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by verghese 1208 days ago
Could you tell me how this compares with other open-source session replay projects such as: 1) OpenReplay (https://openreplay.com/) 2) PostHog (https://posthog.com/)
3 comments

Having used the Posthog product (which is really good btw!), its an "analytics" tool, so their replay product is very good at mapping user funnels to sessions.

On the OpenReplay end, its seems we have feature parity for session replay, but they don't have support for error monitoring and therefore linking errors to corresponding sessions (as far as I can see).

Nonetheless, happy to see other oss tools in this space!

PostHog started as a product analytics tool but we now have a fully fledged session recordings product including handling console logging and network requests for debugging. Mobile support is coming shortly too

Disclaimer: I'm Head of Product at PostHog

Very cool. Didn’t know y’all were investing in that. Always been a fan of posthog.
Thanks! And congrats on the move to open source
Thank you sir!
I didn't think postHog was a good comparison either,

I knew of rrweb https://www.rrweb.io/

Great to see more open source contendants in the space

Thanks. Yeah, we actually use rrweb under the hood and have met with a few of the core maintainers. We're proudly powered by that project.
Posthog also seems to be using rrweb.
Congrats on the open-source move! It's always good to see more players in the OSS space. We do track JS errors at OpenReplay and of course link them to recordings. Errors come with stacktraces, are also fully searchable and can be used as cards to build custom dashboards. In terms of backend errors, we took a different approach at OpenReplay. We pull them from third-party systems (i.e. Sentry, Elastic, CloudWatch, Datadog, etc.) and sync them with the corresponding replays.
On debugging side, sentry (recently?) rolled out replay too https://docs.sentry.io/product/session-replay/
We launched this last week! Right now it's only available on SaaS (sentry.io), but we've been developing it in public in our main server repository (github.com/getsentry/sentry) and plan to have proper instructions for self-hosted users soon.
Hi Ben, thanks for responding. I wonder what approach are you taking in serializing DOM changes, is it similar to rrweb [1]?

[1] https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb/blob/master/docs/serializa...

Sentry also uses rrweb!
PostHog, Highlight and Sentry are all using rrweb. At OpenReplay, we use a full proprietary solution that we built from the ground up and covers all session replay aspects (tracker, protocol and replayer).