highlight VS openreplay

[2] https://app.highlight.io/error-tags

[2] https://github.com/highlight/highlight/tree/main

We have an SDK request here: https://github.com/highlight/highlight/issues/4225

We don't have a particular leaning towards javascript, but haven't gotten to PHP yet. We're definitely open to contributors, but otherwise, we can hopefully get to this in the coming months.

Hi Hacker News! We’re Jay and Vadim from Highlight.io (https://highlight.io). We’re building a truly open source [1] observability platform for modern web applications. We posted some of our tools to HN in recent months [2][3]. Today, we’re excited to formally launch the project, share more about where we’re going, and of course, poll the community for some feedback.

A bit of background: Vadim and I have worked at quite a few startups at this point, and a recurring challenge we’ve faced was tracing usability issues on the frontend to downstream errors and logs on the server. Understanding the real reason behind customer issues was always a chaotic juggling of multiple tools. With the rise of "frontend-forward" frameworks such as NextJS, which blur the boundary between the client and server, the complexity of tracing these issues is only growing.

This is where Highlight.io comes in: our product bridges the gap between client and server to give you a holistic view of your entire application.

At its core, Highlight.io has three main “products”: Session Replay, Error Monitoring, and Logging. The novelty here is not in each product but in how they are connected. For example, in Highlight.io it’s very easy to click from a given error to the associated user session where it is thrown [4], and from a given error, you can easily inspect all of the logs that fired leading up to it. Ensuring that all of our products work together seamlessly with little to no effort is a core principle of our product strategy. If you’re using a common framework [5], for example, we’ll automatically link your frontend sessions with backend errors and logs. No agents, configuring facets, or anything else, It just works.

We depend on several open source projects that help us move quickly. OpenTelemetry (OTEL) [6] is one of them, which helps us with maintainability, i.e. for every language that we support, we only maintain a thin wrapper around its respective OTEL SDK. OTEL is also a great way to enable the community to contribute, and we’re already seeing traction in this space (ie. an open source contributor built a wrapper for a Java SDK [7]).

rrweb [8] is another project we leverage heavily for our session replay product. It drives our ability to record and replay the DOM to visualize user flows in the frontend. We’ve had the privilege to work closely with the rrweb team to ship improvements, and we’re now actively sponsoring the project [9].

ClickHouse [10] has recently become a loved database on our team, as we historically used Opensearch for search-heavy workloads and started to hit growing pains with ingest throughput. We recently rolled it out for our logging product [3] and plan to replace our sessions and errors (and upcoming tracing work) with the database as well.

From a business perspective, Highlight.io is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and we make money with our hosted product [11]. For the hosted product, you can set billing caps for each offering and we don’t charge for seats. At this point, we have 100+ companies paying for our product (some of which are large enterprises), and thousands of sole developers use Highlight.io every week.

On our roadmap [12] for the future includes metrics, tracing, release management and more. We also are launching several updates this week on our launch week page [13].

Overall, we’re excited to be sharing Highlight.io with the world, and Vadim and I are particularly excited to get some feedback from the HN community. Please give us a test-drive at https://app.highlight.io and let us know what you think. We would love to learn about what you wish you had in an observability product as well as any other experiences and ideas in this space. We look forward to hearing from you!

https://gitlab.com/hyperlink-academy/app https://github.com/highlight/highlight https://github.com/calcom/cal.com https://github.com/Nutlope/roomGPT

I'd be curious to hear how this compares to

https://qryn.metrico.in

and

https://github.com/highlight/highlight

(There are some interesting comparisons/comments vs signoiz in sibling threads).

We only scratched the surface of vanilla-extract here, so check out the documentation if you’re interested in learning more. We’ll continue to share about how we are leveraging it to build the Highlight design system, and all our code is open source if you’re interested in exploring our usage more. All the code for the examples in this article are also available for anyone to fork and play around with as well.

- Optimize user experience: use insights to refine and improve your app’s usability.

Interested? For more details, you can check out the GitHub repo [0] or documentation [1]:

[0] https://github.com/openreplay/openreplay or documentation

[1] https://docs.openreplay.com/en/rn-sdk/

Hey HN,

For anyone who uses session replay tools to debug, monitor, or analyze user journeys, this feature might come in handy. OpenReplay — the self-hosted session replay tool that helps developers troubleshoot web apps faster — now supports tabbed browsing.

*Here's how:*

1. Capture and replay user sessions that span across multiple browser tabs, all within a single recording.

2. OpenReplay's tracker communicates across browser tabs, ensuring accurate tracking of each tab, even when duplicated or opened with `window.open` without `_blank`.

3. With "co-browsing", you can watch and support users in real-time and see how they navigate across multiple tabs of your app.

*Why it’s important?*

1. This feature is convenient for developers as it allows them to easily identify bugs by reviewing a complete session in one replay, rather than having to reference multiple recordings.

2. It provides a deeper understanding of the user journey and interactions across multiple tabs in your web app, helping in the comprehension of complex user behaviors and paths.

3. It provides accurate feedback on user tab actions such as opening, switching, and closing tabs, assisting in UX/UI improvements.

Interested? For more details, you can check out the GitHub repo at https://github.com/openreplay/openreplay.

You could maybe get in a scenario where a company rather sneakily changes their license without proper announcement to make usage non-open and billable, but that's pretty rare and bad behavior and that underhandedness may bite them back if it goes to court (I am not a lawyer). That said, it can happen. As an example, see this discussion I opened where the project switched licenses and the maintainers thought it was enough to only really announce this within a 1 hour YouTube video (Rather than their blog or update notes).

OpenReplay would not be typically be considered open source. (Which I have raised with them and have since been blocked from their repos).

How does it compare to OpenReplay ?

> Before deciding on ClickHouse, we were planning to use OpenSearch

You should have tried Quickwit :)

Anyway, sounds like a great project, best of luck!

[1] https://github.com/openreplay/openreplay

[2] https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

I would disagree with OpenReplay being open source, as I raised with them back in July (I've also since been blocked from their GitHub org for opening that discussion).