Quick answer: Error logging records events your code chooses to log; crash reporting automatically captures crashes with full context and groups them by issue. Logging diagnoses what you anticipated; crash reporting catches the failures you didn't, especially in the field. Most games benefit from both.
Error logging and crash reporting sound similar and overlap, but they solve different problems. Logging is a record of events your code emits; crash reporting is a system that captures, contextualizes, and groups crashes from real players. Understanding the distinction tells you which you need, usually both.
What Error Logging Does
Error logging is your code writing records of events, errors, warnings, state, to a log, based on what you decided to log. It's invaluable for diagnosing problems you anticipated and for tracing what happened leading up to an issue. But logs are passive: someone has to collect, read, and interpret them, and they only contain what you thought to log in advance.
On a player's machine, local logs are often invisible to you unless the player sends them, and a raw log is hard to act on at scale, you can't easily tell how many players hit an error or which logs represent the same issue. Logging is powerful for diagnosis but weak as a monitoring system.
What Crash Reporting Does
Crash reporting is a system specifically for capturing crashes, automatically, the moment they happen, with the stack trace, device, OS, and version attached, then grouping identical crashes and ranking them by how many players are affected. You don't have to anticipate the crash or ask the player for anything; it's captured and organized for you.
Bugnet is a crash reporting tool: crashes from real players arrive grouped by signature, ranked by impact, with full context. Where logging gives you raw events you must collect and read, crash reporting gives you a prioritized, actionable view of what's actually crashing your game across your whole player base.
Which You Need (Usually Both)
These aren't competitors, they're complementary. Crash reporting tells you what's crashing, how often, and for how many players, your monitoring and prioritization layer. Logging and breadcrumbs then help you diagnose why a given crash happened by showing the events leading up to it. You use crash reporting to find and rank issues, and logs to dig into them.
Bugnet captures breadcrumb trails alongside crashes, blending both: automatic capture and grouping (crash reporting) plus the event trail that makes diagnosis possible (logging-style context). So rather than choosing, most games use crash reporting as the system of record for failures and logging as the detail you drill into.
Logging records events you chose to log; crash reporting auto-captures, contextualizes, and groups crashes by impact. Logging diagnoses; crash reporting catches and prioritizes. Most games use both.