After successfully building an app using React Native, your next question is likely, “How do I monitor my React Native app performance?” With that in mind, the next step is finding the best React Native performance monitoring tool available to you. Having the right monitoring tool is vital to maintaining optimal app performance, helping boost visibility in app stores, attracting and retaining users, and growing app profitability.

When considering monitoring tools, it’s important to go beyond the basics of crash reporting. While crash reporting is a good start, it doesn’t give you insight into the finer aspects of app performance that affect user experience and revenue – only high-quality performance monitoring tools can provide you with the data you need.

In this blog, we’ll go through…

  • React Native overview
  • The benefits of using performance monitoring tools for react native apps
  • Top React Native performance monitoring tools for 2023
  • Other React Native tools

React Native overview

React Native is an open source JavaScript framework. This framework was created by Facebook and released in 2015. Because of its longstanding history in the community, when compared to newer frameworks like Flutter, React Native has a robust community of developers and extensive components, libraries, and reference material.

The benefits of using performance monitoring tools for React Native apps

Many mobile teams want to know the benefits of monitoring their React Native app with a performance monitoring tool versus another React Native tool. Here are a few reasons why performance monitoring tools are helpful:

Informed decisions

Performance monitoring tools provide a deeper level of insight into user issues. In a performance monitoring tool, you can visualize important data in helpful dashboards, create alerts to route issues to the right teams, and proactively solve issues.

Faster detection and problem solving

Performance monitoring tools highlight the finer behavioral metrics beyond crashes and errors. When you’re equipped with one of these tools, you can see what caused a user to become frustrated, their subsequent actions in-app, and work to recreate the problem to prevent it moving forward.

Increased user retention

When your team can solve problems proactively and respond to issues at their source faster, the result is satisfied users and decreased user churn.

Top React Native performance monitoring tools for 2023

Poor performing apps have a harder time gaining visibility in app stores, attracting and retaining users, and growing important metrics like Average Order Value. Luckily, with the right performance monitoring tool, optimizing and maintaining your app can be as easy as it was to build inside of React Native.

To help, we’ve rounded up some of the best React Native performance tools below and provided rundown of each for context. Note, these performance monitoring tools appear in no particular order.

Embrace

Embrace background

Embrace is a unified mobile monitoring platform that’s designed to give you full insight into your user experience through session insights. It is the only React Native performance monitoring tool that collects 100% of data from every user session, eliminating previous gaps in app performance and user visibility.

React Native SDK details

Embrace’s React Native SDK provides the following:

  • Dashboards
  • Crash Monitoring
  • ANR Monitoring
  • Network Monitoring
  • Error Monitoring
  • Moments
  • Alerting
  • Logging and Breadcrumbs
  • User Terminations

A few notable features include:

  • Captures every user session: Embrace captures 100% of the data from every user session. This makes problem solving easy because there are no gaps in the information you need to maintain and optimize your user experience.
  • Moments: “Moments” is a feature that gives you a better understanding of customer user flows by showing all issues associated with a given session.
  • In-depth ANR reporting: Embrace captures ANRs, allows you to group them by package, and shows you the associated stack traces.

Drawbacks

Embrace is only focused on mobile monitoring and performance, making it the perfect solution for app developers but an incomplete one for those looking to achieve front and backend observability. That said, Embrace is capable of integrating with backend monitoring solutions, provides a data source plugin for popular visualization tools like Grafana, and even has a useful Metrics API.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics background

AppDynamics is a backend and application performance monitoring (APM) tool. They focus on end-to-end customization for businesses.

React Native SDK details

AppDynamics’s React Native SDK focuses on business outcomes by putting your application health in the context of your business goals.

A few of their notable features include:

  • IoT monitoring: This capability allows you to monitor the performance, usage, and availability of an Internet of Things (IoT) device.
  • Cross application flow maps: These maps allow you to visualize your device-side and server-side metrics by syncing AppDynamics with other products.
  • Data management: AppDynamics offers on-premise data management.

Drawbacks

AppDynamics provides limited reporting and analysis for ANRs. In the AppDynamics platform, ANRs are reported alongside other code issues, have limited filter metrics, and cannot be organized in flame graphs or other visualization methods. Additionally, AppDynamics’s alerting is only available for crashes and code issues. There is a limit on the level of specificity that a user can achieve for alerts as well.

Sentry

Sentry background

Sentry is a full-stack, application and performance monitoring platform that focuses on observation at the code level.

React Native SDK details

Sentry offers a React Native SDK that supports both iOS and Android. These are a few key features of the Sentry React Native SDK:

  • Error monitoring: You can see the React Native error monitoring with complete stack traces. You can also apply source maps automatically to convert minified, compiled, or transpiled code back to its original form.
  • Distributed tracing: You can get to the bottom of performance issues fast with end-to-end distributed traces. This allows you to follow an event from the mobile side to the backend across all services.
  • Search features: With Sentry, you can query a large number of attributes for any issue.

Drawbacks

If mobile is your focus, then this product might not be the best fit. Sentry’s mobile offering doesn’t work seamlessly out of the box, which means capturing relevant app data will require dedicating time to log instrumentation. Additionally, even after logging, Sentry’s data tends to lack context for issues that affect the user experience.

