Top 8 Session Recording And Replay Tools [Our 2024 Review]

Session recording and replay tools are essential for user experience analysis. They help you understand how to optimize your website, web app, or landing page. Finding the right tools with relevant features can be pretty challenging, given that so many tools for recording user sessions and replays are available on the market.

Session recording and replay tools have different features, benefits, limitations, and specific use cases. Depending on your particular needs, some might be more useful than others. To help you make your decision faster, we created a list of the top eight user recordings and session replay tools you can use in your business.

One example is FullSession, our web analytics tool. It helps you watch and replay recordings of your website visitors in real time as they navigate your site and interact with your web elements.

This way, you can understand actual user journeys and determine user pain points that affect conversions. Besides session recording and replays, FullSession provides interactive heatmaps, website feedback forms, and advanced analytics to help you optimize your product.

You can start a free trial or get a demo to see our session recording and replay feature in action.

Now, let’s begin this comprehensive article by highlighting the basics of website session recording software.

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What are session recording tools?

Session recording tools are qualitative research tools that help you record user actions while browsing different web pages. Product teams, UX and UI researchers, marketers, and site owners use this feature to capture data and analyze user behavior.

What are session replays?

Session playback helps you focus on the video and pay closer attention to how visitors interact with your website or app. It allows you to spot all crucial details about users’ behavior.

Some analytics tools even let you set up the playback speed of your videos to help you save time during the analysis. Fixing all critical issues you noticed during session replays will improve your customers’ digital experience.

Session recordings help you monitor user sessions

With session recordings, you can watch recordings of how users interact with your website, web app, or landing page in real-time.

You can track:

How long has the user engaged with your site.
How many pages they viewed
Determine what areas of your site need improvement
Determine if you need to redesign your web elements
Understand if there are any usability issues.
Identify bugs and Javascript errors
Learn about customers’ preferences and behaviors

It helps you tailor your products and services to meet users’ needs.

Session recording lets you track user behavior

Image source: Intechnic

Session recordings are helpful for understanding and capturing data about user navigation on your website and issues they encounter during their visit. You can watch sessions to learn:

What your website visitors see on different screen resolutions.
What page elements catch attention and engage customers.
Where users click or how far they scroll on pages.
Users’ mouse movement.

Now that we’ve explained the basics of a session recording tool, let’s discuss how to choose the best solution to optimize your website.

How to choose the best session recording tool?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best session recording tool for your needs will depend on several factors.

However, when choosing a session recording and replay tool, some things to consider include

Ease of use: You should choose software that is easy to use and set up to start recording sessions quickly.
Recording quality: Make sure the tool you choose produces high-quality recordings that will be easy to watch and understand.
Compatibility: Ensure that the tool you choose is compatible with the devices and software you’re using to avoid any headaches down the line.
Pricing: Consider your budget when selecting a session recording and replay tool, as some options can be expensive.

We created a handy list to help you choose the tool that fits your budget and offers the necessary features. Continue reading to learn more.

The 8 best session recording tools

Why settle for a mediocre website or app performance? With session recording software, you can record, review, and analyze users’ actions in real-time to boost engagement rates and conversions. Check out the list below to get your hands on the best session recording software.

1. FullSession

FullSession is a user behavior analytics software that helps you capture and analyze user behavioral data across your web pages, landing pages, or web apps. It allows you to identify funnel drop-offs, usability issues, and bugs preventing your web visitors from converting into paying customers.

Our analytics software is primarily for web designers, product managers, UX/UI researchers, and digital marketers. We are also popular in the e-commerce industry.

You can deploy the FullSession platform by starting a free trial and adding our code snippet to the source code of your website.

FullSession also allows you to integrate with third-party platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, and WordPress.

FullSession features

FullSession provides web analytics tools that let you see user actions and monitor user engagement with your website. With FullSession features, you can identify best-performing web content, website bugs, and other usability issues you need to solve to provide customers with the optimal user experience.

Let’s explain each feature.

1. Session recording and replay tools

Our user session recording and replay tools provide a time-stamped record of each user event that occurred in a user session. It lets you see what users do when navigating your site, so you can use the insights to improve the user experience.

