Using session replay software allows businesses to really ‘step into the shoes’ of their users. By replaying user behaviors and interactions on a website or app, teams can uncover hidden gems about customer preferences that may have gone unnoticed. Session replay software enables teams to monitor user activity on a website and replay it to see where users click, scroll, pause, and spend their time. The data from session replays can help resolve issues quickly, determine hot spots on pages that need improvement, and create a better user experience. 👍
Replaying a user session also shows teams where users get stuck or frustrated with a process and what areas should get more attention regarding page optimization and design changes. Ultimately, user session replays could be the difference between successful products/businesses and those that fail! 💪🚀
Pros & Cons of Using Session Replay Tools
It is crucial for companies to thoroughly review all potential pros and cons of applying any user session replay tool. They need to analyze the risk factors before initiating any further mapping sessions or processing of private customer data.
Session Replay Tools: Pros
Applying user session replay tools can offer numerous benefits to businesses, including:
- Increased customer satisfaction – Session replay tools allow businesses to observe the user journey and analyze how they interact with website content. This helps the team better understand users’ needs and preferences, allowing them to improve their service or product.
- Increased conversions – Tracking user behavior through session replays allows businesses to determine which products or pages have higher conversion rates and what needs improvement.
- Improved customer support – By replaying user sessions, customer service agents can immediately identify any issues customers may face.
- Easier debugging – If there is an issue with the website, user session replay tools allow developers to detect the source quickly by viewing the exact sequence of steps users took before seeing the bug.
- Increased understanding of user behavior – Session replays allow businesses to gain insights into user behavior and how they interact with specific features on the website.
So, now that you know the top benefits your business will get, you can’t help applying user session replay tools, can you? 😏 Let’s consider the contrasting side of replaying user sessions.
Session Replay Tools: Cons
Applying user session replay tools can have negative implications, including:
- Privacy concerns – There are such around session replay software as they collect personal data without user consent which could be misused.
- Data overload – Because session replay tools capture every click and scroll, it can be difficult for companies to analyze all the user data collected from multiple recordings. This may lead to information overload.
- Costly – Many session replay tools come with hefty price tags, which can be unaffordable for small businesses and independent users that don’t have large budgets.
- Technical difficulties – It can be tricky to set up user session replay tools depending on your website’s complexity. It may require technical expertise that not all businesses have access to in order to get everything up and running smoothly without any hiccups along the way.
- Time-consuming – Analyzing each user session replays might take time, depending on your task manager setup.
Hence, using session replay tools can have serious implications for user privacy and data overload. Furthermore, being costly and difficult to set up correctly, such replay tools may cause a frustrating user experience.
How To Track User Behavior With Session Replay Tools
Session replay software tracks user interaction by capturing mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, form submissions, time spent on each page, error messages encountered, etc. In addition, these session replay tools track other information such as device type, location & IP address, etc. Enabling companies to view this detailed activity from actual visitors gives clear insights into how users behave/interact with website content.
The Results We Can Get From Using Session Replay Tools
Companies can gain valuable insights into how users navigate their websites (or apps) by applying user session replay tools. These tools also highlight what elements cause users’ confusion or hinder progress along specific points of their journey throughout their users’ experiences (UX). This helps them measure & compare different versions of the website, identify potential areas that need improvement or even uncover hidden features/paths that drive conversions but were not noticed before. Companies can also use the data collected from these session replays to design more engaging & effective campaigns across multiple channels and platforms by studying visitor patterns & behaviors over time.
Using session replay tools can provide businesses with a great deal of information and insights into user behavior, enabling them to better understand their customers and tailor the website experience. However, there are some potential downsides, such as privacy concerns, which should be considered when using such tools. Additionally, many different types of session replay tools are available on the market, each offering different features and benefits you should thoroughly research before making a decision.
The List of 16 Best Session Replay Tools
This best session replay software list includes Plerdy, Mouseflow, Smartlook, FullStory, Hotjar, Lucky Orange, Cux, Browsee, SessionStack, UXtweak, Heap, Germain UX, LiveSession, Contentsquare, Quantum Metric, and LogRocket.
