When people report bugs or performance problems, developers need more than logs and metrics; they need context. That’s where debugging and session replay tools enter the picture. These platforms log users' interactions, console logs and network activity, giving teams a window into what really happened before the error occurred.
Some popular tools like LogRocket, Sentry, Datadog and FullStory have already established themselves as essential in modern product teams. They give companies the ability to issue track, and this results in better user experiences and the alignment of engineering with design.
But a new player in the space, Multiplayer, is betting on developer-first debugging and visibility, which is based around live collaboration, rich context and without any vendor lock-in.
This article will compare Multiplayer to LogRocket, Sentry, Datadog, and FullStory, breaking down their main features into an easy-to-digest pros and cons read through in order for you to choose the right one for your team.
What is Multiplayer?
Multiplayer is an all-in-one debugging and session replay platform for developers. It brings together full stack session replays, and collaborative tools in a single place, offering a seamless integration within your current workflow. Multiplayer was founded by Steph and Thomas Johnson in 2023, and its product was in beta back in February 2024. They finally opened their platform to the public in the same year and have been enjoying growth ever since.
Unlike traditional monitoring tools, Multiplayer doesn’t just tell you what went wrong; it helps teams reproduce, discuss and fix issues faster. Also you don’t need to worry about any vendor lock-in; and it is possible to export your data and have it sent to you if you ask the Multiplayer team.
It's worth mentioning that with other session replay tools you need to rely on their backend instrumentation to add traces, logs, etc. to your session replays (if they even, support that!). Like for example if you're using Sentry, you also need to instrument Sentry in your backend.
Multiplayer is built on OpenTelemetry (OTel) which is an open source observability framework for providing IT teams with standardized protocols and tools which can collect and route telemetry data. This basically means that you can use any of your existing observability tools, with no need to switch (or, you can switch, whenever you want, to whatever observability stack you want).
Some of the standout features include:
- Live cross-team collaboration: Share debug sessions with teammates in real-time, like Google Docs for debugging. It's not just shared visibility, but also the ability to annotate recordings, so engineers, designers and PMs can look at the same replay data without losing any context
- Full-stack data capturing: Collect full-stack data from UX and console errors, to backend traces, logs and request/response errors
- Multiple recording modes: Multiplayer offers 3 recording modes, while other tools have one or two at most. On-demand mode allows you to manually start and stop recordings, while Continuous mode lets you record in the background while you work (both available via browser extension, in-app widget, or SDK). Conditional recording allows you to silently collect session replays of users visiting your app, based on customizable parameters you set in the UI or through the SDK.
AI-ready Session Replays
Another feature worth mentioning is AI-ready session replays. Modern debugging is not just about what happened; it’s about making that context directly available where you are working. Multiplayer's AI-ready session replay feature does exactly that. It features native support for the VS Code Extension and the MCP server, so Multiplayer can bring full-stack session recordings directly to your IDE and AI assistants. This means that they can be armed with complete context to reason, suggest fixes, or automate away repetitive tasks in an entirely new league of features.
From inside VS Code, you can browse through user sessions, review traces and actions as well as network data, and instantly navigate to relevant code paths, all without ever leaving the editor. The AI copilots can have the same access to these recordings and can immediately know what caused a bug, how the system behaved, and what potential changes are necessary to fix it without having to switch tabs or do guessing.
Multiplayer even extends it with the MCP server, as every session is designed for machine learning, user action, log and trace, request and response headers, and annotations are available for your AI IDE or assistant. Things such as cursor position, Claude Code’s commands for classes and methods completion, Copilot’s suggestions, Windsurf files, among other things. That means your AI tools can serve up precise debugging plans, code fixes, and feature dev proposals all from your live Session Context.
In essence, Multiplayer is intelligent asset creation from your replays, each session able to tutor, explain, or contribute something new. By connecting human context with AI reasoning, it turns debugging from an individual manual task into a collaborative, context-aware process that improves over time.
In other words, Multiplayer takes debugging from something you do alone into a social, high-visibility event.
Multiplayer vs LogRocket
What LogRocket Does Well
LogRocket is among the most popular session replay tools. It captures DOM mutations, network requests, and console logs, providing visibility into what exactly the user is interacting with. It is generally used for frontend issue tracking, UI analysis, and product analytics.
Where Multiplayer Stands Out
LogRocket is incredible for visual replays, but Multiplayer is purpose-built for debugging complex technical issues and cross-team collaboration. It’s designed for full-stack visibility so you can easily jump directly from a replay to your stack trace, all in a single interface.
