About
Compared with the alternatives
bugbottle is one small piece of a crowded field, and it is not the most
capable thing in it. This page places it next to six tools people actually
reach for, so you can tell in a minute whether you want a library or a
product. Every figure below was checked on 7 September 2026 against the page
linked in its row, except the @sentry/react row, which was checked on
27 September 2026; prices and features move, so follow the link before you
decide anything.
| Tool | Licence | Hosted or your endpoint | What it captures | Size in your bundle | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bugbottle | MIT, client and server helpers alike (LICENSE) | Your endpoint. There is no bugbottle server to send anything to | Console errors and warnings, page context, the element pointed at, click and navigation breadcrumbs, failed and slow requests, an optional DOM screenshot the reporter can mark with a rectangle, an arrow or a destructive blur (docs) | About 1.4 kB gzipped for the core, 5.5 kB for the React hook, 12 kB for the ready-made panel (budgets in CI) | Free |
| Marker.io | Commercial | Hosted. Reports land in Marker.io and are pushed to your tracker | Annotated screenshot, session replay, console and network logs, browser and environment details (console logs) | Not published | From $39/mo; console, network and replay start on the $149/mo Team plan (pricing) |
| Jam | Commercial | Hosted. A Jam is a link on jam.dev | Screen recording, console, network, device and browser details, the actions leading up to the bug, all from the moment you press record (jam.dev) | Nothing — it is a browser extension, not a script in your app | Free tier, then $14 per creator per month (pricing) |
| Sentry User Feedback | SDK is MIT (sentry-javascript) | Sentry's ingest. The widget is yours to replace, the backend is not | The message plus screenshot and attachments, joined to the error, the release, the trace and the replay Sentry already has (docs) | Not published as one number: the widget is loaded on top of the browser SDK, which is the larger part | Free developer plan, then from $26/mo (pricing) |
@sentry/react |
MIT (licence) | Sentry's ingest. Self-hosting Sentry is a separate product and a separate bill | Every unhandled error, unhandled rejection and console call with breadcrumbs, the release and the environment; captureFeedback attaches a typed report to the error it happened next to (docs) |
33.2 kB gzipped for init alone, 95.8 kB with replayIntegration() and captureFeedback in the bundle — 2.8× the whole bugbottle panel, and 8× it (measured) |
Free developer plan, then $26/mo Team; 50 session replays a month on every plan (pricing) |
| BugPin | AGPL-3.0 server, MIT widget (repository) | Self-hosted: its own Bun, Hono and SQLite service, or nothing | Annotated screenshot, console errors, network activity, page metadata, with an offline queue in front of the send (repository) | Under 150 kB gzipped for the widget, in a shadow root (repository) | Free; you run the server |
| rrweb | MIT (repository) | Neither. It is a recording primitive with no backend and no UI | Every DOM mutation and input event, as a stream you replay later (repository) | Tens of kilobytes for the recorder, and the events keep arriving for as long as you record | Free |
What the others do that bugbottle does not #
Marker.io and Jam both hand a non-technical reporter something bugbottle
cannot: in Jam's case a video of what they did, and in both cases a place for
the report to land with a queue, an assignee and a history. bugbottle now has
the drawing — a rectangle, an arrow and a blur over the screenshot — but it
still ends at the JSON it posts to your endpoint. The nearest thing to a place
it lands is
examples/inbox:
a dependency-free Node server that writes each report to disk and serves a
read-only list behind one password. That is an example you copy and own, not a
queue with owners and a history, and it is deliberately as far as this project
goes.
Neither needs a developer to install anything in the application at all — Jam is a browser extension, which means it works on a site you do not own, and on the third-party page your bug turned out to be on.
Sentry User Feedback is the tool to beat when you already run Sentry, because it is the only one in this table that ties the sentence someone typed to the stack trace, the release and the session replay of the same moment. bugbottle sends a report; Sentry sends a report into a case file that was already open.
The SDK underneath it is the one everybody actually installs: @sentry/react
took 29 251 063 downloads in the week to 26 September 2026, and bugbottle took
191 in the same week (npm's download API,
queried 27 September 2026). That comparison is not a score — CI runs and
transitive installs inflate the large number, and one npm package is not a
product — but it is the honest answer to "what does a JavaScript team reach for
when it wants users to report bugs". The costs of that reach are the ones this
page is for. It weighs 33.2 kB gzipped before it has recorded anything, which
is two and a half times bugbottle's entire panel, and 95.8 kB once session
replay and captureFeedback are in the bundle — eight times the panel, sent
to somebody else's ingest, billed per event, with 50 session replays a month
included on every plan including the free one. If you already pay for Sentry,
none of that is an argument: you have bought those bytes and that quota
already, and running a second store of reports next to the one you read every
morning is a store nobody reads. If you do not, it is the cost of finding out
that it is worth it.
BugPin gives you the dashboard and the triage that bugbottle deliberately does not ship, and you can still run it on your own hardware. What "your own hardware" costs is a column of its own, and self-hosting bugbottle answers it: there is no service to run, three ways to receive a report yourself, and the five things that bite whoever writes the route. rrweb records far more than bugbottle ever will: it is the recorder underneath several of the products above, and if what you need is to watch the minute before the bug, nothing here replaces it.
When to pick something else #
Pick Jam or Marker.io if the people reporting bugs are not developers and what unblocks them is a place the report lands in — a queue, an owner, a status — rather than a route in your own application. Pick Sentry, the SDK or the product, if you already pay for it, because a second store of reports next to the one you check every morning is a store nobody checks. Pick BugPin or another self-hosted product if you want a dashboard and are happy to run a service and its database. Pick rrweb if the question is "what did they do before it broke" rather than "what is broken", and you have somewhere to put several megabytes of events.
Pick bugbottle when you already have an API, a database and an inbox, and the only missing piece is the few kilobytes that turn "it's broken" into a JSON report you can act on: no dashboard, no account, no vendor that can shut down or reprice, and nothing between the browser and a route you wrote. That is a narrower job than any product on this page does, and it is the whole of what this library is for.
The wider field #
The six above are the ones worth standing next to; the September 2026 survey they came from covers about twenty more — Userback, BugHerd, Gleap, OpenReplay, Highlight.io, FasterFixes and the rest — with the same figures and the same sources. It lives in the repository as docs/research-alternatives.md.