I fixed one bug, shipped a new version with that bug still in it, and waited to see what my error trackers would say. BugSnag reopened one error and wrote down why: "Reopened by BugSnag, This error occurred in 1.1.0". Airbrake reopened all five of my errors, with no label on any of them.
Airbrake wasn't malfunctioning. Reporting a deploy to Airbrake resolves every open error by default, so every bug that happened again after the deploy counted as reopened. One of those reopened groups also held two different crashes, because Airbrake had grouped them together from the start. The regression I was looking for was in there, but I had to dig for it.
That contrast holds for most of this comparison. BugSnag is the more careful error tracker: it keeps bugs apart, labels crashes, records what happened and why, and scores each release. Airbrake is the more direct one, with fewer moving parts, plus something BugSnag doesn't give you out of the box: route performance numbers with no extra setup.
The sections that follow put the two tools through identical tasks, from setup and grouping to debugging, search, triage, regressions, performance, alerts, AI and cost. You'll get a verdict at the end of each, all drawn from what I saw while testing both in October 2026.
| Job | Stronger in my test | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Signing up | BugSnag | No card for the trial; Airbrake asks for one |
| Grouping | BugSnag | Six bugs became six errors; Airbrake merged two crashes and can't split them |
| Error detail | BugSnag | Labelled tabs, a breadcrumb timeline and a user tab; Airbrake shows raw JSON |
| Search and breakdowns | Airbrake | 27 filters with "N of M" counts and over 20 aggregations per group |
| Triage | BugSnag | Assign, snooze by impact and ignore; Airbrake resolves, mutes or deletes |
| Releases and regressions | BugSnag | Version-aware fixes and stability scores; Airbrake reopened everything |
| Performance | Airbrake | Route timings and Apdex with no setup; BugSnag needs OpenTelemetry |
| Alerts and integrations | BugSnag | PagerDuty and more; Airbrake alerts are on and off toggles |
| AI | Not compared | BugSnag offers an MCP fix flow I didn't run; I found no AI in Airbrake |
| Price | BugSnag to start | A free plan; Airbrake starts at $19 a month |
My test bed, monitoring-lab, is a bookstore that breaks on schedule. It runs as an Express API on SQLite, next to a deliberately unreliable price service and a report job that throws once a minute. BugSnag and Airbrake each plug in through a small adapter file, which means both saw identical failures from identical server code:
GET /books/:idPOST /checkout, which I call the coupon crashBoth crashes are the same kind of TypeError, "Cannot read properties of undefined", thrown from different routes for different reasons. That detail matters in the grouping section.
Scripted shoppers named alice, bob and carol generated the traffic. Once 1.0.0 had run, I resolved the coupon crash in both dashboards and put out 1.1.0 with the bug left in. I used @bugsnag/js with its Express plugin, and Airbrake's Node notifier, version 2.1.9.
A few things to keep in mind:
BugSnag's trial needed no card. Its onboarding asks where your app runs before showing the setup for your platform, and the Express snippet placed the request handler first and the error handler after the routes.
Airbrake asked for a card before it would activate the trial:
The page asks for card details as part of account creation, and Airbrake's pricing page confirms that "starting a new account requires a valid email and credit card". Setup itself was quick once you're in, and Airbrake's notifier started sending errors and request timings at once.
One small Airbrake trap: my data landed in a project named "Monitoring", while the default "First project" stayed empty, which is confusing on the first visit.
Verdict: BugSnag. Both are quick to set up, but a free trial without a card is easier to say yes to.
Both tools caught every failure, including the uncaught promise rejection. They disagreed on how many bugs that was.
BugSnag counted six, one per bug:
The missing-book crash and the coupon crash are separate rows, each labelled "Default grouping", and each row marks the error as handled or unhandled. If BugSnag's default ever lets you down, project settings offer "Group by error class" and "Group by error context".
Airbrake counted five. It grouped errors by their message pattern, and both crashes normalize to "Cannot read properties of undefined (reading {})", so they landed in one group. You only find that out from the group's Aggregations tab:
Under "Message params", 13 occurrences read title and 10 read discount, and the Files breakdown shows two different lines, 38 and 81. That's two bugs with two fixes sharing one group. Airbrake has no way to split it, and no way to merge groups either, so you live with the default.
The same rule worked in Airbrake's favor elsewhere. My report job fails with a different run number each time, "Sales report run #3 failed", "#4" and so on, and Airbrake folded every run into one group through its message pattern. BugSnag also kept the job in one group.
This is one result from one app. Airbrake's pattern-based grouping helps when messages differ only in values, and it hurts when different bugs produce the same message, which is common with JavaScript's generic TypeError text. When we compared Sentry with Airbrake, the same two crashes stayed separate in Sentry, as they did in BugSnag.