Bugsnag

Bugsnag background

Bugsnag is a full-stack stability and error monitoring platform. Bugsnag’s main focus is helping teams make data-driven decisions on when it’s most appropriate to build features versus when it’s most appropriate to fix bugs.

React Native SDK details

The Bugsnag React Native SDK reports errors at the JavaScript and native levels. It also reports on the following:

  • Full stack traces
  • Reports of unhandled errors
  • Reports of out-of-memory terminations
  • Reports of ANRs and fatal app hangs
  • Reports of thermal kills
  • Reports of handled errors
  • Diagnostic data
  • Identification of users
  • Breadcrumb logs
  • Session tracking
  • Declaration of feature flags and experiments
  • Identification of crashes at launch

Bugsnag’s React Native SDK boasts the following key features:

  • Business Intelligence: Bugsnag integrates with both Splunk and Amazon Simple Queue Service.
  • Team Functionality: Bugsnag has great team collaboration features that allow you to alert people about specific issues inside the platform.
  • Integration with Code Push: Bugsnag works alongside Code Push letting you identify bugs through Bugsnag and push out instant updates with Code Push.

Drawbacks

A potential drawback of Bugsnag is its inability to provide data on every user session. This means that if you’re looking to debug or get to the bottom of an issue, you won’t be able to look up users to review their sessions in detail. This can create a longer time to resolution and a more complicated debugging process as developers try to recreate an issue through trial and error.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace background

Dynatrace is an observability platform that’s powered by AI data. Dynatrace uses their data to simplify cloud operations and help automate DevSecOps.

React Native SDK details

Dynatrace supports React Native and has an SDK. Their most pertinent use cases involve:

  • Crash analysis
  • Error reporting
  • User behavior analysis
  • Business value insights
  • Rollout monitoring
  • Performance monitoring

A few noteworthy features include:

  • Apdex scores: This score gives you an at-a-glance metric to measure the overall health of your app.
  • Distributed tracing: Dynatrace offers end-to-end visibility of events and errors through distributed tracing.
  • Davis AI: Davis AI is Dynatrace’s AI engine that performs fault analysis to get to the root cause of issues.

Drawbacks

While Dynatrace stores the existence of every single session, they don’t store much data for these sessions. There are limitations to their depth and detail surrounding the app state, disk usage, etc. This means that they may lack vital information when seeking to understand the problems of a user. Additionally, Dynatrace doesn’t cover ANRs or OOMs in sessions.

Firebase

Firebase background

Firebase is Google’s tool created to monitor both mobile and web applications.

React Native SDK details

Firebase doesn’t have its own React Native SDK. However, there is a third-party platform, React Native Firebase, that bridges this divide. It’s a community-driven collection of packages that provide React Native support for Firebase users on both iOS and Android.

Drawbacks

In general, Firebase setups tend to be limited in the data they can provide. Beyond crashes, extracting actionable data tends to be a rather manual process. That means custom metrics, logs, network monitoring, and events need to be instrumented by hand, which is both time intensive and introduces the potential to create blind spots in your data.

Datadog

Datadog background

Datadog is a monitoring platform that works across tech stacks. They specialize in both backend infrastructure and APM. They were founded with the mission to break down team silos through the use of a Real-Time Unified Data Platform.

React Native SDK details

Datadog has a React Native SDK that focuses on:

  • Collecting RUM events
  • Collecting traces
  • Collecting logs

Datadog’s React Native SDK features include:

  • End-to-end monitoring: This platform allows you to pivot from your user experience data to backend traces, runtime metrics, and logs.
  • Understand user and business impact: Datadog provides critical user experience data like screen engagement by demographics, version releases, custom attributes, and more.
  • Watchdog: This is Datadog’s AI solution that detects performance outliers. It also provides automated root cause analysis and insights for troubleshooting the issue.

Drawbacks

Datadog’s launch of Real User Monitoring (RUM) is recent and not as polished as other offerings in the category. In most cases, the Datadog platform tells you what’s wrong with your app, but can’t provide much data on how to solve the issue. It heavily relies on other products to produce true end-to-end insights.

Instabug

Instabug background

Instabug is a mobile app performance monitoring tool that provides support for multiple platforms including React Native.

React Native SDK details

Instabug has a React Native SDK which supports:

  • Bug reporting
  • Crash reporting
  • App performance monitoring
  • In-app surveys
  • In-app replies
  • Feature requests

A few notable features include:

  • Apdex scores: An Apdex score is an open standard for scoring an app’s performance on a simple scale of 0-1, with 1 representing a perfect user experience.
  • Workflow functionality: You can assign an issue, resolution, status, and priority to a relevant team or team member.
  • Bug reporting: Instabug makes it possible for users or beta testers to provide feedback in-app through a feedback and bug reporting SDK from any page in the app.

Drawbacks

With Instabug, it’s difficult to get a holistic view of health metrics for new releases in your React Native app. Instead, you can view things like adoption, crash-free rate, and bug reports. Instabug also struggles with user experience monitoring. If you’re looking to discover when and why your users are abandoning or force quitting your app, you won’t be able to find those measurements with Instabug.

