Continuous session recording, reimagined

Most session recording tools force you into a tradeoff:

(1) On-Demand recording

Tools: Screen capture, Loom, Jam
The promise: Record only what matters, when you need it.
The reality: You only capture what you remembered to start recording.

The problem? The most important moments are unexpected. A user encounters a critical bug at 3 PM, but you don't hear about it until the next day. By then, reproducing the exact steps and system behaviour is a manual, time-consuming process. You're left asking the user to "try to reproduce it" while remembering to start a screen recording, hoping lightning strikes twice.

Engineers waste hours attempting to reproduce issues based on vague descriptions. Support teams send lengthy back-and-forth emails trying to extract details. The actual evidence? Already lost.

OR (2) Always-on recording

Tools: Sentry, Fullstory, LogRocket , etc.
The promise: Capture everything so nothing gets missed.
The reality: You capture everything, including the 99.9% of sessions that don't matter.

This is what we usually think of when we hear "continuous" recording. I think a more accurate description would be "always-on" frontend recording (by default) that stops at the browser boundary, leaving you blind to the full-stack context that actually explains what went wrong.

Teams end up drowning in data, burning storage on noise, and wasting hours filtering to find the handful of sessions that matter. Worse, these tools only capture the part of the picture. When you finally find the relevant session, you still need to:

1. Open your APM tool to find the corresponding (sampled?) backend traces
2. Check your logs for related errors
3. Query your database to understand data state
4. Correlate timestamps manually across systems
5. Hope all the pieces line up

Multiplayer takes a different approach

Instead of recording every second of every session forever, we give you options: three recording modes to fit your specific workflow or immediate needs.

No matter the type of technical issue (vague user report, intermittent, hard-to-reproduce, across your stack, etc.) you’ll have the visibility you need to debug, validate, and build with confidence.

On-demand recording

Capture full stack session recordings on demand: manually start and stop a session replay with a browser extension, in-app widget, or SDK.

End-users, support teams and engineers can instantly record and share issues, understand user and system behavior, and collaborate on how to solve them.

Continuous recording

This is Multiplayer's take on the traditional "continuous" recording mode: a middle ground between on-demand and "always-on".

You manually start the recording, and we keep a lightweight rolling buffer while you work, adding no latency to your process. If an issue arises, you can instantly save the last snapshot, no need to start the recording and try to reproduce the issue.

We also auto-save sessions when frontend or backend exceptions and errors occur, so you’ll always have the critical context when something breaks.

The result: less wasted time searching, lower storage overhead, and higher confidence that the sessions you need are always there.

Conditional recording

This is the replay mode most similar how traditional session replay tool record your user session, but with a more control.

You can record session replays in the background for a specific cohort of users, based on pre-defined conditions.

This mode still allows you to silently capture user sessions without any manual steps, allowing you to detect issues even when users don't notice or don't report them. However, it's more lightweight and targeted than the traditional "always-on" recording.

It's not "all or nothing". Flexibility in recording modes matters.

With Multiplayer, you’re not locked into a single recording strategy. On-demand, continuous, and conditional modes work together, so your team can choose the right balance of precision, automation, and coverage.

End-to-end visibility is the baseline. Multiplayer captures the full stack out of the box (frontend interactions, backend traces, logs, request/response content, and headers) so you get the right data.

And with the option to choose (or combine) recording modes, you always have the right data at the right time, without drowning in noise or losing the context you need to fix, validate, and move forward.