Even more, you can use our session recording and replay feature to

Identify Javascript errors, user frustration, usability issues, or poor-performing content
Analyze usage patterns
Track users’ clicks, scroll behavior, and mouse movements
Track the pages that users engage with the most
Monitor the time they spend on each web page
Analyze the performance of specific marketing campaigns

Website session recording tools help you gain a bird’s eye view of your website performance to understand how to optimize it further.

You can analyze recorded sessions using user data points like

User location and IP address
Clicked URL
Referrals
Visited pages
Average time on page
Total active time on pages
Session list
Session event

We also have a skip inactivity feature that lets you skip segments of user sessions to save time and focus on activities that give you valuable insights.

2. Interactive heatmaps

Interactive heatmaps enable you to visualize how users interact with your website elements, like buttons, headers, CTAs, and form fields. Even more, our heat map feature provides behavioral data to improve your website tracking efforts

Scroll maps: to analyze how far users scroll on your web page
Click maps: help you to visualize where users click
Mouse movement map: to see how users navigate your website

These features help determine if users are missing the most valuable website areas. With this insight, you can remove distracting website elements, fix broken ones, and improve your conversion rates.

The FullSession interactive heat maps can also help you to

Visualize heatmap data on different devices
See the URL the user visited
Track the number of total views and total clicks
Watch error clicks
Visualize rage clicks
Monitor dead clicks
See the average load time on page
See the average time on page
Track the number of users that visited the page

Click map example

Mouse movement map example

Scroll map example

3. Advanced filtering and segmentation

Our advanced segmentation and filtering options allow you to create unique customer segments to filter important user events and identify questionable user recordings and session replays.

4. Advanced analytics

The FullSession platform provides an advanced analytics dashboard that lets you quickly identify significant patterns in user actions. It includes different categories that’ll improve how you interpret user behavioral data.

Here are the main ones:

Session playlist
Top users
Segment health
Key pages
User trends
Feedback trends
Device breakdown
Browser breakdown
User feedback trends
Top referrers
Screen resolution breakdown
Error clicks and rage clicks

With this feature, you can gain insight into user behavior and uncover hidden customer struggles in every user activity.

5. Customer feedback forms

Our customer feedback forms allow you to collect real-time user feedback to understand users’ actions, including what they think about their digital experiences and your site’s performance.

We also provide a customer feedback report to help you analyze the feedback you collect from your customers. It includes several categories that will help you dig deeper into user feedback.

For instance, you can see a full breakdown of the user profile and feedback details. They include email address, country, the comments they submitted, their device type, the feedback date, and the URL they visited.

Each user feedback you collect is connected to a session recording so you can watch and understand what happened during a session.

6. Notes

The FullSession notes feature allows you to leave comments about user events to improve website analysis and deeply evaluate customer issues. With this feature, you can write down significant customer actions, share them with your team and improve collaboration during project development.

7. Conversions

The FullSession platform lets you keep track of your conversion rates using the conversions feature. You can monitor conversion metrics like page views, the average number of users, page load time, time to convert, etc., to determine the effectiveness of your product strategy.

Now that we’ve introduced FullSession and explained its various analytics features let’s move on to why you should consider our analytics software for your business.

Why should you choose FullSession?

Here are four reasons to choose FullSession to perform web analysis

FullSession helps you perform UX analysis without affecting your website performance and page loading time.
FullSession can track and analyze user behavior to identify user struggles and conversion blockers.
Our analytics software provides advanced filtering options that enable you to identify critical user actions and understand the digital experience of each user.
FullSession provides a central analytics platform that lets you and your team collaborate more efficiently.

As you can see, FullSession provides you with many benefits, so don’t waste time anymore and start your free trial to create a perfect digital experience for your customers.

Pricing

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides two paid plans—Basic and Business. Here are more details on each plan.

The Basic plan starts from $39/month and allows you to track up to 5000 monthly sessions
The Business plan starts from $149 and enables you to track up to 25000 monthly sessions
The Enterprise plan provides a customized pricing plan you can use to track 100,000 monthly sessions

So far, we’ve explained FullSession and why it’s an ideal session recording and replay tool for your business. In the next section, we’ll introduce Hotjar as a second alternative.

2. Hotjar

Image source: Venture Harbour

Investing in a tool like Hotjar can help you improve the user experience and your company’s profits. With session recordings and session replay tools, you can watch what your users are doing online and discover issues in the user journey, from the entry page to the exit page.

