Comparison between TestFlight Live, QuincyKit and Crashlytics

pAkY88 picture pAkY88 · Dec 26, 2012 · Viewed 14.5k times · Source

I am going to launch my app on the AppStore and I would like to keep track of crashes and fix them as soon as possible. If possible, it would be nice to collect also some additional information about user activity and other useful stuff. In order to do so, I have looked for some crash reporting tools and the most interesting ones I have found are: TestFlight Live, QuincyKit and Crashlytics.

Among those three, QuincyKit should be the lightest one but the other two seem to be quite interesting since they provide more sophisticated reports and other interesting stuff.

My goal is to have as many information as I can on any issue the user can experience, but at the same time I don't want to make the app slower or consume more resources.

  1. In your opinion and from your personal experience, which of these tools is the best one (taking into account my goal and my needs)?
  2. By using TestFlight Live or Crashlytics I would make my app too slow?
  3. Is there a risk to overload the device?
  4. Reports provided by QuincyKit are precise enough? How many information can I retrieve from them?

Thanks!

Here is what I decided:

I am using Crashlytics for crash reporting (yes, it seems to be really great) and TestFlight for tracking user activity (checkpoints are really useful to find out what users generally do and figure out what the tendency is). I followed the instructions written here

Answer

bsneed picture bsneed · Dec 27, 2012

I honestly think Crashlytics is a better solution than Testflight for crash reporting.

Here's what you get with Crashlytics that you don't get with the others.

  • Duplicate culling (TF does this too, but its not too great at it, Crashlytics is damned near perfect)
  • You can actually mark crashes as closed/resolved, and get them out of your list for a given version.
  • Crashlytics does everything TF's Crash reporting does, but better and then some (logging, stack traces, etc.)
  • Percentage of affected users, and the numbers that go with that. (ie: should i fix the bug that happened to one guy, or the one that's happening to 10k?) Testflight doesn't tell you this.
  • Prioritization based on occurrence. This is probably the most important gain in my opinion.

These are just a few, but I figure they're probably the most important ones for you.

We used Testflight's crash reporting for close to 2 years on an extremely popular app (several million D/Ls). Its definitely better than nothing, and very convenient if you're using TF for distribution as well, however you get many more benefits from Crashlytics. We switched to Crashlytics this summer and now we're actually able to manage crashes and make smart decisions about what to fix and when, instead of just sifting through a giant never ending list.

I see you already accepted an answer, but I'd seriously give it another look even if you opt to continue with Testflight. I've found its hard to really grasp what you're missing until your app has shipped, at which point is even harder to change.