Multiplayer vs Fullstory: which session replay tool actually gives you the full story?

You've got a critical bug report. A user can't complete checkout. You open Fullstory, watch the session replay, see them click the checkout button... and then what? The frontend looks fine, but something's clearly broken. Now you're digging through logs, checking APM dashboards, correlating timestamps, and trying to piece together what happened on the backend.

This is the gap between user analytics tools and debugging tools.

TL;DR

Choose Multiplayer if: You need to resolve technical issues fast, with full frontend + backend context in one place, and you need to improve your debugging workflows across multiple teams (e.g. Support → Engineering).

Choose Fullstory if: You primarily need behavioral analytics for product and UX decisions.

Key difference: Fullstory shows you how users behave on your website, aggregating performance metrics. Multiplayer shows how your system behaves, from user actions to backend traces, and how to fix a bug (or have your AI coding assistant do it for you).

Quick comparison

More resources:

• Multiplayer vs Fullstory deep dive
• Multiplayer vs other tools

The real difference: frontend vs full stack

Fullstory (or half the story?)

Fullstory captures what happens in the browser: clicks, page loads, DOM events. For understanding user flows and UX patterns, this is valuable. But when you're debugging a technical issue, you're missing the critical half: what happened in your backend.

When an API call fails, a database query times out, or a microservice throws an error, you're forced to:

• Switch to your observability platform
• Manually correlate timestamps
• Hunt through logs to find the right data
• Piece together context across multiple tools

Multiplayer: the actual full story

Multiplayer captures full stack session recordings by default. Every frontend action is automatically correlated with backend traces, logs, and request/response data, in a single, unified timeline.

When that checkout button fails, you see:

• The user's click
• The API request
• The backend trace showing which service failed
• The exact error message and stack trace
• Request/response content and headers from internal service calls

No hunting. No manual correlation. No tool switching. Everything you need to fix the bug is in one place.

Real scenario: A user reports "payment failed" but your logs show a 200 response. With Multiplayer, you see: the button click, the API call to your payment service, the upstream call to Stripe, the 429 rate limit error from Stripe, and the incorrectly handled error response your service returned as a 200.

Recording control: always-on vs choose-your-adventure

Fullstory: Always-on recording via SDK

Fullstory uses always-on recording through its SDK: you're recording and storing everything, whether you need it or not. This works fine for aggregate analytics, but creates friction for debugging:

• No granular control over when and which sessions to capture
• Can't easily capture specific user cohorts or error scenarios
• Limited to SDK installation (no browser extensions or widgets for end-users)

Multiplayer: record what you need, when you need it

Multiplayer offers three recording modes and three installation methods. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure approach that adapts to your teams’ workflows.

Recording modes:

• On-demand: Start/stop recording manually. Perfect for reproducing specific bugs.
• Continuous: Start/stop recording in the background during your entire working session. Great for development and QA to automatically save sessions with errors and exceptions.
• Conditional: Silent capture of specific user cohorts or error conditions.

Installation methods:

• In-app widget: Let users report issues with replays attached automatically, directly from your app
• Browser extension: Quickly capture a bug, unexpected behavior, or new feature idea
• SDK / CLI Apps: Full integration for programmatic control

Real scenario: Your support team gets a vague bug description. They ask the end-user to record a full stack session replay through the in-app widget. Support is able to fully understand the problem and they can reproduce the issue in 30 seconds. It’s immediately clear what the next steps (or possible fixes) are.

Support workflows: serial handoffs vs parallel collaboration

Fullstory: built for analysts, not debugging teams

Fullstory's collaboration features are designed for PM and UX teams reviewing sessions asynchronously:

• Share session links
• Add highlights and notes
• Build funnels and dashboards

But for technical debugging, this creates serial handoffs:

1. Support searches and watches the replay (frontend only)
2. Support escalates to Engineering with partial context
3. Engineering opens observability tools to find backend data
4. Engineering asks follow-up questions
5. Support provides more details
6. Repeat until enough context is gathered

Multiplayer: complete context from the start

Multiplayer is built for parallel Support ↔ Engineering workflows:

Single, sharable timeline:

• Frontend screens, user actions, backend traces, logs, request/response data, and user feedback, all correlated automatically
• Support sees the user's experience; Engineering sees the technical root cause
• Both work from the same data, at the same time

Annotations and collaboration:

• Sketch directly on recordings
• Annotate any data point in the timeline
• Create interactive sandboxes for API integrations
• Link sessions directly to Zendesk, Intercom, or Jira tickets

What you actually get per session

Fullstory captures:

• User clicks ✓
• Page navigations ✓
• DOM events ✓
• Console messages (browser only) ✓
• Network requests (paid plans only) ✓

Multiplayer captures:

Everything Fullstory captures, plus:

• Correlated backend logs and traces (any observability platform, unsampled) ✓
• Backend errors ✓
• Full request/response content and headers (including from internal service calls) ✓
• User feedback integrated in the timeline ✓
• Service and dependency maps ✓

Integration and deployment: flexibility matters

Fullstory:

• SDK installation only
• SaaS deployment only
• Mobile support is a paid add-on
• No backend visibility or observability integrations
• No support for AI coding workflows

Multiplayer:

• Web and mobile support out of the box
• Multiple installation methods (extension, widget, SDK)
• SaaS or self-hosted deployment
• Works with any observability platform (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, etc.), language, framework, and architecture
• MCP server for AI-native debugging in your IDE or AI assistant

For teams with compliance requirements: Fullstory's SaaS-only model can be a dealbreaker. Multiplayer's self-hosted option keeps sensitive data in your infrastructure.

For AI-forward teams: Multiplayer's MCP server feeds complete session context (frontend + backend + annotations) directly to Claude, Cursor, or your AI tool of choice. Ask "why did this checkout fail?" and get answers grounded in the actual session data.

Which tool should you choose

Choose Multiplayer if:

• You need to fix bugs and resolve technical issues fast
• Your support team regularly escalates issues to engineering
• You need backend visibility alongside frontend data
• You want flexible recording modes (not just always-on)
• You need to correlate frontend and backend data without manual work
• You have compliance requirements that need self-hosting
• You want AI-native debugging workflows

Choose Fullstory if:

• Your primary goal is user analytics and UX optimization
• PM and design teams are your main users
• You don't need backend data integrated with session replays
• Always-on, frontend-only recording meets your needs

Consider both if:

• You're a large organization where user analytics and technical debugging are handled by separate teams with separate objectives

The bottom line

Fullstory is a powerful behavioral analytics platform. But if you're using it to debug technical issues, you're working with one hand tied behind your back. You're missing backend data, manually correlating across tools, and creating slow handoffs between support and engineering.

Multiplayer gives you the complete picture: frontend and backend, correlated automatically, in a single timeline, with purpose-built collaboration for technical teams. It's session replay designed for the reality of modern distributed systems.