You can observe how customers use your site, make design changes, and compare the effects of those changes. It’s the UX designers’ favorite tool, but all teams working in the Information Technology industry can benefit from it.

Compared to traditional web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which gives you raw data, Hotjar offers you sensitive data presented in visual reports, providing immediate feedback on whether your changes have the desired effect or not.

Hotjar features

Hotjar is a qualitative web analytics solution you can use to make informed decisions about your website usability, navigation structure, and content organization. Here is a list of Hotjar’s features.

Heatmaps
Session recording
Session replay tools
Conversion funnels
Form analytics
User feedback pop-up widget
Incoming feedback
Surveys
Usability testing recruitment

Hotjar gives you a bird’s eye view of your website visitors. You can use it to see how users behave on your site, where they’re clicking, and what they’re paying attention to. If you want to learn how Hotjar compares to its competitors, you can read our Hotjar alternatives review.

Hotjar pricing

Hotjar offers two premium packages—Observe and Ask. The Observe plan lets you analyze customer events using heatmaps and session recording features. It includes

Basic plan—it’s free and allows you to track and analyze 1050 sessions/month
Plus plan— costs $48/month and helps you to track and analyze 3,000 sessions/month
Business plan—starting price is $80/month and gives you access to 500 daily sessions
Scale—offers a custom plan and allows you to track unlimited daily session recordings

The Ask plan enables you to collect feedback from users regarding their overall digital experience via a feedback widget, and it includes

Basic plan—it’s free and provides access to 20 monthly responses
Plus plan—costs $48/month and allows you to receive 250 monthly responses
Business plan—the starting price is $64/month and helps you collect up to 500 monthly responses
Scale—offers a custom plan and allows you to collect unlimited monthly responses

Our Hotjar reviews and comparison articles

Want to learn more about Hotjar and its alternatives? Feel free to check out our in-depth articles:

3. Inspectlet

Image source: Segment

With Inspectlet, you’ll have always-on visitor recordings that allow you to step into your customer’s shoes to improve and potentially increase your sales conversion rate. Also, it has an advanced setup that lets you gather data on desktop or mobile devices.

Inspectlet features

If you want to know more about the user experience on your website or landing page, Inspectlet is a good place to start. Here is the Inspectlet features list.

Automatic event tracking
Session recording and session replay tools
Screenshots utility
Eye-tracking heatmaps, click heatmaps and scroll heatmaps
User-targeted tracking options
Advanced filtering options
Session and user tagging
A/B testing
Feedback surveys
Form analytics
Bug reports

Inspectlet pricing

Inspectlet offers a free plan and five paid plans. Here are more details of each plan:

Free plan – provides access to 2500 session recordings
Micro plan – starts at $39 per month and allows you to track 10,000 session recordings
Startup plan – starts at $79 per month and gives you access to 25,000 recorded sessions
Growth plan – starts at $149 per month and allows you to analyze 50,000 recorded sessions
Accelerate plan – starts at $299 per month and enables you to track 125,000 session recordings
Enterprise plan – starts at $499 per month and gives you access to 250,000 recorded sessions

If you want to read more about how Inspectlet compares to Hotjar, you can check out our review.

4. Mouseflow

Source: Capterra.com

If your site visitors aren’t converting, Mouseflow can tell you why. The service lets you replay the whole visit and sees what areas people struggled with most. You’ll be able to pinpoint and fix problems easily and boost conversions on the web or mobile apps.

Mouseflow features

We all want to know what our users think. Mouseflow is a tool that provides an in-depth analysis of your website’s visitors. Here is Mouseflow’s feature list.

Click, scroll, attention, movement, geo, and live heatmaps
Session recordings and session replay tools
Conversion funnel optimization tool
Form analysis and optimization
User feedback

Mouseflow pricing

Would you like to use the free forever or paid plan? The free forever plan (500 sessions/month) is good for small businesses and websites and only offers limited features. However, if your website has a lot of monthly traffic, we recommend one of Mouseflow paid plans.

Starter costs $24 per month for 5,000 recordings/month
Growth costs $79 per month for 15,000 recordings/month
Business costs $159 per month for 50,000 recordings/month
Pro costs $299 per month for 150,000 recordings/month

Each paid plan has a free trial period. If you need more than 200,000 recordings/month, you can contact Mouseflow sales reps for more information.

