For a website owner, understanding the entire customer journey is the key to success, and that’s where customer journey analytics...
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 quite challenging, given the abundance of user session recording and replay tools available on the market.
Session recording and replay tools have different features, benefits, limitations, and specific use cases. Some might be more useful than others, depending on your particular needs.
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 user journeys and determine pain points affecting conversions.
In addition to session recording and replays, FullSession provides interactive heatmaps, website feedback forms, funnel analysis, error tracking analysis and advanced analytics to help you optimize your product.
To help you make your decision faster, we've created a list of the top eight user recordings and session replay tools for your business.
Start a Free Trial to Experience FullSession
Discover how our session recordings and replays help you capture the entire user journey.
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.
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.
Capture the Entire User Journey
Discover how FullSession session recordings and replays help you analyze user behavior in real time.
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 must solve to provide customers with the optimal user experience.
Let’s explain each feature.
Our user session recording and replay tools provide a time-stamped record of each user event that occurs in a user session. It helps you see what users do when navigating your site, allowing you to use the insights to improve the user experience.
You can also use our session recording and replay feature to
Website session recording tools help you gain a bird’s-eye view of your website’s performance and understand how to optimize it further.
You can analyze recorded sessions using user data points like
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.
Interactive heatmaps let you visualize how users interact with your website elements, like buttons, headers, CTAs, and form fields. Our heat map feature provides behavioral data to improve your website tracking efforts.
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 conversion rates.
The FullSession interactive heat maps can also help you to
Our advanced segmentation and filtering options allow you to create unique customer segments, filter important user events, and identify questionable user recordings and session replays.
The FullSession platform provides an advanced analytics dashboard that lets you quickly identify significant patterns in user actions. It includes different categories that will improve your interpretation of user behavioral data.
Here are the main ones:
With this feature, you can gain insight into user behavior and uncover hidden customer struggles in every user activity.
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 the user's email address, country, comments submitted, device type, feedback date, and URL visited.
Each user feedback you collect is connected to a session recording so you can watch and understand what happened during a session.
The notes feature allows you to leave comments about user events to improve website analysis and deeply evaluate customer issues.
You can write down significant customer actions, share them with your team, and improve collaboration during project development.
The FullSession funnels and conversions feature offers an in-depth analysis of user journeys, allowing you to monitor, comprehend, and optimize every stage of your conversion funnel.
It helps you identify crucial actions that drive conversions, detect issues causing drop-offs, and analyze user interactions to improve the overall user experience. Its main features include:
FullSession error analysis helps identify, analyze, and resolve errors impacting user experience by leveraging data on error clicks, network errors, console errors, error logs, and uncaught exceptions.
This feature provides actionable insights to improve the reliability and user satisfaction of digital products.
Here are four reasons to choose FullSession to perform web analysis
As you can see, FullSession provides many benefits, so don’t waste time anymore. Start your free trial to create a perfect digital experience for your customers.
FullSession doesn’t include a free plan, but we offer a free trial. The annual subscription allows you to save 20% on our premium plans.
Here are more details on each plan.
Turn User Behavior into Growth Opportunities
Learn how to visualize, analyze, and optimize your site with FullSession.
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 actual user journeys, 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 is the favorite tool of UX designers, but it can benefit all teams working in the Information Technology industry.
Unlike traditional web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which provide raw data, Hotjar offers sensitive data presented in visual reports, providing immediate feedback on whether your changes have the desired effect.
Hotjar is a qualitative web analytics solution that helps you make informed decisions about your website's usability, navigation structure, and content organization. Here is a list of Hotjar’s features.
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 comparison.
Hotjar provides a free version. Its paid plans include the Observe, Ask, and Engage plans. If you pay annually, you can get a 20% discount.
The Observe plan lets you visualize user behavior with heatmaps and see users’ actions with session recording. It is divided into:
Want to learn more about Hotjar and its alternatives? Feel free to check out our in-depth articles:
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.
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.
