Table of Contents
1. Overview: Free but Limited vs Paid and Complete
Firebase Crashlytics is Google's crash reporting service, included for free in the Firebase platform. It has become the default starting point for most iOS and Android developers. But as teams scale, they consistently hit the same walls.
Firebase Crashlytics
A free crash reporting tool that shows crash counts, affected users, and stack traces. It integrates tightly with the Firebase ecosystem (Analytics, Performance, Remote Config). Crashlytics does one thing — crash counting — and does it adequately. It does not do logging, AI analysis, webhooks, or structured alerting.
Cost: Free
Primary focus: Crash counting and stack traces
Logging: None
Logtrics
A mobile observability platform that combines crash reporting, remote logging, AI root cause analysis, and real-time alerting in a single SDK. Designed for teams that need to understand not just that a crash happened, but exactly why and how to fix it.
Cost: Free plan + paid from $25/mo
Primary focus: Full mobile observability
Logging: Built into same SDK
2. Full Feature Comparison Table
| Feature | Logtrics | Crashlytics |
|---|---|---|
| iOS crash reporting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android crash reporting | ✓ | ✓ |
| React Native — JS crashes | ✓ Full support | Partial |
| React Native — source maps | ✓ Automatic | ✗ Not supported |
| Flutter crash reporting | ✓ Full (Dart + native) | Native only |
| Remote logging | ✓ Built-in | ✗ None |
| Structured log search | ✓ | ✗ |
| AI root cause analysis | ✓ | ✗ |
| Session correlation | ✓ Logs + crashes linked | ✗ |
| Slack alerts | ✓ | ✗ |
| Email alerts | ✓ | Firebase email digest only |
| Webhook alerts | ✓ | ✗ |
| iOS dSYM symbolication | ✓ Automatic | ✓ Xcode integration |
| Android ProGuard mapping | ✓ Automatic | ✓ Gradle plugin |
| Data retention | Up to 365 days | 90 days |
| Price | Free + from $25/mo | Free |
3. What Crashlytics Cannot Do
Crashlytics is a crash counter. It counts crashes, groups them by issue type, and shows you the stack trace. That is the full extent of what it does. Here are the gaps that teams consistently hit:
No Remote Logging
Crashlytics has no ability to capture log statements from your app. When you get a crash report, you see the stack trace but have no idea what the user was doing, what API calls were made, or what state the app was in before the crash. You cannot add Log.d("tag", "user tapped checkout") and have that appear in your crash report. You are always debugging in the dark.
No AI Root Cause Analysis
Crashlytics shows you a stack trace. Interpreting it is entirely your job. There is no AI engine to analyze the crash, no automatic explanation of why it happened, and no suggested fix. For complex crashes involving threading issues or memory pressure, this means hours of manual investigation.
No Slack or Webhook Alerts
Crashlytics cannot send a real-time alert to your Slack channel or trigger a webhook when a new crash occurs. You can receive a Firebase email digest, but there is no way to get an immediate notification with crash context delivered to your team's alert channel. For production apps, this means crashes can go unnoticed for hours.
Limited React Native Support
The @react-native-firebase/crashlytics package captures native-layer crashes but does not natively capture JavaScript exceptions or unhandled promise rejections without additional custom setup. Critically, there is no source map upload support, which means React Native production crash stack traces are unreadable minified addresses.
Limited Flutter Support
Firebase Crashlytics for Flutter captures fatal crashes in the native layer but does not handle Dart zone errors comprehensively without manual configuration. Flutter's FlutterError.onError integration requires custom code. Logtrics handles all of this automatically in the Flutter SDK.
90-Day Retention Cap
Crashlytics stores crash data for 90 days. For apps that release quarterly, this means crash data from one release cycle is gone before the next one ships. Version-over-version crash comparison becomes impossible. Logtrics retains data for up to 365 days depending on plan.
4. Platform Support: React Native and Flutter
React Native — Crashlytics Reality
The reality of using Crashlytics with React Native is significant manual overhead. You get native crash capture for iOS and Android, but:
- ✗ JS stack traces are minified — you see bundle:1:23441 not your file name
- ✗ No built-in source map upload tool exists in Crashlytics
- ✗ Promise rejections are not captured without custom ErrorUtils setup
- ✗ You cannot search logs tied to a specific JS crash
React Native — Logtrics
Logtrics provides a complete React Native solution out of the box:
- ✓ Automatic JS exception capture via ErrorUtils
- ✓ Automatic promise rejection capture
- ✓ Source map upload in CI via Logtrics CLI
- ✓ Remote logs visible alongside the crash in dashboard
- ✓ Native iOS and Android crashes captured simultaneously
Flutter — Crashlytics Reality
Flutter support in Crashlytics requires manual setup of multiple error handlers:
- ~ Must manually wire
FlutterError.onError - ~ Zone errors require
runZonedGuardedwrapper - ✗ No Dart-side remote logging capability
- ✗ Symbol upload for release builds requires manual steps
Flutter — Logtrics
Logtrics handles all Flutter error capture automatically:
- ✓ Auto-wires FlutterError.onError on init
- ✓ Zone error capture included
- ✓ Dart-side logging:
Logtrics.log('msg') - ✓ Symbol upload automated in build tooling
5. Remote Logging: The Biggest Gap
Remote logging is the most impactful feature missing from Firebase Crashlytics. Consider this scenario: your app crashes in production and Crashlytics shows you a stack trace pointing to a network call failure. You know it crashed but not why. Was the user on a slow connection? Did an API return unexpected data? Was a feature flag misconfigured? Without logs, you cannot answer any of these questions.
