Datadog vs. Multiplayer for
technical issues and bugs

Stop wasting hours grepping through log files for a single bug. With Multiplayer you go from bug-to-fix immediately.

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How is Multiplayer different?

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Built for bug-to-fix collaboration

Most tools optimize for one team at a time creating debugging workflows that involve slow, painful serial hand-offs. Multiplayer is built to enable cross-team collaboration and give context to devs, answers to support and fixes to end-users.

Datadog is built for DevOps teams to monitor performance, and identify trends and bottlenecks like "What's slow across our app?".
When a customer reports a specific issue, Datadog provides aggregated metrics and partial visibility. Teams still spend hours sifting through logs or working in separate tools, manually correlating data and handing off context. It's built for observability at scale, not cross-team collaboration on highly complex technical bugs.
Multiplayer enables parallel collaboration on technical issues, from day one.
Full-stack session recordings give every team complete context from the start, correlating everything (user actions, frontend states, backend traces, logs, request/response content, and headers) in a single, shared, annotatable workspace.

With Multiplayer you can shorten your debugging workflows from days to hours.

Everything you need, for any support scenario, out of the box

Other tools make you stitch together partial solutions: Want full-stack visibility? Piece together three platforms. Need mobile support? Add another tool. Want flexibility for when and how you record? Too bad.

Datadog is built for monitoring, not flexible support workflows. Session replays are a premium tier, add-on feature primarily designed for always-on recording, with limited control over when/what to capture. Customization for support workflows requires additional configuration and multiple tools (or they simply aren’t supported), and storage costs can balloon quickly.
Multiplayer enables any support workflow. Plug and play with any existing ticketing system (e.g. Zendesk, Intercom, Jira). Multiple full stack recording modes give you control without overhead. Multiple installation methods work however your team works. Your team can work across multiple use cases: from actively resolving technical support tickets, to proactively identifying bugs before users do so they can be addressed and resolved instantly.

With Multiplayer, a single subscription powers many workflows out of the box.

Everything you need, for any support scenario, out of the box

Developer-friendly and AI-native

Multiplayer fits seamlessly into your existing workflows and tool stack.

Datadog requires vendor lock-in and custom instrumentation to achieve full stack visibility. Even when you fully adopt Datadog's entire platform, critical data is missing—user feedback, request/response content and headers, team notes, etc.—forcing you to stitch multiple tools together. It's also SaaS-only: if you need self-hosting for regulatory, data residency, privacy, or control reasons, it's not an option.
Multiplayer is full-stack, backend-agnostic by default. Full-stack session recordings capture everything out of the box, including critical data other tools miss, like request/response content and headers from deep within your system. It’s compatible with any observability platform, language, environment, architecture, and AI tool. You can also host in the cloud or self-host.

With Multiplayer you get end-to-end visibility from day one, with zero manual context-gathering or vendor lock-in.

Why use Multiplayer?

Understand unclear, hard-to-describe issues

Users often report confusing behavior or ask questions that require technical clarity. Sometimes the tickets themselves are ambiguous or incomplete. Multiplayer shows exactly what happened on the user's end, so support teams can answer quickly and confidently. No need to ask users for 'more info' or escalate unnecessarily.

Resolve complex technical issues or bugs dramatically faster

With full stack session recordings, Multiplayer lets you instantly see how bugs happened in a single timeline, automatically correlating data across all layers of your stack. It reduces guesswork, shortens investigation time, and saves hours from grepping through log files or jumping between dashboards and screens.

Eliminate costly, repetitive escalations

Multiplayer removes the back-and-forth that slows support and debugging workflows down. Support can review a user's full session, annotate it, and escalate with complete context, so engineering can diagnose issues without reconstructing missing data. Cut down on meeting loops, duplicate work, and miscommunication, and get users to a resolution faster.