5. Clicktale (now Contentsquare)

Image source: G2

Clicktale is a cloud-based session recording software that lets you gain insight into how your customers interact with your digital products. It provides information on web navigation, browsing patterns, and general behaviors of your users on web or mobile apps.

This session recording and session replay tool is ideal for measuring the goals of marketing campaigns, improving conversion rates, enhancing customer experience, and boosting sales.

Clicktale features

Clicktale is a powerful platform that has one fit for all your digital needs. It’s one place where marketers, product managers, and IT can use the session replay feature to get customer data and do their jobs better. Here is the list of Clicktale’s features.

Customer journey analysis
Zone-based heatmaps
Session replay tool
AI insights
Mobile app analysis
Merchandising analysis
Friction, page error, and site error detection
Impact quantification
APIs and web analytics integration

Clicktale (now Contentsquare) pricing

Clicktale provides a record-everything service. Pricing information is unavailable on the official site, and customers need to contact sales reps for more information. It is worth noting that Clicktale has subscription-based pricing.

To learn more about this tool, read our article on Contentsquare competitors.

6. Smartlook

Image source: G2

The Smartlook session recording and session replay software is an invaluable tool that can help you see everything your customers do on their screens. You’ll be able to see visitors click, their inputs into form fields, where they spend the most time, and how they go through each page of your website or mobile apps, thanks to an easy-to-use SDK.

It’s a tool that helps you stay compliant with GDPR. You can install it quickly and easily on your website by adding a small code snippet or using Google Tag Manager.

If you want to learn more about this tool and its competitors, you can read our article on Smartlook alternatives.

Smartlook features

Smartlook helps you get inside your visitor’s mind. You can track where they get stuck on your website, then use that information to improve the user experience. Here is the list of Smartlook features.

Session recording and session replay with advanced filtering options
Heatmaps you can segment by device type or visitor type
Automatic event tracking, statistics, and breakdown
Conversion funnels optimization
Analytics and reporting
Retention tables to understand user engagement and identify churn

Bonus features for mobile devices

User recording on Android or iOS devices
Wireframe mode to help you focus on UI elements
Games recording and analytics
WebGL to see graphic elements of your apps on different devices

Smartlook pricing

Smartlook offers a 10-day free trial. In this trial period, you can enjoy all the business plan features. However, there is a limit of 5,000 visits. You do not need to enter your credit card information to start the trial. After ten days, you can buy a paid plan or return to the free version. Smartlook offers three paid plans:

Startup with 5,000 sessions/month for $39 per month
Business with 15,000 sessions/month for $111 per month
Ultimate provides a tailor-made solution, so you need to contact sales reps

7. Lucky Orange

Image source: G2

Lucky Orange has a user-friendly interface that lets you take complete control of your recordings. It is a good tool for UX designers, product managers, market researchers, digital marketers, and others.

With session recording and session replay features, you’ll be able to see mouse movements, scrolls, taps, and gestures on the virtual desktop screen. To learn how this tool compares to other UX analytics solutions, read our article on Lucky Orange alternatives.

Lucky Orange features

Lucky Orange lets you optimize your website’s performance fast. It provides data to back up decisions in a useful way for both solo entrepreneurs and large corporations. Here is the list of Lucky Orange’s features:

Session recording and session replay
Live Chat for customer support
Conversion funnel optimization to remove roadblocks
Detailed visitor profiles with recordings history
Announcement sharing with placement options and intelligent triggers
Dynamic heatmaps
Unlimited and customizable dashboards to focus on important data
Form analytics
Fully customizable surveys with a pre-launch preview

Lucky Orange pricing

It offers a free plan for one website. The free plan includes 500 page views per month and unlimited recordings, with 30 days’ worth of heatmap data. Paid plans provide more insights, and you can test them out with a free trial. Also, it offers a 20% discount for yearly payments. Check more pricing details below.

Build package includes 10,000 pageviews for $18/month
Grow package includes 40,000 pageviews for $35/month
Expand package includes 100,000 pageviews for $70/month
Scale package includes 300,000 pageviews for $150/month
Enterprise package lets you create a plan based on your needs

8. FullStory

Image source: G2

FullStory is like having an extra set of eyes on the inside. It’s like having someone at your place who can see what people are up to while you’re not around. FullStory has a holistic view of your online customer experience.

