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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Testing Frameworks
  4. Beta Testing Mobile App Distribution
  5. Crashlytics vs TestFlight

Crashlytics vs TestFlight

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

TestFlight
TestFlight
Stacks1.1K
Followers705
Votes163
Crashlytics
Crashlytics
Stacks1.0K
Followers614
Votes340

Crashlytics vs TestFlight: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Crashlytics and TestFlight are both popular mobile app testing platforms used by developers to gather real-time data and improve the stability and performance of their apps. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two platforms that set them apart.

  1. Integration with development platforms: Crashlytics is owned and integrated with Fabric, which is a comprehensive suite of developer tools, allowing seamless integration with other Fabric tools such as Answers, Digits, and Beta. On the other hand, TestFlight is owned and integrated with Apple's development platform, making it the default choice for iOS app developers.

  2. Availability for multiple platforms: Crashlytics offers support for both iOS and Android platforms, providing a unified crash reporting and analytics solution for cross-platform app development. In contrast, TestFlight is exclusively available for iOS, limiting its use to Apple app development.

  3. Beta testing features: Crashlytics provides a comprehensive beta testing distribution system called Beta, allowing developers to distribute their apps to specific groups of testers for testing before releasing them to the app store. TestFlight, which was originally an independent beta testing platform, was integrated into Apple's development platform and offers similar beta testing capabilities but with a tighter integration into the app store release process.

  4. Crash reporting and analytics: Crashlytics focuses on real-time crash reporting and analytics, providing detailed crash reports with stack traces, device information, and user data. It offers advanced analytics features, including custom events and usage data. TestFlight, while it also provides crash reporting, has a more limited set of features compared to Crashlytics.

  5. User feedback and in-app bug reporting: Crashlytics allows users to provide feedback and report bugs within the app using a customizable feedback form. This facilitates direct communication between developers and users, helping in identifying and resolving app issues. TestFlight does not offer a built-in user feedback or bug reporting feature.

  6. Pricing and ownership: Crashlytics is owned by Google and is available for free, making it an attractive option for developers who want a robust crash reporting solution without any additional cost. TestFlight, being owned by Apple, is free to use for developers distributing their apps through the App Store.

In summary, Crashlytics and TestFlight differ in their integration with development platforms, availability for multiple platforms, beta testing features, crash reporting and analytics capabilities, user feedback and bug reporting, as well as pricing and ownership. While both serve the purpose of app testing and stability improvement, the choice between the two platforms depends on the specific requirements and preferences of the developer.

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Detailed Comparison

TestFlight
TestFlight
Crashlytics
Crashlytics

With TestFlight, developers simply upload a build, and the testers can install it directly from their device, over the air.

Instead of just showing you the stack trace, Crashlytics performs deep analysis of each and every thread. We de-prioritize lines that don't matter while highlighting the interesting ones. This makes reading stack traces easier, faster, and far more useful! Crashlytics' intelligent grouping can take 50,000 crashes, distill them down to 20 unique issues, and then tell you which 3 are the most important to fix.