Whereas LogRocket is built on top of third-party integrations like Sentry for logs and traces, which only show you sampled data to begin with, not endpoints or payloads. Multiplayer is full-stack out of the box, including in each session logs, traces, and headers by default.
LogRocket has a rich library of integrations indeed because it doesn't natively support many features or data points. For example, while Multiplayer includes user feedback in session replays by default, with LogRocket, you’d only be able to view this information by adding the replay links in a third-party customer support tool.
In conclusion, Multiplayer eliminates the legacy data lock-in and fragmentation of outdated platforms and provides teams with a fully integrated, developer-first debugging experience.
Ideal Use Case
- LogRocket: UX teams and PMs who want to study user behaviour and performance metrics
- Multiplayer: Support and Engineering teams who need fast, actionable debugging context and real-time collaboration
Summary Table
Taking a look at the summary table, we can see how both of them compare across some feature sets.
| Feature | LogRocket | Multiplayer |
|---|---|---|
| Session Replays | Yes | Yes |
| Collaboration | Limited | Advanced |
| Full-stack Data | No | Yes |
| Vendor Lock-in | Yes | No |
| Developer Focus | Limited | Yes |
Multiplayer vs Sentry
What Sentry Does Well
Sentry is an error and performance monitoring tool. It does a great job in getting exceptions, traces and stack from backend and frontend applications. It’s most powerful for alerting, crash tracking and performance analytics.
Where Multiplayer Stands Out
Sentry is great at telling you when something is broken. Multiplayer however, shows you how it broke. With full stack replays and collaborative debugging tools, Multiplayer fills in the gap of visibility that fits in between what Sentry reports and what developers need to actually reproduce and resolve issues more quickly.
Unlike Sentry, which is primarily an error-monitoring tool that has since added session replays as a feature, Multiplayer was built from the beginning to cater for support workflows and cross-team collaboration. Multiple recording modes and versatile install options allow you to have more freedom in both what and how you record.
Multiplayer also records all the things in a session, not just errors and stack traces, but also user feedback, (un-sampled) traces, as well as request and response content, including full headers.
And beyond visibility, Multiplayer makes debugging a shared activity. Teams can annotate replays, share notes and collaborate in real-time with the injection of built-in notebooks and comments, which Sentry just does not offer.
In other words, Sentry tells you what went wrong, whereas Multiplayer helps you understand why and how to fix it, with your team.
Ideal Use Case
- Sentry: Teams who want robust error tracking and alerts across backend and frontend
- Multiplayer: Teams who want session replays, and context-aware collaboration and editing tools
Summary Table
Again the summary table illustrates how they compare feature by feature.
| Feature | Sentry | Multiplayer |
|---|---|---|
| Error Monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Session Replays | Basic | Advanced |
| Collaboration | Minimal | Advanced |
| Backend Tracing | Yes | Per session, un-sampled |
| Frontend Debugging | Partial | Yes |
Multiplayer vs Datadog
What Datadog Does Well
Datadog is a giant in observability as well as infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, traces and more. It’s great for large scale production systems which require the visibility to access distributed environments.
Where Multiplayer Stands Out
Datadog is made for tracking systems, stats and infra monitoring. Multiplayer instead is focused on full-stack sessions and the human side behind troubleshooting technical support issues. It allows engineers to understand exactly what happened for each user bug (from the user actions to the correlated traces and logs), without spending hours searching for this specific information among dashboards and logs.
In reality, Multiplayer isn’t a replacement but a complement to Datadog: the latter is still great for high-level observability; however, Multiplayer significantly increases efficiency in certain workflows such as debugging and repro-ing issues, and collaborating on support across teams. It integrates smoothly with your stack so you can have end-to-end visibility without having to manually capture context for each issue.
Although Datadog RUM provides frontend monitoring, building holistic observability would require you to embrace the whole of their ecosystem, APM, logs and infrastructure modules, with potential vendor lock-in. And even then, these replays are typically incomplete: they lack user feedback, request and response content and headers, etc. creating the need to chain multiple tools together. Datadog is also SaaS-only, excluding teams that require data to be self-hosted due to privacy laws, residency or complex regulatory requirements.