With Logtrics, every log statement from your app is captured and stored alongside the crash in the same session timeline. You see exactly what happened, in order, for the 30 minutes before the crash. This transforms debugging from guesswork into a deterministic process.
// Swift example — logs appear next to crashes in Logtrics dashboard
Logtrics.log(.debug, "User tapped checkout")
Logtrics.log(.info, "Loading cart: \(cartId)")
Logtrics.log(.warn, "Payment API slow: \(responseMs)ms")
Logtrics.log(.error, "Payment failed: \(error.localizedDescription)")
// If app crashes here, all above logs appear in the crash timeline
With Crashlytics, none of those log lines would be visible in your crash report. You would see only the stack trace of the crash itself.
6. AI Root Cause Analysis
Logtrics' AI root cause analysis engine processes the crash stack trace, the pre-crash logs from the same session, device state (OS version, memory usage, battery level, network status), and historical patterns across all users who triggered the same crash. It then produces a natural-language explanation of what caused the crash and what to fix.
Example AI Analysis Output
Root Cause: Nil force-unwrap in payment flow
The crash occurs when paymentMethod is nil in CheckoutViewController.processPayment() at line 84. Logs show this happens when users return from background after the payment sheet was dismissed — the delegate was deallocated but the callback still fires.
Suggested fix:
Add a nil check before force-unwrapping paymentMethod, or use guard let to exit safely.
Crashlytics Analysis
Fatal Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS SIGSEGV
0 libswiftCore.dylib 0x19a2b3c4
1 CheckoutViewController 0x1000a3f0
2 UIKit 0x18f4a2c1
Affected users: 43
Occurrences: 87
No analysis available. Interpretation is manual.
7. Alert Channels
Real-time alerting is critical for production mobile apps. Knowing about a crash 2 hours after it starts happening — when thousands of users have been affected — is unacceptable. Yet this is exactly what Crashlytics forces you into.
| Alert Type | Logtrics | Crashlytics |
|---|---|---|
| Slack real-time alert | ✓ | ✗ |
| Email alert (immediate) | ✓ | Digest only |
| Webhook / PagerDuty | ✓ | ✗ |
| Alert includes pre-crash logs | ✓ | ✗ |
| Threshold-based rules | ✓ | ✗ |
8. Pricing Comparison
Firebase Crashlytics
Price: Free
No limits on crash events. No paid upgrade path within Crashlytics itself.
To get logging you would need to add a separate tool. To get AI analysis, a separate tool. To get Slack alerts, a separate tool. The "free" cost grows significantly when you account for the additional services required to fill the gaps.
Logtrics
Free — 10K events/month
All features included. 1 app, 3-day retention.
Starter — $25/month
100K events, 3 apps, 30-day retention.
Growth — $79/month
500K events, 10 apps, 90-day retention.
Pro — $199/month
2M events, unlimited apps, 365-day retention.
The real cost of "free": If you use Crashlytics and add a separate logging tool (e.g. Datadog mobile logs at ~$3/GB), plus configure custom Slack alerting via Firebase Functions, plus spend 2–3 engineer-hours per complex crash on manual debugging — the total cost of ownership for Crashlytics quickly exceeds Logtrics' paid plans, while delivering a significantly worse debugging experience.
9. Verdict
Use Crashlytics if:
- → You are a solo developer or very early-stage startup
- → You only need basic crash counts for a simple iOS/Android app
- → You are already deeply invested in the Firebase ecosystem
- → Budget is $0 and you can live with manual crash investigation
Use Logtrics if:
- ✓ You want to understand why crashes happen, not just that they happened
- ✓ You need real-time Slack or webhook alerts for production issues
- ✓ You build with React Native or Flutter
- ✓ You want AI to explain and suggest fixes for crashes
- ✓ You want logging and crash reporting in one tool
Bottom line: Firebase Crashlytics is fine for basic iOS and Android crash counts in simple apps. Logtrics is for teams that need root cause analysis, remote logging, React Native and Flutter first-class support, and real-time alerting — all in one platform without stitching together multiple tools.
FAQ
Does Firebase Crashlytics support React Native?
Firebase Crashlytics has a React Native SDK (@react-native-firebase/crashlytics) that captures crashes, but it has significant limitations. It does not capture unhandled JS promise rejections by default, source map upload requires manual configuration, and there is no remote logging. Logtrics provides full React Native support including JS and native crash capture, automatic source map upload, and remote logging in a single SDK.
What is the main limitation of Firebase Crashlytics?
The biggest limitation of Firebase Crashlytics is the complete absence of remote logging. Crashlytics can tell you that a crash happened and show you the stack trace, but it cannot show you what the user was doing in the minutes before the crash. Without log context, you are left guessing at root causes. Additionally, Crashlytics has no AI analysis, no Slack or webhook alerts, limited React Native and Flutter support, and only 90-day data retention.
Is Firebase Crashlytics free?
Yes, Firebase Crashlytics is completely free with no limits on crash events. However, the free tier comes with significant feature limitations: no remote logging, no AI root cause analysis, no Slack or webhook alerts, 90-day retention, and limited cross-platform symbolication support. Logtrics offers a free plan (10K events/month) and paid plans starting at $25/month that include all features.
Can I use both Firebase Crashlytics and Logtrics?
Yes, you can run both simultaneously during a migration period. However, most teams switch fully to Logtrics once they experience the combined logging and crash reporting workflow, because Logtrics shows both the crash and the full session log context in one place — removing the need to correlate data between two separate tools.
See What Crashlytics Is Missing
Start with 10,000 events per month — free, no credit card required. Get crash reporting, remote logging, AI root cause analysis, and Slack alerts all in one mobile SDK. See your first crash with full context within minutes.