It is a platform that combines both quantitative and qualitative data so you can drive digital transformation and growth. FullStory tells you what seems to matter most these days – what appeals to your customers.

You can check out our article on FullStory competitors if you want to learn more.

FullStory features

FullStory lets you get a complete picture of what users do on your website. Here are more details of the FullStory features:

Advanced record and session replay options with skip inactivity feature
Users and sessions filtering based on any action
Developers’ tools and bug reports
Conversion funnel optimization
Click and scroll heatmaps
Collaboration tools include notes, alerts, email digest, and slack integration
Privacy control features
Out-of-the-box implementation with JavaScript frameworks

FullStory pricing

FullStory doesn’t discuss pricing openly, but we can see basic information about each plan they mention.

A free forever plan has limited features and allows you to record 1,000 sessions/month
A free trial lets you test Business package features for two weeks
A Business plan offers a demo version you can check out
You can contact a sales representative if interested in the enterprise version

So far, we’ve explained the top eight session recordings and replay tools to help you understand user behavior. In the next section, we’ll present a table summarizing the features of each tool to make a quick overview.

The best session recording and replay tools: A short overview

The table below provides a short overview of the session recordings and replay software we mentioned above.

Features	FullSession	Hotjar	Inspectlet	MouseFlow	Clicktale	Smartlook	Lucky Orange	FullStory
Real-time Session recording	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Funnel analysis	✔	✔	✘	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔
Conversion tracking	✔	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
Behavioral analytics	✔	✘	✔	✘	✔	✘	✔	✘
Customer segmentation	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
A/B testing	✘	✘	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘
Customer journey mapping	✔	✔	✘	✘	✔	✔	✘	✔
Dynamic heatmaps	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘	✔	✘
Free version	✘	✔	✔	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔
Free trial	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔
Surveys and customer feedback	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔	✘	✔	✘
Insights	✔	✘	✘	✘	✔	✘	✘	✘

Session recording tools: Our verdict

As we conclude this comprehensive article, we hope it has provided you with enough information to select suitable session recording tools for your website tracking needs.

So many session recording solutions are available with varying strengths and weaknesses, so sticking with a solution that works for you and your team is critical.

FullSession stands as the best option in this article. Our UX analytics tool provides real-time session recordings and replay tools that help you watch users as they browse your website. With this feature, you can better understand user behavior, figure out where users are having issues and use the insight to improve conversions.

Test FullSession for free

Don’t hesitate to test our session recording and replay feature to learn how it works.

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial or request a demo if you need more information.

Session recording and replay tools: FAQ

Here are some answers to throw more light on session recordings and replay tools.

What is a session recording?

Session recording is a qualitative research tool that helps you record user sessions in real time. Product teams can replay the recordings and better understand user behavior by analyzing data, including the user’s clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, etc.

What is session replay software?

Video recording can give website owners a lot of information about user sessions. Session replay software helps you understand customer behavior in-depth and opt for marketing strategies that better fit their needs.

To analyze patterns that occur when users browse through your website or use its interface, you can invite visitors for usability testing and watch and replay videos they make themselves.

Why is session recording important?

Session recording lets you learn more about how visitors browse your website, including where they click and what content they view. It will help you understand your visitors’ needs and wants. This method can also allow developers to reproduce bugs and fix technical problems as soon as they happen.

How do I start a session recording?

We will take our FullSession as an example because it consists of six easy steps.

Start your free trial
Add your first and last name
Add the URL of your website or web app
Choose where you want to install FullSession
Get your Recording code or User ID code
Verify the installation
Invite your team members

That was easy, and it will take you only a few minutes to start with the session recording.

What is a Hotjar recording?

A Hotjar recording shows you a video of how users scroll, click, tap and interact with different features and web elements.

Does Google Analytics have user session recordings?

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking data and analytics relating to your website’s traffic, but it doesn’t collect everything you need to know.

For example, if a site visitor accesses a series of pages to fill out a form, you may wonder whether they reached a particular point in that form or not.

Or perhaps you want to know why they even came to your site in the first place. In both cases, session recording and replay tools allow you to see what users do on your site to understand their actions and improve your website accordingly.