BugSnag joins the SmartBear Family

In February 2013 we founded BugSnag to address a problem we’d seen ourselves throughout our careers as software engineers — we wanted to help teams figure out which bugs actually matter, and which to fix first.

Our vision was to become the source of truth for application quality. Over the past eight years, we’ve developed BugSnag into a platform used by over 6,000 software teams, including Slack, Airbnb, Lyft, and many more.

Today, we are excited to announce the next phase of this journey. We have entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by SmartBear Software — the leader in test automation, test management, application performance monitoring, and the API lifecycle.

Shared vision for application quality

SmartBear’s mission is to help software teams accelerate the delivery of high-quality applications. If this mission sounds familiar, it should. BugSnag shares the exact same vision, but we exist at different ends of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC):

• SmartBear’s suite of products addresses software quality before you get to production. 
• BugSnag solves for software quality after you get to production. 

We often say at BugSnag “QA is dead; long live Quality.” SmartBear’s test automation solutions are achieving the shift from traditional, manual QA through pre-production test automation. Bugsnag is the expert at the right-hand side of the SDLC and helps organizations understand errors that exist in production. 

Joining forces with SmartBear allows us to help software teams understand quality throughout the entire SDLC.

What this partnership means for BugSnag

This partnership is an investment in BugSnag’s growth. By joining the SmartBear family, BugSnag benefits from the scale of SmartBear’s business, as well as its efficiencies, expertise, and experiences. 

We anticipate a smooth integration, both with our solutions and teams. In addition to our common mission and vision, the two teams are aligned culturally and share the same values around humility and inclusion. Our product philosophies are also similar, and both companies have developed low-friction products with a “try before you buy” approach to sales. 

Not surprisingly, both companies also give back to the open source community and invest in open source, as demonstrated by SmartBear’s acquisition of open source products like Cucumber and Swagger. 

Overall, we are really excited to play a role in SmartBear becoming an end-to-end platform for software quality. 

What does this mean for me as a customer?

SmartBear is investing in the BugSnag product, roadmap, and team, and everyone at BugSnag is joining the SmartBear family. Customers will keep all current relationships with account managers and executive sponsors, and the same level of support will be provided as always. 

In short, the BugSnag brand will remain the same and our platform will continue to grow and improve — it’s business as usual.

The future

We are so excited to keep building BugSnag inside our new SmartBear family. We cannot imagine a better partner with whom we share a vision, mission, culture, and commitment to building great solutions.