Datadog is built for monitoring

Multiplayer is built for debugging and support workflows

Core differences

	Datadog	Multiplayer
PRIMARY USE CASE	Monitoring and performance at scale	Deep, collaborative investigation of technical support issues, bugs and escalations
USERS	DevOps and Developers	Customer Support, Developers, QAs, end-users and external partners
SESSION REPLAYS	Limited Add-on to RUM platform, always-on recording with limited versatility for different debugging workflows	Versatile by design and developer-friendly Multiple recording modes, install options, and supported use cases. Compatible with any observability platform, language, environment, architecture, AI tool and deployment
DATA PER SESSION	Limited Full stack requires backend instrumentation with Datadog. Critical information still requires manual customization or third-party integrations	Full stack data and complete context Including data like user feedback, request/response content and headers for components deep in your system, team annotations, etc.
TEAM COLLABORATION	Limited View and share session replays and dashboards	View, share, and annotate every aspect of a session recording
AI CAPABILITIES	Focused on interrogating system observability data Datadog’s MCP server doesn’t provide full-stack, correlated-per-session data to your AI tools	Sessions are AI-ready from frontend screens, to backend traces, to team annotations. The MCP server feeds complete, correlated and enriched context to your IDE or AI tool of choice

Session recording features

Feature	Datadog	Multiplayer
Installation method	Only SDK	Browser extension, in-app widget, SDK
Deployment	Only SaaS	Saas and self-hosted
Web & mobile applications
Data per session	Frontend by default, with Datadog instrumentation needed for sampled backend data. Critical information still requires manual customization or third-party integrations	Full stack out of the box, compatible with any observability tool. No trace sampling or missing data.
Recording modes	Always-on and conditional (only through SDK)	On-demand for granular start/stop control, continuous while you work, conditional for silent capture of specific user cohorts
Auto-saved sessions for errors or exceptions	Only through SDK and only for frontend errors	Both frontend and backend errors and exceptions are saved, using any installation method
Session recording sharing
Session recording annotation	No	Sketch on top of recordings and annotate any data point in a session recording
Notebooks for team collaboration	Text- and graph-only notebooks	Interactive sandbox environments where teams can auto-generate runnable test scripts from session recordings, test complex API integrations, collaborate on feature requirements or visualize data sets.
Masking sensitive user information
Session recording searchability	Frontend by default. Backend data included only when instrumented on Datadog	Full stack by default
Dashboards	System performance metrics and errors	System architecture and component overview
MCP server	For observability data	For session-based, full-stack debugging workflows

Session recording data

Feature	Datadog	Multiplayer
User clicks + inputs
Page navigations + loads
Session metadata (device, runtime environment, browser, OS)
DOM events
Console messages	With manual configuration
Network requests
HTML source code	No
Backend errors	Only with Datadog instrumentation
Correlated distributed traces	Only with Datadog instrumentation	Observability platform agnostic, zero sampling by default
User feedback	No. You can add session replay links to third-party tools	Included by default
Request/response content	No. Requires manually adding custom instrumentation	Out of the box for all system layers including from middleware and internal service calls
Headers	No. Requires manually adding custom instrumentation	Out of the box for all system layers including from middleware and internal service calls
Service and dependency maps
Repositories	No

Getting started with Multiplayer
is easy.

A simple, performant interface so you can start recording in minutes. It fits right into your code with SDKs for your favorite programming languages.

Get started with our client library

Install our Chrome Extension

Install our Visual Studio Code extension

You can install the Multiplayer Session Recorder using npm:

npm install @multiplayer-app/session-recorder-browser

Quick start

import SessionRecorder from '@multiplayer-app/session-recorder-browser'

SessionRecorder.init({
  application: 'my-web-app',
  version: '1.0.0',
  environment: 'production',
  apiKey: 'MULTIPLAYER_API_KEY',
})

More languages and CLI SDKs can be found in our documentation.

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Best practices on software architecture, system design, debugging, and observability.

Datadog vs. Multiplayer for technical issues and bugs