AirBrake vs Exceptional vs errbit: which one is the best to track exceptions in your rails app?

Question

It's important to collect and manage exceptions in your web application since it's unfortunately unavoidable. I used to use Exception Notifier but eventually I ended up using web-based service/tool for that purpose. AirBrake(formerly known as Hoptoad) is great but they got acquired by Exceptional so they might shut down one of the two services(they haven't officially announced anything about shutting down though). There are also several open source projects for exception managing.

Here is a list of services/tools for tracking exceptions.

• AirBrake: great exception managing service that has been acquired by Exceptional.
• Exceptional: another exception managing service that costs $9/month.
• errbit: open source error catcher that's Airbrake API compliant.

Now you will come up with an interesting question: What service/tool should I use?

If I choose AirBrake/Exceptional I should care about their intention and consider moving collected data if shutting down really happens. errbit needs to be deployed somewhere and we should manage the deployed errbit itself. New Relic and Amon can track them but these two are not as functional as the others. In this case, which one do you choose?

There is also this kind of services for other platforms(eg: bugsense for mobile platforms). But in this question just focus on rails apps.

Solution

Disclaimer. I'm the lead Product guy at Airbrake / Exceptional.

We agree that it's important to track / manage exceptions in your app; both products have been doing so successfully since 2008. Both teams built an excellent services. Unfortunately there hasn't been much product innovation in the last few years. Our team is dedicated to building a strong business exception tracking business that provides the best tools for developers. We have lots of innovation coming; longer datastore, graphs, search, analytics, reports, improved UI etc.. We plan to be around for a long time.

Regarding your concerns.

1. Service closing down. We are stabling out both products, we've updated both API and backend datastores to fix legacy scaling issue. We are currently updating both apps, and won't be shutting any service down. We are still to publish our long-term roadmap, but we will offer a way to export or take the data with you if we were to ever shut one down.

Addressing your question. "Which service should you use? (For Rails) - It depends. I would recommend trying out both services, as both have different UI features, both services a free 30 day trial. The gem is different for both apps, and I would recommend reading the respective readmes. Exceptional Gem on Github and Airbrake Gem on Github.

I'm not going to address non-rails questions here, but I'm happy to follow up on any other question. You can reach me at [email protected] or [email protected] ;-)