Wonder how you can generally benefit from these user session replay tools?😏 👇
The benefits of using a session replay tool for a website include gaining insights into how users interact with the design elements and a better understanding of customer behavior to make better decisions about changes or upgrades to the website. User session replaying also helps identify problems that can be fixed quickly, like page loading issues or dead links, increasing user experience and encouraging loyal customers. Overall, session replay tools allow businesses to track the customer journey and come up with personalized user experiences that drive higher conversion rates.
Plerdy Session Replay Tool
Plerdy is one of the best session replay tools, providing exceptional user experience insights. It allows businesses of all sizes to record, replay and analyze user sessions, segment videos by event type, and segment users into groups. Additionally, Plerdy’s analytics provides tremendous insight into mobile and desktop website versions. The Session Replay software is designed for B2B companies looking to identify usability issues and UX optimizations. Its main advantages include highly customizable rules, the ability to analyze video sessions on different channels, plus the HQ location in Lviv, Ukraine, with CEO Andrew Chornyy leading the team. In short, Plerdy offers an intuitive platform for businesses of all sizes to better understand their visitors.
Links to Plerdy’s social accounts:
Twitter – @plerdy_com
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
So far, I’ve used the user session recording feature the most, and the layout makes it easy to see how users interact with the site. The indicators for cursor movement, page scroll, click, and keyboard input make it easy to quickly scan the video to see the essential parts of long recordings.
The SEO checker is a great tool and provides an instant overview of user devices over time.
I’ve tried out the form builder, which is easy to use and produces good results with little effort. They’re also pretty simple to implement on my website.
There are so many tools to use, and I’ve only scratched the surface.
Great value!
What do you dislike?
It took a little while to understand the navigation, which is a simple menu. Maybe slightly better signposting?
The only thing I’d like to see on the video recordings is that when selecting to view the current month, it doesn’t show the current day on a separate page.
John B., Founder
Mouseflow Session Replay Tool
Mouseflow is an advanced session replay tool designed to help businesses optimize their website user experience. It offers a unique 100% user recording capability and an exclusive Friction Score that allows users to identify frustrated visitors and fix any issues quickly. The session replay tool also provides robust security for all its data, enabling businesses to trust its recordings. The company’s offices are located in Austin, Texas, and the head of the company is Mikkel Wakefield. Mouseflow suits digital marketers, UX/UI professionals, product managers, startups, and enterprises. With this powerful session replay software, they can quickly analyze user behavior with clear visualizations and detailed insights to gain valuable knowledge about users’ preferences and improve their websites.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @mouseflow
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
The ability to tag key processes and what recordings are associated with those to narrow down key functionality issues.
What do you dislike?
Limits on session recording can sometimes be an issue.
Josh S., Director of Marketing and Technology
Smartlook Session Replay Tool
Smartlook is a session replay software designed to help businesses understand precisely how users interact with their website or application. It features always-on recordings that allow for recording 100% of traffic by default, providing key user details such as location and last activity. Its advanced filters analyze session recordings time efficiently. Plus, it provides insights, bugs & errors that lead to customer frustration. The company is headquartered in Brno, Czech Republic, and was founded by Petr Janošík. Smartlook stands out from similar software due to its easy integration, which requires no coding knowledge, and its ability to provide accurate data in real time. Additionally, the session replay software can be used for various businesses as it is suitable for websites, iOS/Android apps, and frameworks like React Native & Flutter.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @getSmartlook
User’s reviews on the Session replay tool
What do you like best?
Smartlook takes only a few lines to integrate, and you’ll start seeing session recordings instantly. It is very lightweight on bandwidth and simply captures DOM events and reconstructs the DOM in the playback viewer. You can easily add filters (for example, filtering out dev boxes/test user accounts), and you can quickly identify if a user encountered an error during their session.
What do you dislike?
Sometimes the session playback preview doesn’t quite load in style sheets correctly. However, because the DOM event capture is tied to the elements, you don’t end up with issues of clicks not showing up on the right elements. I have noticed some significant issues with large stylesheets, especially on mobile layouts, with dynamic z-indices and transforms.
