Spending too much time fixing bugs?
With codebases growing ever more complex and deadlines getting tighter, debugging can often feel like a never-ending battle for developers and engineering managers alike. Identifying, diagnosing, and squashing software bugs quickly is vital if you want to keep your projects on track and users happy.
Yet, you know how easily precious hours slip away when you are manually hunting down tricky issues or trying to track bugs that pop up in distributed environments. Fixing these critical errors late in the process slows down delivery, disrupts team productivity, and can eat into your budget.
Just consider figures from DEV Community, showing that developers spend roughly 620 million hours per year solving debugging issues. That is a staggering amount of time lost to what should be a solvable problem, and it highlights just how important it is to optimize your debugging workflow for both velocity and quality.
The good news? There is a smarter way forward. The right debugging tools can drastically reduce resolution times and integrate with your software stack to boost your team’s efficiency.
In this article, I am going to break down the best debugging software available in 2025. I will show you which tools stand out for feature set, speed, and integration potential.
You will find honest insights to help you cut through the noise and pick solutions that save you hours and keep your releases on schedule.
Let’s get started.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Target Users |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rookout↗ | Developers needing real-time production debugging |
| 2 | Lightrun↗ | Developers fixing bugs live without downtime |
| 3 | Shoreline↗ | Engineers automating cloud incident response |
| 4 | Komodor↗ | Platform engineers managing Kubernetes reliability |
| 5 | New Relic↗ | Engineering teams needing full-stack observability |
1. Rookout
Struggling to debug complex issues in production?
Rookout eliminates the need to stop your app or reproduce bugs to get real-time data.
By injecting live debugging on any environment or architecture, it lets you grab code-level information like variable states and stack traces without downtime. This means less guesswork and faster fixes.
Rookout is designed to simplify your debugging experience. It supports numerous languages like Java, Python, and Node.js and works across on-prem, cloud-native, and serverless environments. This broad coverage ensures you can tackle bugs wherever they happen.
You won’t waste time setting up complex tools.
With a click, get instant code visibility and trace complex flows effortlessly with live data streaming into your existing observability platforms.
The software helps you debug Kubernetes pods and serverless applications visually, so you quickly identify problematic areas.
Its enterprise-grade security means your sensitive data stays protected, with SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA compliance, and options for on-prem data control.
This lets you debug confidently without risking production data exposure.
Key features:
Real-time live debugging: Fetch production data instantly without stopping your app or rebuilding code, reducing downtime and speeding up bug resolution.
Extensive environment coverage: Debug on any architecture, including Kubernetes, serverless, cloud, or on-premises, adapting smoothly to your project’s setup.
Enterprise security and compliance: Built-in safeguards like SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA ensure your debugging process meets strict privacy and compliance needs.
Learn more about Rookout features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict:
Rookout stands out as the best debugging software for developers who want to solve production issues without the hassle of downtime or complicated setups. Its live data capture helped teams reduce debugging time by 5x, proving it’s a powerful tool for speeding up fixes in complex environments.
2. Lightrun
Want to fix bugs right in production?
Lightrun lets you debug live applications without stopping or redeploying.
With its AI-powered platform, you can find the root cause of bugs at the exact line of code, and even get instant fix suggestions. It means you save time and resolve issues faster, reducing frustration and downtime.
No more guesswork or long waits.
This platform integrates directly into your favorite IDEs like IntelliJ or Visual Studio Code, so you debug right where you code, making your workflow smoother.
Another standout feature is dynamic logging and snapshots, which capture detailed runtime information without modifying the code or impacting performance. This lets you see what’s really happening inside your apps, even in complex multi-threaded or cloud-native environments.
Lightrun also helps cut down logging costs by optimizing what data you collect.
It’s designed for developers and engineering leaders who need to troubleshoot effectively across development, staging, and production environments.
What I love is that it supports multiple languages like Java, Python, Node.js, and .NET, plus offers secure, enterprise-grade controls that keep your data safe.
Key features:
- Real-time debugging at line-level precision that helps you quickly identify and fix production bugs without downtime or redeployments.
- Dynamic logs and snapshots deliver deep visibility into live application behavior, aiding root cause analysis and improving developer productivity by up to 20%.
