Embrace

Embrace is a real user monitoring platform for teams responsible for mobile apps and websites. It is most compelling when engineers need to connect a performance problem to a user’s session, rather than inspect isolated signals.

Overview

Embrace combines mobile and web monitoring around the user session. On mobile, it captures crashes, ANRs, network activity, and performance; for web, it provides session timelines, Core Web Vitals, exception and error reporting, custom metrics, and alerting. Bringing these signals together can help frontend and mobile engineers investigate the sequence behind a poor experience, while DevOps and SRE teams can use dashboards, SLO support, and user journey analysis to follow service health.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Los Angeles, Embrace is built on OpenTelemetry. It can forward metrics, network spans, logs, or traces to other destinations, including Datadog, Grafana Cloud, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic, Chronosphere, and Observe. Slack and webhooks are also among its integrations. That openness is useful for teams with an existing observability stack; the product’s value is less clear if session-level investigation is not a priority.

Key features

• Full-session context: Crashes, network requests, custom events, and Core Web Vitals can be tied to a session. This helps teams see how issues unfold for users, not just whether an error or metric crossed a threshold.
• Mobile and web coverage: The mobile product covers crashes, ANRs, network, and performance insights; web RUM adds timelines, vitals, errors, custom metrics, and alerting. Mobile and web sessions share the same pricing basis, so using both does not create separate session pools.
• Instrumentation choices: Documentation covers Android, iOS, web, React Native, Unity, and Flutter. This breadth is useful for teams spanning native and cross-platform apps, though it does not by itself establish support for every framework or workflow.
• OpenTelemetry forwarding: Metrics, network spans, and logs or traces can be sent onward through data destinations and OpenTelemetry interfaces. This gives teams a path to combine Embrace data with other tools, while adding another destination does not remove the need to manage overall session consumption.
• Dashboards and user journeys: Configurable dashboards, custom metrics, SLO support, and detailed journey analysis support both service-level monitoring and investigation of individual flows.

Pricing

Embrace uses a freemium, session-based model. Mobile and web sessions count together toward overall consumption, which makes the shared pool easy to reason about but means both surfaces draw down the same allowance.

• Free — free: Pay-as-you-go, up to 1 million sessions per year and 5 users, with 3 days of event retention. It includes errors, exceptions, crashes, basic performance monitoring, dashboards, and alerting. This is a practical starting point for a small team evaluating core workflows, but either the session cap or seat cap stops additional ingestion or users until an upgrade. Three days of retention also leaves little room for investigations that begin well after an incident.
• Pro — $0.80 a month: Pay-as-you-go or annual contract, with a minimum spend of $80/month. It allows up to 10 users and 14 days of event retention, and adds custom dashboards, API access, metrics forwarding, standard customer support, and discounts for higher session volume. Pro suits teams that need more seats, longer retention, or integrations into their monitoring workflow. The minimum spend matters: the displayed per-month rate is not the whole budget commitment for a small deployment.
• Enterprise — custom pricing: Annual contract, unlimited users, 30 days of event retention, custom metrics, events and spans forwarding, and gold-tier customer support. It is the relevant tier for teams needing uncapped seats or the longer retention and forwarding scope; custom pricing means its cost should be assessed against expected session volume and requirements.

A 30-day trial is offered. The free plan is not equivalent to the paid tiers: it limits users and annual sessions, and its event retention is much shorter than Pro or Enterprise. The product also gives a separate 90+ days data-retention figure, but the plan-specific event retention terms are 3, 14, and 30 days respectively.

Platforms

Embrace is available for Android, iOS, web, and API. Its instrumentation documentation also covers React Native, Unity, and Flutter, making it relevant to teams whose mobile products use cross-platform frameworks. The platform coverage spans app and web monitoring rather than positioning Embrace solely as a website analytics tool.

Who it's for

Embrace is best suited to frontend and mobile engineers who need to investigate crashes, network behavior, or web performance in the context of a user journey. DevOps and SRE teams may also benefit from its dashboards, SLO support, alerting, and data forwarding, particularly when they want these signals to feed into an established observability stack.

It is a weaker fit for a team whose main constraint is very long event retention or a large free allowance: the free tier stops ingestion at 1 million sessions per year and retains event data for only 3 days. Pro raises those ceilings, but its $80/month minimum spend can be disproportionate for low-volume use.

Pros and cons

• Pro: Session context connects crashes, network requests, custom events, and Core Web Vitals, helping teams investigate the user impact and sequence of issues.
• Pro: Mobile and web RUM share a session pricing basis, and data can be forwarded through OpenTelemetry interfaces to a broad set of destinations.
• Pro: Instrumentation spans Android, iOS, web, React Native, Unity, and Flutter.
• Con: The free plan caps both annual sessions and users; hitting either limit prevents further ingestion or adding users without upgrading.
• Con: Free event retention is 3 days, and Pro raises it only to 14 days, which may not suit teams needing longer investigation windows without Enterprise.
• Con: Pro’s $80/month minimum spend can outweigh the $0.80 per-month rate for smaller deployments.

Alternatives

Consider BugSnag if you want a freemium monitoring option with a free plan, free trial, and broad platform coverage; its free tier includes one user, 7.5K events, and 1M spans per month.

Middleware may suit teams comparing a free-forever plan with allowances for data, RUM sessions, synthetic checks, and browser tests. Its free plan caps RUM at 1,000 sessions, so compare that usage basis with Embrace’s annual session allowance.

For a Kubernetes-focused monitoring option, Dynatrace Kubernetes Monitoring bills at $0.002 per hour per pod.

Grafana Cloud Application Observability is worth considering if host-hour pricing and a free tier with 2,232 host hours better match your application monitoring needs.

New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring may fit teams looking for a free tier with 100 GB of data ingest and a Pro annual commitment at $349 a year.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs is an alternative when the need is specifically log ingestion, priced at $0.50 a month for the first 10 TB per month in US East (N. Virginia), with rates varying by region and tier.

Choose Dynatrace Real User Monitoring if its per-session pricing and 35-day retention align better with your retention needs: its RUM plan is billed at $0.00225 per session, while RUM with Session Replay is billed at $0.0045 per session.

Grafana k6 is another alternative.

Browse Real User Monitoring options or the Game Crash Reporting Software list to compare related tools.

Verdict

Embrace is a strong choice for mobile and frontend teams that need performance, errors, and network activity tied to complete user sessions, with OpenTelemetry forwarding to keep those signals connected to other tools. The main reasons to look elsewhere are the free tier’s 1-million-session and 5-user ceilings, short event retention, and Pro’s $80/month minimum spend. Choose it when user-level context is central to troubleshooting; compare alternatives when your priority is a larger allowance, longer retention, or a different pricing unit.