Verdict: BugSnag. Its default kept every bug apart, and it gives you settings to change the rule. Airbrake's merged group can't be split.
For server errors, both tools stop at file and line, so the code itself stays in your editor. BugSnag's stack starts at server.js:38:45, followed by Express router frames and a "Raw view" switch. Airbrake pointed at server.js:81:45 with no function name and no code. Its raw context explained why: "sourceMapErrors" says it can't read file:// paths, so a local app gets no source either way.
Beyond the stack, the two tools present context very differently.
BugSnag splits an event into labelled tabs: Stacktrace, Breadcrumbs, App, Correlated events, Device, Request, User and Trace, plus a tab for your own metadata. The user gets a tab of their own:
Email and ID sit in labelled fields, so you know whose checkout failed without reading JSON. Breadcrumbs appear as a timeline with a type filter and search, and data my code attached to a handled error landed in its own Details tab with the book ID, email and quantity.
BugSnag also marked the promise rejection as unhandled, even though its stack had only one frame:
The single frame, server.js:144:9 loadRecommendations, is all the stack there is, but the unhandled label tells you this one crashed rather than being reported on purpose.
Airbrake's Overview tab starts strong. Next to the error type, file and version, it shows the error rate of the route it came from:
"11.76% error rate from 85 requests to this route: POST /checkout" tells you how much of the endpoint is broken, which BugSnag doesn't show on an error. Below that, though, the detail turns raw. My breadcrumbs, sent as a parameter, appear as JSON:
There's no timeline or icon, just "checkout started" and "book found" as nested objects next to operating system and process details. The plan page lists breadcrumbs as a feature, but no breadcrumb panel appeared for my Node errors. The shopper's email lives only inside the raw Context JSON and the Users aggregation, never in a labelled field.
Airbrake also doesn't separate crashes from errors you reported on purpose. The handled out-of-stock error and the crashes all show severity "error", and the uncaught promise rejection arrived with one frame and nothing marking it as unhandled.
Verdict: BugSnag. Its labelled tabs, user field, breadcrumb timeline and unhandled marker make every error faster to read. Airbrake's route error rate is a useful extra, but it doesn't make up for the raw JSON underneath.
Neither BugSnag nor Airbrake showed one line of my server code, and Airbrake left my breadcrumbs as raw JSON. Better Stack showed the code around the failing line on the error itself, along with the bug comments I'd left in it:
One more click, "View logs", narrowed Live tail to that request, putting the app's log lines beside the failure as plain text:
Neither BugSnag nor Airbrake stores logs at all.
This is where Airbrake earns its place.
Its search box offers 27 filter keys as chips, including User, Version, Route, Environment and Message param:
Pick a key, then a value, and the list updates with counts. Filtering by carol showed how much of each group was hers:
"5 of 16" on the out-of-stock group and "4 of 23" on the crash group tell you her share at a glance. Inside each group, the Aggregations tab breaks occurrences down by more than 20 fields, including users, versions, routes, files and message values, each with first and last seen. Filters are chips only, though: typing route:/check was treated as free text and matched nothing.
BugSnag's filters are structured chips too, and they worked well. Filtering to bob's email and open errors found his two errors, with his event count on each. The error page then summarizes each error by release stage, app type, release and host. It's capable, but it has nothing as deep as Airbrake's Aggregations tab.
Verdict: Airbrake. Its "N of M" counts and per-group breakdowns answer "who and what is affected" faster than BugSnag's summaries.
BugSnag gives you the full set of triage actions: assign, mark as fixed, snooze, ignore, comment and link an issue. Its snooze waits on impact instead of time:
You can hide an error until it happens again, happens after a set time, reaches a count or affects more users, so a quiet error stays out of the way until it spreads.
Airbrake keeps triage to a minimum. Resolving takes a single click, offers an Undo, and asks nothing else:
"Error was resolved. Undo" is the whole interaction, with no choice of version. Beyond that, you can mute, delete or comment. The only bulk action is Resolve, and I found no assign, priority, snooze or merge.
Verdict: BugSnag. On a team, you need to know who owns an error and when it's worth looking at again. Airbrake's single resolve button works for one developer, and gets thin for anyone more.
BugSnag takes the version your SDK reports and tracks sessions on its own. Its Express plugin treats every request as a session, which gives each release a stability score without any configuration:
Version 1.0.0 scored 83.103% session stability over 290 sessions, marked "Critical stability" against BugSnag's default 99% target. My app fails on purpose, so the number is low by design.
Airbrake records the version on each error, but treats deploys as a separate thing. Sending a version doesn't create a deploy, so I reported deploys through its API. In project settings, one option is switched on by default: "Resolve all errors in environment after a deploy".