Forest K., CTO
FullStory Session Replay Tool
FullStory is an excellent session replay tool designed for businesses of any size. It offers easy implementation, an intuitive UI that allows the whole team to jump in quickly, and a tagless auto-capture for worry-free data collection. The complete sessions are recreated in crystal-clear detail without any lag or impact on website performance. Additionally, you can choose the right privacy level for your organization to capture what you need and mask what you don’t. Most importantly, this session replay software provides insights into user behavior behind metrics, helping to identify and solve user problems efficiently and effectively. Its parent company is based in Atlanta, GA, with Scott Voigt as CEO/ President.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @fullstory
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
The session replay tool is second to none. Replay Fidelity is practically flawless. FullStory gives insight into the site that I don’t know how else we would get.
What do you dislike?
There aren’t very many things I don’t like about fullstory. I do wish that the washed elements or retroactiv, and that you can create and monitor events based off of network calls.
Alex H., Senior Product Manager
Hotjar Session Replay Tool
Hotjar is an easy-to-use session replay tool that enables businesses to record, analyze and optimize user behavior on their websites. It offers a range of powerful session replay features such as 365 days of storage, rage clicks, u-turns and error tracking, comparison of traffic sources, sharing and commenting on recordings, privacy protection, and unlimited users.
With offices in Valletta (Malta) headed by CEO Mohannad Ali, Hotjar is well placed to help businesses better understand their customers by replaying how they interact with the website. Furthermore, its intuitive design makes it suitable for any business regardless of size or technical ability. This session replay software can help improve customer experience and increase ROI from small startups to large enterprises.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @HotjarApps
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
User-friendly interface, good UI. Freemium options. Multiple options, such as form analytics, heatmaps, session recordings. Another plus point is that it is GDPR Compliant. So no need to worry about additional changes. Session recordings have the option to fast forward so that you do not need to wait. Can run up to 4x.
The javascript used is asynchronous and hence does not slow down your website. The Session recordings are extremely accurate and will help in conversions. It’s a kind of instant feedback and extremely helpful review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike?
Cannot track logged in users. There is no option to deanonymize if the user signs in. If this feature is there, it will be helpful for the marketing purpose. Integration with Google Analytics would be a plus point. Ability to download the session recordings would have helped a lot.
Dheeraj M., Small-Business
Lucky Orange Session Replay Tool
Lucky Orange is a powerful session replay software that offers many advantages over its competitors. It enables users to track interaction with any website element without the need for technical know-how. It comes with features such as full replay, timeline view, live view, and adjustable play speed. This session replay software is designed to help businesses understand user behavior before and after logging into a website or account dashboard, allowing them to provide better customer service. It also doesn’t slow down websites, making it an ideal session replay software for businesses who want to improve their customer experience without sacrificing loading speed. Lucky Orange has its headquarters in Overland Park, KS, and is owned by Brian Gruber.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @luckyorange
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
It’s a really nice tool with great heatmaps and user recording features. I love the ability to view videos by events that were triggered in the user’s session: nice layouts and pretty understandable without a lot of learning time.
What do you dislike?
Overall, lucky orange needs a little bit of a facelift. UI is a bit clunky, and some of the features are almost but not quite what I need. The best example of this is the polls tool. You can only do up to 4 answers and only radial style, no dropdowns.
Billing for large volume websites is a pain and also pretty expensive despite the fact you don’t really get more value. Limitations on storage of recordings is annoying but ultimately harmless. The hardest part is there isn’t any way to say I want to record these visitors, not those visitors. If we don’t care about people who are current customers, but we do care about potential customers.
Caldon P., Marketing Technology Manager
Cux Session Replay Tool
Cux is one of the best session replay tools that offers a variety of advantages when compared to its competitors. The session replay software allows users to track activity from individual users, check their visibility and analyze visit recordings with great accuracy. Cux gives an accurate picture of users’ visits with complete session recordings rather than single sessions like other software do. Moreover, it shows the most popular exit pages, which helps identify high bounce rate reasons.
The company headquarters are in Wrocław, and its Co-Founder & CEO is Paulina Walkowiak. Cux is beneficial for businesses that want to monitor user behavior and see how well their website performs. This session replay software helps them understand customer needs and provides insights into what can be improved or changed on the website to provide a better user experience.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @cux_io
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
I really liked that cux.io is recording not only a single session but the whole customer visit. What it’s also important that they have great support!
What do you dislike?
Cux.io works well; there’s nothing to dislike from my point of view.
