February 26, 2026
Your customer finds a bug in your app. In the old workflow, they send you a Slack message, a screenshot in email, or a Loom video describing what's broken. You ask clarifying questions. They reply hours later. You get a 10-second video of the problem and have to reproduce it yourself, dig through logs, and guess at the context. By the time you understand the issue, the customer is frustrated.
In-app bug reporting eliminates this cycle. Users report bugs directly from your product, and the tool automatically captures what they were doing—a full session replay, console logs, network requests, device information, and exact browser state. Your developers see the bug from the user's perspective, not a description of it. They can reproduce it instantly, understand the flow that led to the problem, and fix it without the back-and-forth. This turns bug reporting from a slow, frustrating process into a data-rich, efficient workflow.
Session replay is a video of everything the user did in your app leading up to the bug. It records clicks, form inputs, page navigation, and visual changes in real-time. This is invaluable because it shows you the exact steps that triggered the bug—users often have trouble articulating their workflow in words, but a video is unambiguous. Developers can watch the replay, see the click-by-click flow, and spot the problem immediately.
Every JavaScript error, warning, and log statement your app generates is automatically captured and attached to the bug report. If your app throws an exception when the user clicks a button, that error message is in the logs. This eliminates the need to ask the user "What error did you see?" You have the raw error message, stack trace, and any context your app logged during the session.
Bug reporting tools capture a full record of HTTP requests and responses—API calls, their status codes, payloads, and latencies. If a user reports a bug that's actually a backend failure (API returned 500, timed out, returned invalid data), the network logs show exactly what happened. This helps you spot whether the issue is frontend, backend, or network-related.
The report includes the user's browser (Chrome 131 on macOS), device type, screen resolution, network speed, and geolocation. Some bugs are device-specific (mobile-only layout issues) or browser-specific (Safari CSS quirks). Metadata helps your team spot these patterns and reproduce locally.
Advanced bug reporting tools can infer or ask the user to explain the steps that led to the bug. Some capture it from session replay (automated step reconstruction), others ask in a form ("What did you do before seeing the bug?"). Either way, you have a clear workflow to follow, not a vague description.
The ideal workflow is simple: user reports → team reviews → engineer investigates → ticket created → fix deployed → user notified.
User reports bug directly from your app. They see something broken, click a feedback button or shake their phone, and a form pops up asking "What's wrong?" They type 2-3 sentences. The tool captures session replay, logs, network data, and metadata automatically. The user submits and is done.
Your team gets a notification. The bug report lands in a unified inbox prioritized by severity. Critical bugs (failures that block workflows) bubble to the top. Your support or product team triages: is this a real bug or user confusion? Is it critical or cosmetic? They assign it a label and priority.
An issue tracker ticket is created. When you decide to fix the bug, your team creates a Jira or Linear ticket from the bug report in one click. The ticket links back to the bug so developers can see the session replay, logs, and context without switching tools. The developer doesn't just see "Submit button broken," they see exactly what the user did and what error was logged.
The developer fixes it. With full context from the bug report, the developer can reproduce locally (or follow the exact steps from replay), identify the root cause, and fix it. The reproduction data accelerates debugging by hours or days.
The loop closes. When the fix ships, your team marks the bug as resolved. The tool notifies the user who reported it: "We fixed the submit button issue you reported. Thanks for letting us know!" This reinforces that you listen and drives customer satisfaction.
The user voluntarily reports a bug. They hit a feedback button, take a screenshot, annotate it, or fill out a form describing the issue. This is high-intent feedback—the user is motivated to help you fix it. User-initiated reporting gives you rich context because the user can describe the problem in their own words, and the tool captures the session context automatically. The downside is you only hear about bugs from engaged users; users who abandon your product silently due to bugs won't report them.
Your app automatically reports unhandled errors (JavaScript crashes, API failures) to a monitoring tool like BugSnag or Sentry. You don't need the user to hit a button—if the app crashes, you know about it. This catches bugs that impact many users but few notice or report. The downside is that automated error reports lack user context. You know there was an error but not what the user was trying to do. Many teams use both: automated monitoring catches crashes, user-initiated reporting provides context for non-critical issues.
Some tools let users draw or annotate on a screenshot. They can circle a broken UI element, draw an arrow to highlight the issue, or write text on the screenshot. This is useful for visual bugs (wrong color, misaligned text, missing element) that are hard to describe in words. The downside is that screenshots are static—they don't show the sequence of events that triggered the bug, unlike session replay.
| Tool | Platform Coverage | Starting Price | Session Replay | Live Chat Included | Free Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gleap | Web + iOS + Android | $19/month | Yes, with console logs auto-attached | Yes | Yes |
| Instabug | iOS + Android only | $99/month | Yes | No | No |
| ShakeBugs | iOS + Android only | $29/month | No | No | No |
| BugSnag | Web + mobile (monitoring focused) | Free tier, $59/month Team | No | No | Yes |
| Marker.io | Web only | $39/month (3 users) | No (screenshots only) | No | No |
| Usersnap | Web + mobile | $99/month | No (screenshots only) | No | No |
| Userback | Web + mobile | $49/month | No (video recording optional) | No | No |
Implementing in-app bug reporting is straightforward if you follow this five-step process:
Gleap combines web, iOS, and Android in a single SDK, so you install once per platform and get coverage across your entire product. When a user reports a bug, Gleap automatically attaches session replay (video of their actions), console logs, network requests, device information, and metadata. The developer doesn't see a support ticket—they see the bug from the user's perspective with all the context needed to reproduce.
The platform is SOC 2 Type II certified, which matters if you have enterprise customers who require security compliance. Session replay respects privacy by default—you can mask sensitive fields (passwords, credit card numbers, PII) so they don't appear in the recording. Gleap also works offline; if your app is used on unreliable networks, session replay continues recording and syncs the data when the user reconnects.
Integration with issue trackers (Jira, Linear, GitHub, etc.) is seamless. When your team marks a bug as "in progress," Gleap can automatically create a ticket or update an existing one. When the ticket is closed, Gleap can notify the user who reported the bug. This closes the feedback loop and reinforces that you listen to customer feedback. Video calling is also built in, so if a bug report requires clarification, you can video call the user directly from Gleap's chat widget without needing Zoom or Google Meet.
We publish in-depth comparison guides across this cluster. Links will appear here as new guides are published.
In-app bug reporting is a feature that lets users report bugs directly from within your product. They click a feedback button or shake their mobile device, and a form appears asking them to describe the issue. When they submit, the tool automatically captures a session replay (video of what they did), console logs (error messages from your app), network requests (API calls and responses), device information, and metadata. This context is attached to the bug report so your developers can understand what happened without asking clarifying questions. It's faster, richer, and more reliable than email or screenshots.
A complete in-app bug report includes: a video of the user's session (every click, form input, page change), JavaScript console logs and errors, HTTP request/response data (API calls and failures), browser and OS information (Chrome on macOS vs. Safari on iPhone), screen resolution, network speed, geolocation, and user metadata (account ID, plan, signup date, previous support tickets). Some tools also capture device sensors like device orientation or battery level. All of this is automatically collected; the user just has to type 2-3 sentences describing the problem.
In-app bug reporting captures user experience bugs—the button doesn't work, the form doesn't submit, the page is slow. It's triggered when the user sees something wrong and decides to report it. Error monitoring (like BugSnag or Sentry) automatically captures unhandled errors and crashes in your app, even if the user never reports them. Error monitoring tells you about bugs that crash your app. In-app bug reporting tells you about bugs that frustrate users but don't crash. Both are valuable—combine them for the best visibility. Use error monitoring for crashes, in-app reporting for user experience issues.
Yes, it works on both native (iOS/Android) and web. Mobile bug reporting is often superior to web because session replay on mobile captures everything—touch events, network requests, logs—without needing the user to manually take screenshots. Shake-to-report (tilt your phone to open the feedback form) is a popular mobile pattern because it's intuitive. Some tools like Instabug and ShakeBugs are mobile-only. Gleap covers both web and mobile with a single integration, so your team sees bug reports from your entire user base in one inbox.
When your team reviews a bug report and decides it's worth fixing, you can create a Jira or Linear ticket directly from the bug tool without copying and pasting details. The ticket is automatically populated with the bug description and linked back to the original report. Developers can click from the Jira ticket to view the session replay, console logs, and network data. Some tools support two-way sync: when you mark a bug as "in progress" in the bug tool, the ticket status in Jira updates automatically. When you close the ticket in Jira, the bug tool can notify the user who reported it.
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