New Relic

New Relic background

New Relic is a full-stack observability and analytics platform. New Relic’s support for React Native is more recent than many of their competitors. They began supporting React Native in 2022.

React Native SDK details

New Relic’s React Native SDK offers the collection of crash data, network traffic, and other information for hybrid apps.

These are a few key features of New Relic’s React Native SDK:

  • JavaScript errors: New Relic captures data at the JavaScript level and reports them, allowing you to view these details in a custom dashboard.
  • Full-stack ability: New Relic offers infrastructure monitoring, back-end logs, and more that provide you with a full picture of your front and backend.
  • Service maps: These maps allow you to visualize dependencies across a variety of environments.

Drawbacks

If you’re looking for a mobile-first offering, then New Relic might not be the right choice for you. Mobile monitoring is an add-on with New Relic, rather than a part of the package. Additionally, New Relic has limited ANR reporting, doesn’t capture background session data, and their information surrounding custom user flow events is limited in metrics and filtering capabilities.

Other React Native tools

Just as crash reporting is only one piece of performance monitoring, APM tools are just one part of building and maintaining a quality React Native app. Below, we’ve compiled some of the best React Native tools for design, state management, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), and more.

Analytics

Flipper is a platform for debugging iOS, Android, and React Native apps. Flipper launched in September 2019 with React Native support in mind. In fact, Flipper has shipped with React Native by default since version 0.62. If you’re looking for insight into your React Native performance, Flipper makes it easy to access the needed tooling.

Countly is an open source analytics platform that’s built for mobile and web applications. Countly has a React Native SDK that can track key metrics about your users to help you retain them.

Mixpanel is an analytics tool that tracks how your users interact with your app. Adding Mixpanel’s React Native SDK allows you to track vital metrics concerning your users.

Amplitude is an analytics tool that helps you build great products by visualizing your user data into easily digestible insights. Amplitude has a new React Native SDK that is currently in beta. This SDK provides helpful insights into your user experience.

Clevertap is a platform that’s focused on user retention. They help increase customer engagement through real-time insights. They have a React Native SDK for your app.

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Bitrise is a CI/CD platform that focuses largely on mobile development. Bitrise is great because you can automate the deployment of your apps quickly and personalize the process to your needs. Bitrise has a React Native bundle you can add to monitor your React Native app as well.

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform that allows developers to automate a build, test it, and deploy it, all in the same platform. You can configure your React Native app with GitHub Actions to monitor the new version of your releases and keep them pristine.

CircleCI is a CI/CD platform that allows you to build with any toolchain, framework, or language that you want. You can automate your React Native app in Circle CI as well.

AppCenter is a CI/CD platform that allows you to automate the lifecycle of your React Native platform. Developers choose AppCenter because it’s simple to use and easy to set up.

Fastlane is an open source CI/CD platform that’s primarily focused on simplifying the Android and iOS deployment process, but it also offers a React Native plugin.

Design

BuilderX is a browser-based design tool that allows you to code in React Native. This means you can convert any sketch designs into a React Native compatible format. Teams choose BuilderX because it’s both intuitive and adaptable for designers.

Material UI is a customizable library of components for React Native. The beauty of MUI is its comprehensiveness. The library allows you to create designs quickly and have them production-ready in a flash.

DevTools

Reactotron is a popular web application. It works with Windows, Linux, and Mac. Reactotron is often used for React Native tooling. It’s great for developers because it can maintain a track of dispatch actions, application states, and more.

Expo is an open source tool for React Native developers. Expo is new to the scene, but a favorite of many people because of its wide range of React Native components.

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Android Studio is the IDE to choose if you’re looking to develop an application on the Android platform. Outside of this, you can also create a React Native application in Android Studio. Additionally, there are many ways to test and debug your application and understand how well it performs on mobile devices.

Xcode is a tool that provides a coding environment along with debugging capabilities. Developers like XCode because it’s a great environment for React Native development of iOS applications.

Visual Studio Code is a code editor that’s made for building and debugging web and cloud applications. VS Code has a React Native extension that allows you to debug your code and run React Native commands.

JetBrains is an open source development tool designed to help you build cutting edge software. With JetBrains, you can create, run, and debug React Native applications.

State management

Redux-Saga is an open source library that helps you manage your React Native application.

React Context API is an easy, light approach to state management. It allows for developers to produce shareable global variables.

Wrapping up

Finding the right performance monitoring tool is critical for gaining search visibility in app stores, attracting and retaining users, and meeting revenue goals. That said, what classifies as the “right” performance monitoring tool will largely depend on your team’s needs and goals.

If you’re looking to go beyond errors and crashes to optimize your user experience, then a mobile-focused and comprehensive performance monitoring tool is necessary for your React Native app.

Few alternatives compare to what Embrace can offer. We’re a mobile-first solution that captures a wealth of data in richer detail and greater depth – With Embrace, you’re never barred by incomplete sampling or data limitations. We aim to make it easy to maintain and optimize your React Native app through high-fidelity data that provides in-depth insight into every user session.

Head over to our Docs to learn more about getting started with the Embrace SDK for React Native.