Overview
BugSnag, now part of SmartBear, is an error monitoring tool with its roots in mobile crash reporting. It captures unhandled crashes, ANRs and handled exceptions from iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity, web and server platforms, and shows them in an inbox ordered by severity and number of affected users. A stability score per release helps decide whether to ship new features or fix bugs.
Performance monitoring adds app start, screen load, network and custom spans with distributed tracing, and is compatible with OpenTelemetry. SmartBear's MCP server brings error data into the IDE for AI-assisted fixes.
The free plan is for one person with 7,500 events a month and 7-day retention. Paid plans add unlimited users and 60-day retention and are priced by event and span volume. Enterprise can run on premises, which is the route for PCI and PHI compliance.
Pricing and plans
checked 28 Sept 2026Free tier
1 user, error and performance monitoring, 7,500 events and 1M spans a month, 50+ platforms, 30+ integrations, 7-day data retention.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 user, 7.5k events and 1M spans a month, 7-day retention |
| Select | From about $20/mo (annual) | Unlimited users, end-to-end diagnostics, basic notifications, 60-day retention |
| Preferred | From about $33/mo (annual) | Error prioritisation, stability benchmarks, SAML SSO, system metrics |
| Enterprise | Custom | Automatic error assignment, premium support, on-premises or SaaS, feature flags |
What it does
- Stability scores
- Per-release stability score and targets to decide when a release is healthy.
- Mobile crash reporting
- Crashes, ANRs, native minidumps and symbolication for mobile and desktop apps.
- Performance monitoring
- App starts, screen loads, web vitals and network spans, sold in span packs.
- Distributed tracing
- Waterfalls of API calls and service interactions, correlated with crashes.
- Feature flags and experiments
- Errors broken down by feature flag and experiment variant.
- On-premises deployment
- Enterprise customers can run BugSnag on their own infrastructure.
Strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Strong mobile crash reporting and release stability tracking.
- Prioritises errors by user impact rather than raw counts.
- On-premises option for regulated industries.
- OpenTelemetry-compatible performance monitoring.
Limitations
- Free plan is limited to 1 user and 7 days of data retention.
- Exceeding the daily event quota more than 3 times in 30 days can trigger an automatic plan upgrade.
- Minidump events count as 5 events each for billing.
- SAML SSO requires the Preferred plan.
Who it suits
Good for
- Mobile app teams tracking crash-free releases
- Companies needing on-premises error monitoring
- Teams that ship frequent releases and want stability targets
Look elsewhere if
- Solo developers needing longer free retention
- Uptime, log or infrastructure monitoring
Alternatives to BugSnag
| Tool | From | Free option | Stages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon CloudWatch AWS-native metrics, logs, alarms and tracing | Usage-based | Free tier | |
| Checkly Synthetic and uptime monitoring as code | $24/mo | Free tier | |
| Coroot Self-hosted eBPF observability | $1/mo | Free tier | |
| Grafana Cloud Hosted metrics, logs, traces and dashboards | $19/mo | Free tier | |
| Honeycomb Tracing and event-based observability | $150/mo | Free tier | |
| New Relic Full-stack observability platform | $10/mo | Free tier |
Sentry vs BugSnag → All monitoring, uptime and error tracking →
Questions
Is BugSnag free?
Yes, the Free plan covers one user with 7,500 events and 1 million spans a month and 7 days of retention.
How much does BugSnag cost?
Third-party listings show Select from about $20 a month and Preferred from about $33 on yearly billing; prices rise with event volume.
What happens if I exceed my BugSnag event quota?
You choose between capturing every event (with automatic upgrade after repeated overages) or rate limiting once the daily quota is reached.
Can BugSnag run on premises?
Yes, on the Enterprise plan.
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