Multiplayer, on the other hand, gives you full backend-agnostic visibility right from the start. It retains everything in a session, like user feedback, un-sampled traces, full request and response data, headers, all of it nicely organised for machine learning consumption. As it's powered by OpenTelemetry, it plugs into whatever observability platform you already have and shares full session context directly with your IDE or AI assistant for quicker, more accurate fixes. It runs in any environment, be that production, staging or development and from cloud to on-premises, from serverless to hybrid, with the option for SaaS or self-host.
In other words, Datadog is for system health, and Multiplayer is for session clarity, with the whole narrative from crash to resolution.
Ideal Use Case
- Datadog: Ops and DevOps teams monitoring cloud infrastructure and application performance
- Multiplayer: Support and Engineering teams diagnosing browser-specific issues and UX user behaviours
Summary Table
Looking through the feature summary table we can see the difference between them and how they compare.
| Feature | Datadog | Multiplayer |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure Monitoring | Yes | No |
| Backend Tracing | Yes | Per session, un-sampled |
| Session Replay | Basic (add-on pricing) | Yes |
| Collaboration | Basic | Advanced |
| Frontend Debugging | Basic | Yes |
Multiplayer vs FullStory
What FullStory Does Well
FullStory is well known for its high fidelity session replays and product analytics. It’s great for reading user journeys, where friction occurs and conversion funnels. It is popular among marketing and UX teams who want data-based insights.
Where Multiplayer Stands Out
Multiplayer isn’t focused on marketing metrics or analysis of user behaviour (i.e. engagement graphs or heat maps); it was designed to solve real-tech problems. It cares about the things that developers need: console logs, call stacks, backend logs, requests/response content and headers, collaborative annotations.
While FullStory seems to have a lot of detailed user analytics, it doesn’t provide meaningful backend correlation like for example, you can’t tie the session to real logs, traces or request/response content. Even LogRocket offers richer technical visibility with third-party integrations. Multiplayer brings your frontend and backend data together natively.
Ideal Use Case
- FullStory: Product and UX teams optimising user flows and engagement
- Multiplayer: Support and Engineering teams solving bugs and user issues collaboratively
Summary Table
Comparing the two helps us understand where each of them excel.
| Feature | FullStory | Multiplayer |
|---|---|---|
| Product Analytics | Yes | Minimal |
| Session Replay | Yes | Yes |
| Full-stack Data | No | Yes |
| Collaboration | Limited | Advanced |
| Developer Focus | Limited | Yes |
Feature Comparison Snapshot
Taking everything we have learned into account its now more obvious to see where each tool stands and in what areas they are most relevant in as you can see here in our final feature comparison snapshot table.
| Feature | Multiplayer | LogRocket | Sentry | Datadog | FullStory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Session replay | Yes | Yes | Basic | Add on | Yes |
| Full Stack Data | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | No |
| Error Monitoring | Minimal | Yes | Yes | Yes | Basic |
| Collaboration Tools | Advanced | Basic | Basic | Basic | Basic |
| Developer-first Design | Yes | Basic | Yes | Basic | No |
| Product Analytics | Basic | Yes | Basic | Yes | Yes |
| Vendor Lock-in | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple recording models | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Which Tool Should You Choose?
Each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages and choosing one for your application ultimately comes down to preference.
When making a decision we have learned that:
- Multiplayer: Excellent for engineering and support teams who wish to conduct rapid, collaborative debugging with full visibility and no data lock-in
- LogRocket: Great for frontend UX teams who require detailed replays and product performance metrics
- Sentry: Good at error tracking and alerts for your applications on the backend, mobile, game consoles and frontend
- Datadog: Fantastic for infrastructure and operations teams that manage very large, high-scale systems
- FullStory: Ideal for product and marketing teams who need to dive deep on user behaviour & engagement
It's worth noting that every platform mention with the exception of FullStory offers a free plan including a trial period. Prices vary but there is the option to choose between monthly and annual billing. They also offer various packages all with different features as you would expect such as free, pro, teams, enterprise etc... Costs change all the time so please go to the individual websites to see the latest prices for each subscription.
Conclusion
Debugging and visibility tools are critical to keeping the things we build running smoothly, and as we all know easier to use products are good for everyone. However not all of them serve the same purpose.
If your team is looking for a modern, developer-centric approach that combines replays, debugging context, and real-time collaboration then Multiplayer is a very strong contender. It closes the gap between classic monitoring and getting your hands dirty with debugging, enabling teams to visualise, understand, and get around issues more quickly than ever before.
Take a look at Multiplayer which is an excellent modern alternative for debugging and session replays.
Top comments (1)
Awesome as always, mate! 👍💯