- Seamless IDE integration and multi-language support let you debug from your preferred environment across JVM, Python, Node.js, and .NET stack.
Learn more about Lightrun features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict:
Lightrun proves to be one of the best debugging software options for developers who want to reduce mean time to resolution and speed up code fixes directly in production. It has helped companies like Gong cut MTTR from hours to minutes, delivering strong return on investment and improved productivity.
3. Shoreline
Need better control over your cloud infrastructure?
Shoreline helps engineers automate cloud operations easily, reducing manual work and errors.
This platform lets you write scripts that monitor your systems and automatically fix issues without logging in. So if your app fails, Shoreline can detect it and respond instantly, saving you hours of troubleshooting.
It’s designed to reduce alert fatigue.
Instead of drowning in endless notifications, Shoreline lets you create smarter, automated responses that keep your systems stable.
Another cool feature is its use of custom runbooks that automate repetitive workflows. You can reuse these playbooks across teams and projects to speed up incident response and reduce downtime.
Automation is highly customizable, which means it fits specifically to how your infrastructure runs.
Key features:
- Automated incident detection and remediation that proactively fixes cloud errors to reduce downtime and free your engineering team from repetitive manual tasks.
- Customizable runbooks and workflow automation enable you to craft ready-made fixes and responses, improving efficiency and handling incidents faster.
- Alerts management with fewer false positives reduces noise and helps you focus on genuine issues that require your attention.
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Learn more about Shoreline features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict:
Shoreline stands out as a powerful choice for engineers who want the best debugging software to optimize cloud operations. By automating incident response and reducing alert noise, Shoreline helped highly technical teams cut downtime significantly. Its custom runbooks and proactive fixes ensure your cloud environment is resilient and manageable.
4. Komodor
Dealing with Kubernetes complexity slowing you down?
Komodor simplifies Kubernetes management by giving you full visibility and control to stop firefighting and improve your workloads’ health.
Its platform empowers you to detect issues early with AI-powered root cause analysis, reducing downtime and freeing developers to focus on building more instead of troubleshooting. You get a clear timeline to visualize cluster events, so you understand what changed and why.
This tool drastically lessens your troubleshooting burden.
It provides centralized user management, enabling fleet-wide control with RBAC and audit trails, so you stay in charge even at scale.
Komodor also helps optimize your costs by analyzing your Kubernetes usage and recommending right-sizing strategies without hurting performance.
Its AI assistant, Klaudia, speeds up root cause detection and guides you through remediation steps in seconds, even if you’re not a Kubernetes expert.
I really appreciate how Komodor lets developers fix problems on their own, reducing tickets and boosting team velocity.
The platform is perfect for platform engineers, developers, and tech executives who struggle with Kubernetes’ operational complexity and want to reduce MTTR while improving reliability.
If you want to reduce downtime and accelerate Kubernetes troubleshooting, Komodor offers a comprehensive solution that brings together visibility, automation, and AI-driven insights tailored to real-world Kubernetes challenges.
Key features:
- AI-powered root cause analysis with KlaudiaAI: Quickly pinpoint issues and get detailed remediation steps, cutting your mean time to resolution drastically.
- Multi-cluster drift detection and continuous reliability: Automatically spot configuration drifts that could cause outages, keeping your clusters stable and consistent.
- Centralized access and operations management: Control Kubernetes access via RBAC, JIT permissions, and full audit trails, ensuring security and governance at scale.
Learn more about Komodor features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict:
Komodor stands out as the best debugging software for platform engineers and developers working with Kubernetes. It helped Visier reduce MTTR by over 60% and improved troubleshooting speed with AI-powered root cause analysis. Its centralized controls and cost optimization deliver real operational value.
5. New Relic
Want to fix bugs and monitor your code effectively?
New Relic’s intelligent observability platform helps you resolve issues up to 5x faster by focusing on the data that truly matters. It monitors your full stack, including frontend, backend, infrastructure, and logs.
This means you get comprehensive visibility across your entire environment, allowing you to pinpoint problems faster and reduce downtime. With real-time transaction tracing and error tracking, your engineering team can catch issues before customers do.
It simplifies debugging.
Their Errors Inbox centralizes error tracking so you can manage your bugs efficiently without switching tools or losing context.
