Multiplayer vs PostHog: which session replay tool actually fixes bugs?

You've got a bug report from a frustrated user. You open PostHog, search through all the session replays to find the right one, watch the frontend interaction, and see where they got stuck. But you can't see what failed on the backend. Was it a timeout? A validation error? A service dependency issue?

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 product analytics platforms with session replay features and purpose-built debugging tools.

TL;DR

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

Choose PostHog if: You primarily need product analytics with session replay as a supplementary feature for understanding user behavior.

Key difference: PostHog is a product analytics platform with frontend-only session replay. Multiplayer is purpose-built for debugging with full-stack session recordings, from user actions to backend traces, showing you how to fix a bug (or have your AI coding assistant do it for you).

Quick comparison

More resources:

• Multiplayer vs PostHog deep dive
• Multiplayer vs other tools

The real difference: product analytics vs debugging tool

PostHog: Analytics platform with session replay

PostHog is a comprehensive product analytics platform. Session replay is one feature among many (feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, product analytics). For understanding user behavior, funnel analysis, and product decisions, this works well.

But when you need to debug a technical issue, you only get frontend data. PostHog has no backend data or observability integrations, which means:

• No visibility into API calls beyond the browser
• No distributed traces showing which services were involved
• No request/response content from your backend services

When debugging a production issue, you're forced to:

• Search through PostHog to find the right session replay (frontend only)
• Switch to your observability platform for backend data
• Manually correlate timestamps across systems
• Piece together what happened without a unified view

Multiplayer: Purpose-built for debugging

Multiplayer is focused on resolving technical issues. Full-stack session recordings capture everything you need in a single timeline:

• The user's frontend actions
• The API requests
• Backend traces showing which services were called
• Request/response content and headers from internal service calls
• Error messages and stack traces
• User feedback

No searching through hundreds of sessions. No tool switching. No manual correlation.

Recording control: analytics-first vs choose-your-adventure

PostHog: conditional recording

PostHog offers always-on recording (via SDK) based on conditions you can customize. This works for product analytics where you want to capture broad user behavior:

• No granular control over when and which sessions to capture
• 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

PostHog: Built for product teams, adapted for support

PostHog's workflow is designed for product analytics:

• Search through session replays to find the relevant one
• Share session links with your team
• View frontend behavior
• Build dashboards and funnels

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 searches for the right logs and traces
5. Multiple rounds of back-and-forth to gather full context

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

PostHog captures:

• User clicks ✓
• Page navigations ✓
• DOM events ✓
• Console messages ✓
• Network requests ✓
• Backend errors (requires PostHog backend instrumentation—vendor lock-in) ✓

Multiplayer captures:

Everything PostHog captures, plus:

• Correlated backend logs and traces (any observability platform, unsampled) ✓
• Backend errors (no vendor lock-in) ✓
• Full request/response content and headers (including from internal service calls) ✓
• User feedback integrated in the timeline ✓
• Service and dependency maps ✓

Which tool should you choose

Choose Multiplayer if:

• You need to fix bugs and resolve technical issues fast
• You want complete backend visibility alongside frontend data
• Your support team regularly escalates issues to engineering
• You need full request/response content from internal services
• You want flexible recording modes and installation options
• You want AI-native debugging workflows with complete context

Choose PostHog if:

• Your primary goal is product analytics (funnels, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys)
• Product and UX teams are your main users
• Session replay is a supplementary feature for understanding user behavior
• You don't need backend debugging data
• You're comfortable managing separate tools for analytics and debugging

Consider both if:

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

The bottom line

PostHog is a powerful product analytics platform with many valuable features. Session replay is one tool among many, designed for understanding user behavior and product performance, not for debugging technical issues across your full stack.

Multiplayer is purpose-built for debugging. Full-stack session recordings give you frontend and backend context, automatically correlated in a single timeline. It's session replay designed for the reality of modern distributed systems, where you need complete technical context to fix issues fast.