Multiplayer vs …
Every team with a web or mobile application faces technical issues: user-reported bugs, unexpected behaviors, performance lags, hard-to-reproduce edge cases, intermittent errors. These issues are inevitable, and your team needs a way to resolve them efficiently.
Most teams cobble together a solution from the tools they already have: APM platforms for monitoring, product analytics for user behavior, or manual screen capture.
But none of these tools were built to give Support and Engineering teams what they actually need: end-to-end visibility into technical issues in a single, shareable, and annotatable workspace.
We built Multiplayer to solve this gap. Below, we compare Multiplayer to the common alternatives teams use for debugging and technical support, and explain why purpose-built tooling makes all the difference.
Why choose Multiplayer?
Multiplayer is purpose-built for shortening debugging workflows and resolving technical issues that slow your team down.
Use it when you need to:
- Accelerate bug reporting: End-users can submit issues with full session replays attached, eliminating ambiguity from the start
- Reduce support friction: Support teams can capture complete reproduction steps upfront, cutting down on back-and-forth communication
- Quicker bug fixes: Developers can see exactly how user interactions correlate with backend traces, logs, and response/requests payloads in one view
Multiplayer overview:
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Application type | Web & Mobile. |
| Deployment | SaaS & self-hosted. |
| Installation | Browser extension, in-app widget, SDK / CLI apps. |
| Recording modes | On-demand, Continuous, Conditional. |
| Data captured | Full stack (including unsampled traces, full request / response payloads from service to service, user feedback, etc.). |
| Collaboration | Annotations of individual session data points, sketches, comments, sharing, notebooks. |
| Security | User inputs are masked by default, with customization options for frontend and backend data masking. |
| AI support | Session data is AI-ready + MCP server support for VS Code, Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, Windsurf, Zed. |
With Multiplayer full-stack session recordings, support teams get visibility, developers get context, and users get fixes. All from a single, collaborative session recording. Our objective is to:
- → Reduce back-and-forth with end-users and internal teams
- → Eliminate incomplete bug reports
- → Accelerate engineering escalations
- → Lower ticket resolution times
- → Identify unclear root causes faster
- → Improve overall software quality
vs Manual screenshots and videos
Recording your screen and sharing files manually creates more problems than it solves:
- Slow and labor-intensive: Users spend time recording, uploading, and describing issues. Support teams watch videos hunting for relevant moments. Developers ask follow-up questions because critical context is missing. What should take minutes stretches into hours or days of back-and-forth.
- Security and compliance risks: Every manual recording requires someone to remember to redact sensitive data (API keys, PII, credentials, internal URLs). One oversight and you've exposed information that shouldn't leave your systems. There's no automated redaction, no audit trail, and no way to revoke access once a file is shared.
- Fragmented and lost context: Screenshots live in Slack. Videos sit in email. User feedback is in your issue tracker. Telemetry data sits in multiple tools. Teams waste time reconstructing what happened, data gets siloed across tools, and critical debugging information disappears when threads get buried or files expire.
| Multiplayer | Screenshots / Video / … | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for … | Debugging technical issues | Visual collaboration |
| Capture method | Automatic session recording | Manual screen recording / capture |
| Technical context | Frontend + Backend data | Visual only, no technical data |
| PII data redaction | Automated and configurable | Manual, error-prone |
| Information storage | Centralized, searchable | Scattered across tickets, email, drives |
| Collaboration model | Parallel (Support ↔ Engineering) | Serial handoffs |
vs APM tools
You can use an APM tool with session replay functionality to find and debug specific technical issues / bugs. But should you?
Here are the main drawbacks are:
- Time-intensive debugging: APM tools are designed for monitoring system health at scale, not investigating individual bugs. You'll spend significant time manually sifting through system-wide telemetry and session data to isolate what you actually need.
- Missing data and context switching: You'll encounter sampled data, gaps that require cumbersome manual instrumentation (e.g. full request / response content and headers including from middleware and internal service calls), and frequent context-switching to other tools for user feedback, team comments, or requirements.