New Relic’s agentic AI integrations boost your productivity by helping you automate routine tasks, letting you spend more time on code improvement instead of firefighting. If you’re eager to boost your productivity fast, exploring other tools might also be beneficial.
Built for engineering teams of all sizes, New Relic scales with your needs by offering usage-based pricing, so you only pay for what you use. It also supports 780+ integrations, covering languages and frameworks like Java, Node.js, .NET, Python, and PHP.
Security is a priority, with enterprise-level protections such as GDPR compliance and FedRAMP eligibility.
Key features:
- Full-stack monitoring across frontend, backend, and infrastructure so you can find and fix bugs faster, improving uptime and customer experience.
- Errors Inbox centralizes all your bug tracking which reduces noise and boost team productivity by prioritizing real issues.
- Agentic AI-powered automation tools increase developer efficiency by cutting down repetitive work and enabling faster incident resolution.
Learn more about New Relic features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict:
New Relic is a solid choice if you want the best debugging software that helps individual engineers or teams quickly resolve bugs with full-stack observability and AI-driven insights. Companies like Vault Health saw their mean time to resolution drop to just 15 minutes thanks to its robust error tracking and observability.
6. Bugfender
Are you struggling to catch elusive bugs on production?
Bugfender’s remote logging captures every single issue on your users’ devices, even those that don’t cause crashes, giving you full visibility.
This means you no longer have to rely on crash reports alone or wait for users to report bugs. Bugfender’s device-centric approach lets you quickly drill down to logs of specific users or devices. This makes reproducing and fixing client-side bugs much faster and less frustrating.
It’s easy to use.
Bugfender’s dashboard provides clear, contextual data with logs, stack traces, user steps, and device info to accelerate debugging and improve your app’s stability.
Another impressive capability is its lightweight, mobile-first SDK designed for minimal battery and memory usage, running smoothly even offline without interrupting user experience.
You’ll also appreciate its built-in user feedback feature, which collects insights directly from your app users to understand problems better and improve retention.
For developers focused on launching or improving their own solutions, it might also be helpful to explore app builder software to help you launch with even less friction from the start.
You’re covered on security too.
Bugfender offers a secure design ensuring your customer’s data stays with you, complying with GDPR and ISO 27001 standards. This focus gives peace of mind as you gather deep diagnostics from apps used worldwide.
Its versatile integrations and support for platforms like iOS, Android, React, and Flutter allow developers across industries to get started quickly—usually in under five minutes.
Key features:
- Remote logging across all user devices: Capture every app event and bug, even non-crash issues, so you won’t miss hidden problems slowing down your development.
- Device-centric error monitoring: Focus your search to individual users or devices, improving issue reproduction and speeding up fixes.
- In-app user feedback collection: Gather real user insights effortlessly, helping you better understand pain points and increase app satisfaction.
If you’re interested in directly improving user engagement, consider learning about personalization software to boost your customer engagement as a companion to your debugging toolkit.
Learn more about Bugfender features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict:
Bugfender stands out as the best debugging software for developers who need deep, precise insights to fix client-side bugs faster. It helped GymNadz speed up bug detection by seeing issues in real-time on actual devices, which otherwise go unnoticed. Its secure, lightweight SDK and user feedback tools make it invaluable for quality app delivery.
Conclusion
Feeling overwhelmed by endless debugging tasks?
As developers, we often grapple with the time-consuming nature of fixing bugs that can derail our projects and disrupt our teams. The reality is that software debugging can drain your resources and energy, making it difficult to stay productive in the fast-paced tech landscape.
According to DEV Community, developers spend roughly 620 million hours per year solving debugging issues, which is a staggering waste of potential. If you consider how much innovation could be fostered in that time, it’s clear why this issue deserves our attention.
So how can you reclaim your time and sanity?
Enter Rookout, the solution that transforms your debugging experience. With real-time live debugging, it allows you to retrieve crucial data without stopping your applications, keeping your workflow seamless. Rookout’s capabilities have helped teams discover and fix issues quickly, reducing debugging times dramatically.
If you’re ready to experience a debugging revolution, I highly encourage you to start a free trial of Rookout.
By taking action now, you can streamline your development process and enhance your team’s productivity, ultimately allowing you to focus more on creating innovative solutions rather than battling bugs.