That setting decides what a regression looks like in Airbrake, as the next test shows.
I marked the coupon crash as fixed and shipped 1.1.0 with the bug still in place.
BugSnag reopened that error and nothing else. Its "Mark as fixed" works per version, and the error page shows the split:
The Releases summary puts 51.9% of the error's 27 events on 1.1.0, and the activity log reads "Fixed by Stanley Ulili, Until this error occurs again in a new version", then "Reopened by BugSnag, This error occurred in 1.1.0". On the 1.1.0 release page, "Errors introduced" correctly showed none, since no new bug shipped. In the inbox, though, the row carried no reopened badge.
Airbrake reopened all five groups. The 1.1.0 deploy resolved the four errors I hadn't touched, its activity feed said "resolving 4 errors", and every one of them happened again. The crash group reopened too, with a count since the deploy:
"OCCURRENCES 46 (23 since last deploy)" is the only regression signal, and since this group holds both crashes, you need its Aggregations tab to see that the missing-book crash added 16 of those events and the coupon crash 7. No row says "reopened", and the activity feed has no entry for the reopen.
The deploy page didn't help either:
It reads "Fixed errors 0" and "Introduced errors 0", even though the activity feed credited the same deploy with resolving four errors. I sent the same revision twice, so its comparison had nothing to compare, but the zero fixed count still contradicts the feed.
If you prefer Airbrake's clean slate per deploy, you can keep the setting on and read every reopened group as "still happening". If you want regressions to stand out, switch it off, and BugSnag's version-aware fix does that job without any setting.
Verdict: BugSnag. It reopened exactly the bug I'd fixed, explained why, and scored each release. Airbrake's defaults turned one regression into five reopened groups.
BugSnag explained the reopen only inside the error, and Airbrake buried it among five reopened groups. Better Stack marked the comeback in the error list, where you'd notice it first, with a red "Reoccurred" status:
Only the error I'd resolved came back, and its tags split the events by release, 34 on 1.0.0 and 10 on 1.1.0:
Releases came from the SDK, with no deploy call and no setting that resolves everything behind your back.
Airbrake includes route performance, and it worked from the first request:
Sorted by the 95th percentile, GET /search (1.90 s) and GET /prices/:id (1.70 s) are highlighted in orange at the top, which matches the two slow paths I built in. The overview adds an Apdex score of 0.92, request rate, mean response time and error rate.
The detail stops there. Opening /search showed no breakdown of where its time went:
The mean response time shows a dash, the breakdown bar is empty, and Queries reads "No data for the chosen time period". There are no traces, and in my trial the performance data was kept for 7 days.
BugSnag has a performance product, but it needs OpenTelemetry:
Every performance view stayed empty, with a prompt to install the OpenTelemetry SDK. With that in place, BugSnag offers page loads, inbound and outbound requests and custom spans, which is more than Airbrake's route table. I didn't install it, so I can't judge the result.
Verdict: Airbrake for performance you get today, with zero setup. BugSnag if you're willing to adopt OpenTelemetry for deeper data.
Airbrake told me which routes were slow and then showed an empty breakdown, and BugSnag showed nothing until I'd install OpenTelemetry. Better Stack traced the same app through the Sentry SDK and laid each slow request out as a waterfall:
Every stage of the request gets its own bar, which makes a slow query or upstream call obvious rather than averaged away into a route figure.
BugSnag connects to Slack, Datadog, Jira, Trello, PagerDuty, webhooks and Splunk, alongside email notifications:
The list covers chat, issue tracking, incident management and data forwarding, so an error can page someone through PagerDuty.
Airbrake connects to Slack, Teams, Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello and webhooks. Its Jira integration can create an issue for each new error and reopen it when the error comes back:
Alerting itself is a set of toggles. Each user picks email for errors and comments, digest frequency, high-volume repeats and a production-only filter:
There's no rule builder with thresholds or time windows, no performance alerts, and no PagerDuty or Opsgenie in the list. I didn't connect any integration in either tool.
Verdict: BugSnag, mainly for PagerDuty and incident routing. Airbrake's Jira auto-reopen is a nice touch for teams that live in Jira.
BugSnag's "Fix with MCP" button passes an error to SmartBear's MCP server, where the AI assistant in your IDE can pick it up. On my trial it offered to install the server first, and I cancelled. I didn't find an AI feature in Airbrake.
Verdict: none, since I ran neither. BugSnag at least gives you a route into your own assistant.
BugSnag hands AI work to an MCP server you install yourself, and Airbrake has none. Better Stack's AI SRE is part of the product. I asked it what changed in a bad release of the same app, and it worked through the releases, errors, traces and logs without any prompting from me:
It found the slow database query and the new failing payment step, kept the two causes apart, and recommended a rollback, without access to my repository. It needed roughly four minutes, and the run displayed a $0.49 cost.