- Inflexible workflows: Session replay is bolted on, not core functionality. You're limited to reactive error monitoring rather than proactive session review with precisely the debugging data you need. Add in other constraints (e.g. SaaS-only, limited mobile support, and vendor lock-in through proprietary agents, etc.) and the friction compounds.
| Multiplayer | Sentry / Datadog / New Relic … | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for … | Debugging technical issues | Performance and error monitoring |
| Session recordings | Full stack out of the box | Sampled and/or missing data |
| User-reported issues | Yes, with replay attached | Not supported |
| Storage overhead | Optimized for low cost | High volume, high cost |
| Telemetry standards | OpenTelemetry compatible | Proprietary/vendor lock-in |
| Collaboration model | Parallel (Support ↔ Engineering) | Serial handoffs |
vs Frontend session recorders with backend integrations
Frontend-focused session recorders appeal to developers but fall short when you need complete visibility into technical issues.
Here are the main drawbacks:
- Fragmented full-stack visibility: Backend context comes through third-party integrations, adding setup complexity and another vendor to your stack. You'll still face sampled traces and logs, and miss critical data like request/response headers from middleware and internal service calls.
- Inflexible capture and collaboration: These tools offer either on-demand recordings or always-on frontend capture, with limited control over when, what, or how sessions are recorded. Collaboration features are basic (e.g. no session annotations, interactive notebooks, etc.) and for comprehensive troubleshooting or proactive bug identification, you'll need to bolt on external tools and configure manual workflows.
- Manual context reconstruction: When issues arise, your team will still need to manually piece together what happened: hunting through observability dashboards, correlating timestamps across systems, and tracking down user feedback in separate tools. The debugging workflow requires constant context-switching instead of having everything in one place.
| Multiplayer | Jam / LogRocket / OpenReplay … | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for … | Debugging full stack technical issues | Frontend debugging |
| Session recordings | Full stack out of the box | Frontend by default, with optional third-party integrations for sampled and incomplete backend data |
| Recording control | Multiple install options (browser extension, in-app widget, SDK) and recording modes (on-demand, continuous, conditional) | Limited (usually one install option with either on-demand or always-on recording) |
| User-reported issues | Yes, with replay attached | Limited |
| Telemetry standards | OpenTelemetry compatible | Proprietary/vendor lock-in |
| Collaboration model | Parallel (Support ↔ Engineering) | Serial handoffs |
vs Product analytics tools
Product analytics tools are built for understanding user behavior at scale, not resolving individual technical issues. Teams often use them for debugging out of convenience: after all, they're likely already in the stack for PM and UX work.
But they're the wrong tool for the job. Here’s why:
- Frontend-only visibility: These tools capture user interactions and page performance, but have no backend visibility (or backend integrations). Technical issues and bugs often involve multiple layers of the stack, so developers still need to invest time and effort to dig through logs, dashboards, and multiple other tools to manually correlate frontend actions with backend traces, inspect full request/response payloads, or understand the exact state that triggered an error.
- Built for trends, not collaborative troubleshooting: Product analytics tools are not designed for the deep-dive debugging workflows technical teams need: they inevitably cause slow, serial handoffs between Support and Engineering, where your valuable resources spend time sifting through unrelated session replays to find the correct one, or in multiple rounds of back and forth to gather all the data to fully understand an issue.
- Limited recording control and collaboration: You get basic session replay with minimal configuration options. There's no granular control over what gets captured, no session annotations for technical investigations, and no purpose-built collaboration features for Support ↔ Engineering workflows.
| Multiplayer | Fullstory / Mixpanel / PostHog … | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for … | Debugging full stack technical issues | Product analytics |
| Session recordings | Full stack out of the box | Frontend only |
| Recording control | Multiple install options (browser extension, in-app widget, SDK) and recording modes (on-demand, continuous, conditional) | Limited (usually one install option with always-on recording) |
| User-reported issues | Yes, with replay attached | Not supported |
| Support workflow | Single, sharable, annotatable timeline, linked to your support tickets | Manually piece together context across multiple systems, in multiple tools |
| Collaboration model | Parallel (Support ↔ Engineering) | Serial handoffs |
Next steps
👀 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 with your own app, you can follow the Multiplayer configuration steps. You can start a free plan at any time: go.multiplayer.app