Sessions- Discover how testers are using your application. Watch as they progress and take unexpected turns.;Crash Reports- Reported in realtime, with environment snapshots and full session activity.;In-App Questions- The most effective way to get tester feedback. Get the answers you need by asking questions the moment a checkpoint is passed.;Checkpoints- Place checkpoints throughout your app to see how far testers are getting, confirm which areas are popular and reveal ones that need more testing.;Remote Logging- TFLogs are attached to your session and crash reports.;In-App Updates- Prompt testers to install the latest version of your app. This is the easiest way for your testers to take advantage of installing on the fly.
Instead of just showing you the stack trace, Crashlytics performs deep analysis of each and every thread. We de-prioritize lines that don't matter while highlighting the interesting ones. This makes reading stack traces easier, faster, and far more useful!;Crashlytics' intelligent grouping can take 50,000 crashes, distill them down to 20 unique issues, and then tell you which 3 are the most important to fix.;Now you'll get precise information on the performance of the devices that your apps run on. We'll let you know if the crash only happens on a specific model or generation of a device. We'll even tell you other information, like whether your app only crashes in landscape mode, or whether the proximity sensor is always on.;Through our smart reports, we'll provide key insights into your data so you can spend more time fixing and less time triaging.;Going one layer deeper, Crashlytics examines the operating system that your app is running on. We answer questions like: is it crashing only on jailbroken devices? Is this a memory issue? Does this only affect a specific version of iOS? Through our interactive reports, you'll know instantly.;Our cutting edge architecture can handle all the traffic you'll throw at us. For example, suppose a buggy update is released and all your users experience issues across all of their devices. Our system processes every crash in a record-breaking 18 milliseconds so you can take action — immediately.;Each crash we receive gets analyzed by our banks of servers. While pasting a stack trace is the simplest way to get it to you, we wanted to do better. We analyze the entire stack trace, for every crash, and apply carefully-tuned algorithms. Some lines are de-emphasized while others are highlighted, so we can take you straight to the threads and stack-frames that matter.;We've built a layer of intelligent post-processing to alert you to new issues in real-time. We've also built the channels to get that intelligence to you. Whether you're on the Crashlytics dashboard on your iPad, coding on your MacBook with Crashlytics for Mac, watching your third-party issue tracker or even your email inbox, you'll get notified when something important happens.;You're always in control — all notifications are customizable to minimize noise and maximize action.;The Crashlytics SDK uses a multi-step symbolication process to provide progressively higher levels of detail. We start with on-device symbolication. Once a crash report makes it into our system, stack frames are then re-processed against your application's dSYM on our servers. This two-step symbolication process, coupled with our advanced aggregation algorithms, provides the highest information fidelity available.;On average, Crashlytics adds only 40 KB — or the size of a single image — to the weight of your application.;We don't require linking against any additional frameworks or libraries.;When initialized at start-up, Crashlytics performs only the minimal amount of required work and defers the rest until a few seconds after app startup completes. This delay is configurable — we want your app to launch as quickly as possible;Our memory footprint has been carefully tuned to minimize overhead. We guarantee Crashlytics will not impact gameplay, video processing, or any memory-intensive operations you perform.;We care tremendously about the stability of your app and the experience for your users. If for any reason our SDK fails, its defensive design will ensure it has no negative impact.;We use run-time feature detection to ensure compatibility with iOS 4 to iOS 6 and beyond.
Statistics
Stacks
1.1K
Stacks
1.0K
Followers
705
Followers
614
Votes
163
Votes
340
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 62
    Must have for ios development
  • 49
    Beta testing
  • 20
    Easy setup
  • 10
    Easy way to push out updates for internal testers
  • 7
    In-App Updates
Pros
  • 78
    Crash tracking
  • 56
    Mobile exception tracking
  • 53
    Free
  • 37
    Easy deployment
  • 25
    Ios
Integrations
Trigger.io
Trigger.io
Jira
Jira
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Asana
Asana
HipChat
HipChat
Campfire
Campfire
Trello
Trello
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Hall
Hall

What are some alternatives to TestFlight, Crashlytics?

Instabug

Instabug

Instabug is a platform for Real-Time Contextual Insights that completely takes care of your bug reporting and user feedback process; to accelerate your workflow and allow you to release with confidence.

HockeyApp

HockeyApp

HockeyApp is the best way to collect live crash reports, get feedback from your users, distribute your betas, and analyze your test coverage.

TestFairy

TestFairy

When testing apps in the crowd, you never know what exactly was done, and what went wrong on the client side. TestFairy shows you a video of the exact test that was done, including CPU, memory, GPS, network and a lot more.

Beta by Crashlytics

Beta by Crashlytics

A streamlined solution for distributing apps that gives you a single, cross-platform toolset for iOS and Android, and a delightful, effortless onboarding for your testers.

Crittercism

Crittercism

Crittercism, based in San Francisco, California, is the world’s first mobile application performance management (APM) solution. The company’s products monitor every aspect of mobile app performance, allowing Developers and IT Operations to deliver high performing, highly reliable, highly available mobile apps. Crittercism provides a real-time global view of app diagnostics and crashes across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 apps and is used on more than 800 million unique devices and in more than 250 billion app sessions. The company’s investors include Google Ventures, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures.

Fabric by Twitter

Fabric by Twitter

Installing and managing a wide range of SDKs can be cumbersome and complex. Fabric solves this problem by combining all seven of our SDKs under one roof and organizing them into three Kits: the Crashlytics Kit, the Twitter Kit, and the MoPub Kit.

BoardingBot

BoardingBot

BoardingBot will create a site for your app and allow users to opt-in to beta testing, and receive a TestFlight invitation automatically.

DryDock

DryDock

DryDock is an open source iOS application that we built at Venmo to manage and install all of our internal builds, allow employees to download new experimental apps at any time and to easily share builds designed for a broader audience with their friends.

Updraft

Updraft

It is a platform as a service for continuous mobile app delivery and beta testing. Easy distribute your iOS and Android beta apps to your product managers, testers or designers within your organization and get as early as possible feedback to your beta app. Remove bugs and improve your product to get the highest quality. Continuous enterprise mobile app delivery and bug reporting have never been easier!

SIGNL4

SIGNL4

When critical systems fail or incidents happen, it bridges the ‘last mile’ to your staff, engineers, IT admins and workers ‘in the field’. It adds real-time mobile alerting to your services, systems and processes in no time. It notifies through persistent mobile push, text and voice calls with acknowledgement, tracking and escalation. Integrated duty and shift scheduling ensures the right people are alerted at the right time. Through convenient interfaces like email and webhooks, it adds mobile alerting and incident response capabilities to IT, IoT, SCADA and other technical systems.

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