I took these numbers from BugSnag's and Airbrake's pricing pages on October 26, 2026, and from my two trial accounts. Check both before you buy.
| BugSnag | Airbrake | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | ✔: 7,500 events, 1 user | ✘: none |
| Free plan retention | 7 days | Not applicable |
| Trial | 14 days | 30 days in my account |
| Card for the trial | ✘: not needed | ✔: required |
| BugSnag | Airbrake | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Select | Dev, $19 a month with errors included, 1 user |
| Team plan | Preferred | Basic, $38 a month with errors, unlimited users, 3 teams |
| Higher plan | Enterprise, custom | Pro, $76 a month with errors, adds audit logs and spike forgiveness |
| Published price | Set on a volume slider | Fixed per plan, about 10% less billed annually |
| Error volume | 50,000 to 3M events | 25,000 errors on the first tier |
| Performance | Span volume, with OpenTelemetry | Included route performance |
| Retention | 60 days | 30 days for errors |
Airbrake's plan prices combine a plan package with an error tier. In my trial, Basic showed as a $19 package plus a $19 tier for 25,000 errors, and extra errors cost $6.50 per 10,000. My trial listed performance retention as 7 days, while the current pricing calculator shows 30 days, so confirm it with Airbrake.
BugSnag's page shows "starting at $0" next to a slider instead of fixed paid prices, so the real cost depends on the volume you choose or a sales quote.
| Need | BugSnag | Airbrake |
|---|---|---|
| Logs | ✘: needs another product | ✘: needs another product |
| Session replay | ✘: not listed | ✘: not offered |
| Request traces | With OpenTelemetry | ✘: not offered |
| Uptime and status pages | ✘: needs another product | ✘: needs another product |
Verdict: BugSnag to start, since it has a free plan and a card-free trial. Airbrake's fixed prices are easy to read, and my trial included a free performance tier of 50,000 events, covering route timings that BugSnag only gives you with OpenTelemetry.
| Feature | BugSnag | Airbrake |
|---|---|---|
| Card for the trial | ✘: not needed | ✔: required |
| Grouping in this test | 6 errors for 6 bugs | 5 groups, two crashes merged |
| Split or merge groups | ✔: grouping settings | ✘: neither |
| Handled vs unhandled | ✔: labelled | ✘: not shown |
| Server source lines | ✘: frames only | ✘: frames only |
| Breadcrumbs | ✔: timeline with filter and search | ✘: raw JSON parameter |
| User context | ✔: user tab, correlated events | Raw JSON and a Users aggregation |
| Route error rate on an error | ✘: not shown | ✔: shown on the overview |
| Search | ✔: structured filters | ✔: 27 filter chips with N of M counts |
| Per-group breakdowns | ✔: summaries by release and host | ✔: over 20 aggregations |
| Assign and snooze | ✔: both, snooze by impact | ✘: neither |
| Resolve options | ✔: fixed until a new version | ✘: one click, no options |
| Release health | ✔: session stability per release | ✘: not offered |
| Deploys | ✔: version from the SDK | ✔: reported by CLI or API |
| Auto-resolve on deploy | Off by default | On by default |
| Regression signal | Activity log entry | "Since last deploy" count |
| Route performance | With OpenTelemetry, untested | ✔: p50, p95 and Apdex built in |
| Traces | With OpenTelemetry, untested | ✘: not offered |
| PagerDuty | ✔: available | ✘: not listed |
| AI | Fix with MCP, untested | ✘: none found |
BugSnag is the right choice if a whole team will share the error tracker day to day. It keeps bugs apart, labels crashes, shows who was affected, handles regressions per version and scores the health of each release. It's especially strong if you ship apps where crash-free sessions matter, and its free plan lets one person try it properly. Those qualities also held their own against a much bigger product in our Sentry vs BugSnag comparison.
Airbrake suits a small team that wants errors and route performance from one simple tool and a fixed monthly price. Its filters and aggregations are excellent for understanding impact, and slow routes show up with no setup. Turn off the deploy auto-resolve if you want regressions to stand out, and watch for different bugs that share an error message.
Neither stores logs or replays sessions, so either one will sit next to other tools. For a tracker with session replay and suspected deploys instead, see our BugSnag vs Rollbar comparison.
The difference between these two is care versus speed. BugSnag does more work on every error so you don't have to, from grouping to regressions to release health. Airbrake gives you less detail per error, and more numbers about your routes, for a simple monthly price.
When I fixed one bug and shipped it unfixed, BugSnag reopened one error and Airbrake reopened all five. Pick the tool whose defaults you'd trust at the end of a long release day.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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