Collect what matters: how Multiplayer stays lightweight without losing context
Full stack session recordings capture everything that matters without impacting your application performance or adding unnecessary overhead.
Traditional continuous recording tools and APM platforms take the same brute-force approach: capture everything. Every session, every log, every metric, whether you need it or not. That flood of data creates its own problems: high storage costs, constant filtering and sampling, and hours wasted sifting for the signal inside the noise.
Multiplayer was built differently. We capture only what matters, and we do it in a way that stays lightweight and unobtrusive for users. But when you need the full picture—frontend to backend—you have everything, correlated in one timeline.
How Multiplayer stays lean
Modern teams are rightly sensitive to anything that could slow users down. Multiplayer is designed to capture useful context without adding noticeable latency or chewing through bandwidth/CPU. Here’s how we stay lean:
- Opt-in by default → If you’re not recording, there’s zero runtime overhead. Browser extension off? Widget not initialized? No impact.
- Event-based, not video-based → We capture structured events (DOM mutations, clicks, network metadata), not pixel streams. The result: smaller payloads, faster uploads, less CPU.
- Session-first, not “capture everything” → Multiplayer correlates full-stack data around the sessions you care about, instead of hoovering telemetry from your entire estate.
- Asynchronous, batched I/O → Uploads happen in the background, off the critical path. No blocking calls that slow users down.
- Backend-agnostic via OpenTelemetry → You control what’s instrumented and how much you emit, just like structured logging.
Recording modes: precision vs coverage
Most tools force a tradeoff: either record every session (expensive and noisy) or rely on on-demand captures (easy to miss unexpected issues).
Multiplayer gives you three modes that can be combined depending on your workflow:
- On-Demand: Nothing runs until you explicitly start recording via extension, widget, or SDK. Perfect when you want zero background footprint.
- Continuous: A lightweight rolling buffer (a few minutes of events) that auto-saves on errors/exceptions or when you choose to save. You catch elusive bugs without recording everything.
- Remote (coming soon): Capture specific users, tenants, or environments without asking them to hit “record.”
This versatile approach to choosing and combining multiple recording modes, gives you coverage without drowning in noise or adding unnecessary performance overhead.
Installation options: full control
Different teams have different needs. Multiplayer supports four install paths so you can control overhead and scope:
- Chrome browser extension
- JavaScript client library (with optional in-app widget)
- Language-specific libraries for CLI apps
- Mobile SDK (in beta)
We also offer self-hosted deployments - please contact our team for more information.
Why our approach matters
Multiplayer gives you the control to record what you need, when you need it, without drowning in data or slowing down your users.
Whether you’re debugging, testing, supporting customers, or feeding copilots accurate context, you get the same promise: all the context, none of the noise.
Getting started
👀 If this is the first time you’ve heard about us, you may want to see full stack session recordings in action. You can do that in our free sandbox: sandbox.multiplayer.app
🚀 If you’re ready to trial Multiplayer, the fastest way to get started is to install our browser extension from the Chrome Web Store (Chrome, Firefox, and Edge supported).