happened was amazing... I could go back and rewatch what the user did to replicate that error, this was fantastic. It was also very easy to setup and get going. They had options for React and Redux.js so you can track all your Redux.js actions. I had a fairly large Redux.js store, this was ended up being a issue, it killed the processing power on my machine, Chrome ended up using 2-4gb of ram, so I quickly disabled the Redux.js option.

After using LogRocket for a month or so I decided to switch to Sentry. I noticed that Sentry was openSorce and everyone was talking about Sentry so I thought I may as well give it a test drive. Setting it up was so easy, I had everything up and running within seconds. It also gives you the option to wrap an errorBoundry in React so get more specific errors. The simplicity of Sentry was a breath of fresh air, it allowed me find the bug that was shown to the user and fix that very simply. The UI for Sentry is beautiful and just really clean to look at, and their emails are also just perfect.

I have decided to stick with Sentry for the long run, I tested pretty much all the JS error loggers and I find Sentry the best.