Inspectlet offers a free plan and five paid plans. Here are more details of each plan:
If you want to read more about how Inspectlet compares to Hotjar, you can check out our review.
If your site visitors aren’t converting, Mouseflow can tell you why. The service lets you replay the whole visit and see what areas people struggled with the most. You’ll be able to pinpoint and fix problems easily and boost conversions on the web or mobile apps.
Read our Mouseflow vs VWO comparison to learn more.
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.
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 but offers limited features.
However, if your website has a high monthly traffic, we recommend one of Mouseflow's paid plans.
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.
Contentsquare (formerly 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.
Contentsquare is a platform that fits 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 Contentsquare’s features.
Contentsquare 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 Contentsquare has subscription-based pricing.
To learn more about this tool, read our article on Contentsquare competitors.
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 helps you get inside your visitor’s mind. You can track where they get stuck on your website and then use that information to improve the user experience. Here is the list of Smartlook features.
Bonus features for mobile devices
Smartlook offers a 30-day free trial. During this trial period, you can enjoy all the features of the business plan. However, there is a limit of 3,000 monthly sessions.
You do not need to enter your credit card information to start the trial. After 30 days, you can buy a paid plan or return to the free version. Smartlook offers three paid plans:
Lucky Orange has a user-friendly interface that allows you to completely control 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 can 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 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:
It offers a free plan for one website. The free plan includes 100 sessions per month, unlimited recordings, and 30 days’ worth of 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.
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 doing while you’re not around. FullStory has a holistic view of your online customer experience.
FullStory is a platform that combines quantitative and qualitative data to drive digital transformation and growth. It tells you what seems to matter most these days—what appeals to your customers.
You can check out our article on FullStory competitors to learn more.
FullStory lets you get a complete picture of what users do on your website. Here are more details of the FullStory features:
FullStory offers a free plan for basic needs. It gives you access to 5,000 sessions.
There are three paid plans—Business, Advanced, and Enterprise–but the downside is that it doesn’t provide transparent pricing for each plan on its website.
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 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 | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
Monthly pricing | $39 | $39 | $39 | $39 | n/a | $55 | $39 | n/a |
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.
There are so many session recording solutions available, each with differing strengths and weaknesses, so it's critical to choose a solution that works for you and your team.
FullSession is the best option for your website. Our UX analytics tool provides real-time session recordings and replay tools that help you monitor 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. And it’s not just session replays.
You also get access to a suite of tools to understand your customers’ needs and wants, including heatmaps, conversion funnel analysis, error tracking, customer feedback tools, and more.
Get a 360° View of User Behavior
Learn how to visualize and analyze all user interactions with FullSession.
The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides three paid plans—Starter, Business, and Enterprise. You can save up to 20% with a yearly subscription!
Here are more details on each plan.
If you need more information, you can get a demo.
It takes less than 5 minutes to view your first user session with FullSession, and it's completely free!
Let's answer the most common questions about session recording tools.
Session recording tools are qualitative research tools that help you record user actions while browsing web pages.
Product teams, UX and UI researchers, marketers, and site owners use website session recording software to capture data and analyze user behavior.
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, like FullSession, 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.
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:
It helps you tailor your products and services to meet users’ needs.
Image source: Intechnic
Session recordings help you understand and capture data about user navigation on your website and issues they encounter during their visit. You can watch sessions to learn:
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
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.
Video recording can provide website owners with a lot of information about user sessions.
Session replay software helps you understand customer behavior in depth and choose marketing strategies that better suit 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 of their behavior.
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.
We will take our FullSession as an example because it consists of six easy steps.
That was easy, and it will take you only a few minutes to start with the session recording.
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.
A session replay tool records and plays back user interactions on a website, allowing you to see exactly how users navigate, click, scroll, and interact with your site. It helps identify usability issues and understand user behavior better.
A session capture tool records user sessions on your website, collecting data on mouse movements, clicks, form inputs, and page views. This data is then used to create session replays, which can be analyzed to improve user experience and identify any issues users may face.
To implement session replay, follow these steps: