Jam vs. Multiplayer for technical issues and bugs
From just frontend, user behavior data to full stack, end-to-end visibility. With Multiplayer you get the full picture on technical issues and bugs, immediately.
How is Multiplayer different?
Full stack visibility, not just frontend data
Multiplayer provides full stack session recordings that correlate frontend and backend data out of the box.
• Jam is a frontend session recorder by default. On higher-tier plans, it can pull in sampled backend traces through a Sentry integration, but this requires additional setup, another vendor in your stack, and still leaves you without critical debugging data like request/response content and headers from deep within your system. When something breaks, teams are back to manual detective work: hunting through separate observability tools, correlating timestamps across systems, and searching for user feedback and technical discussions.
• Multiplayer gives you full stack session recordings by default. You have complete context from the start (frontend screens, user actions, backend traces, logs, request/response content and headers and user feedback) automatically correlated and in a single, shared, annotatable timeline. No hunting, no manual correlation, no tool switching.
From day one, you get true end-to-end visibility, seamlessly integrated with whichever observability or support stack you already use.
Everything you need, for any support scenario, out of the box
Multiplayer adapts to every support workflow. No extra tools, no manual workarounds, no rigid setup. Whether you’re handling a question about “unexpected behavior” or a complex cross-service incident, Multiplayer gives you the full context to resolve it.
• Jam is optimized for capturing ad hoc frontend bugs, with basic annotation tools and no automatic PII masking. It doesn't cover the full spectrum of support scenarios (comprehensive technical troubleshooting or proactive bug identification across the stack). Support workflows often require bolting on external tools (like Sentry for backend context, or separate help desk integrations) and manual configuration to fill the gaps.
• Multiplayer enables any support workflow, 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 so you can fix them before users even realize they are there.
With Multiplayer, a single tool powers many workflows out of the box.
Developer-friendly and AI-native
Multiplayer fits seamlessly into your existing workflows and tool stack.
• Jam requires vendor lock-in to achieve full-stack visibility and it’s not optimized for AI assisted debugging.You need their Sentry integration to get any backend data, which means AI tools are working with partial context (i.e. sampled traces, masked request/response data, etc.), resulting in incomplete suggestions that still leave you doing manual correlation work. It's also SaaS-only with no self-hosting option, limiting your deployment choices for regulatory, data residency, or infrastructure control requirements.
• Multiplayer is backend-agnostic and works with any observability platform, language, framework, or architecture, cloud-hosted or self-hosted based on your needs. Through its MCP server, Multiplayer provides AI tools with self-contained, complete session units: frontend screens, unsampled backend traces, full request/response payloads, logs, and team annotations all pre-correlated in one place. Any AI tool can access this complete context to generate accurate root cause analysis and fix suggestions without gaps or guessing.
With Multiplayer your AI assistant becomes genuinely useful because it sees the complete picture.
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.Jam helps you understand frontend bugs
Multiplayer helps you understand and fix technical issues and bugs across your entire stack
Core differences
| Jam | Multiplayer | |
|---|---|---|
| PRIMARY USE CASE | Frontend debugging | Deep, collaborative investigation of technical support issues, bugs and escalations |
| USERS | Developers | Customer Support, Developers, QAs, end-users and external partners |
| SESSION REPLAYS | Limited Limited feature set and versatility for different support workflows | Versatile by design with rich feature-set Multiple recording modes, install options, and supported use cases |
| DATA PER SESSION | Limited Full stack data requires backend instrumentation with Sentry (vendor lock-in, sampled traces, higher tier plan) and manual customizations | Full stack data, backend agnostic Including data like user feedback, request/response content and headers for components deep in your system, team annotations, etc. Compatible with any observability platform, language, environment, architecture, AI tool and deployment |
| TEAM COLLABORATION | Limited View, share, comment and (on higher-tier plans) sketch on top of session replays | View, share, and annotate every aspect and data point of a session recording |
| AI CAPABILITIES | Proprietary AI agent and MCP server to summarize session replays and interrogate them | 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 | Jam | Multiplayer |
|---|---|---|
| Installation method | ||
| Deployment | ||
| Web & mobile applications | ||
| Data per session | ||
| Recording modes | ||
| Auto-saved sessions for errors or exceptions | ||
| Session recording sharing | ||
| Session recording annotation | ||
| Notebooks for team collaboration | ||
| Masking sensitive user information | ||
| Session recording searchability | ||
| Dashboards | ||
| MCP server |
Session recording data
| Feature | Jam | Multiplayer |
|---|---|---|
| User clicks + inputs | ||
| Page navigations + loads | ||
| Session metadata (device, runtime environment, browser, OS) | ||
| DOM events | ||
| Console messages | ||
| Network requests | ||
| HTML source code | ||
| Backend errors | ||
| Correlated distributed traces | ||
| User feedback | ||
| Request / response content per session | ||
| Headers | ||
| Service and dependency maps | ||
| Repositories |
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-browserQuick 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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