Robert M., Mentor
Browse Session Replay Tool
Browsee is an innovative session replay software designed to help businesses and organizations better understand user behavior. It offers a wide range of features to explore, including auto-tagging based on sentiment, rage clicks, and high engagement tracking, filtering by parameters such as referral, UTM, or device type, and the ability to share sessions with the team or create a public URL. Additionally, it allows users to send data to GA or other analytics tools, save favorite sessions and even track sessions across multiple domains.
Its offices are located in New Delhi, India, and are headed by Saurabh Mathur. This session replay software is designed for companies of all sizes who want a more comprehensive overview of their user’s experience on their website. With its versatile capabilities and intuitive interface, Browsee is one of the best session replay tools available today.
Links to their social accounts:
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
Browse helped us solve customer issues faster by getting real-time product analytics through recorded sessions; tagged circles helped in segmentation and launch features quickly.
What do you dislike?
Nothing much; most of the features are easy to use and well thought out.
Subhajeet D., Mid-Market
SessionStack Session Replay Tool
SessionStack is a powerful session replay software that enables businesses to easily capture, analyze and collect user data from any website or web application. It offers tagless auto-capture of client-side data, user segmentation and trends to understand user behavior at scale, instrumentation-free funnels, pixel-perfect session replay, network traffic monitoring, and dev tools for easy debugging. This comprehensive solution is designed to help businesses improve their website user experience.
SessionStack has offices in Sofia, Bulgaria and is led by Founder & CEO Alexander Zlatkov. It stands out amongst its competitors due to features such as session download and sharing capabilities, co-browsing with users, and collaboration tools for offering real-time assistance. These features make it an essential session replay tool for providing valuable feedback on product issues while enhancing customer satisfaction.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @SessionStack
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
Lightweight and extremely powerful tool for session replays. They also have a co-browsing feature that allows you to track what your visitors are doing in real time.
What do you dislike?
The funnels functionality is a great idea, yet, it’s a bit limited at the moment.
Miroslav V., Co-Founder & COO
UXtweak Session Replay Tool
UXtweak’s session replay tool stands out with its comprehensive features, including the ability to watch sessions at double or quadruple speed, seek out important events on the timeline, and quickly skip over sections of inactivity. Additionally, it provides pixel-perfect fully-inspectable recreations of a user’s web experience. This makes the session replay software ideal for businesses looking to gain insights into customer behavior and design more effective websites.
UXtweak is headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia, and owned by Peter Demčák. With this advanced session replay software, businesses have access to real-time analytics and detailed user data that can be used to make informed decisions about their websites.
Links to their social accounts:
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
I was impressed by the customer support I received.
I emailed the company with a question regarding the tools and services offered. I received a response within hours from Peter Demcak. The response was very thorough and helped me learn more about what UXTweak offers. I even got a response to a follow-up email during the weekend, which was an unexpected and pleasant surprise!
I like that you can see demos of each tool so you get a real view of how the data is presented.
Instead of just reading what the tool can be used for, you can actually interact with the demo and pretend you conducted the study, such as replaying recordings and filtering participants.
The Session Recording tool was easy to set up, even though I’d never done website tracking before.
What do you dislike?
With session recordings, there is some lag between a website visitor and when the visitor is recorded in UXTweak. I discovered this when I was testing my study. Whenever I visited my own website, it would take about 10 minutes for my visit to appear in the analysis section. At first, I thought that the study wasn’t recording data properly, which made me anxious.
It would be even easier to set up if there were some instructions describing how to install the snippet with session recording.
Amy M., Student Representative
Heap Session Replay Tool
Heap’s One-Click Session Replay tool offers unique advantages compared to competing solutions. It provides users with instant context and data science guidance to understand user behavior quickly, isolate key moments of friction, and identify solutions to their biggest challenges. Moreover, Heap’s Session Replay is fully integrated into its analytics suite, eliminating the need for manual tracking or setup.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and is led by Ken Fine as the new CEO. This powerful session replay tool is designed for businesses across industries that need actionable insights from their user data to improve their products and services.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @heap
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
I like how easy heap has made it to tag events in your product. You can quickly name all events and create funnels to visualize how users are using your product.
What do you dislike?
I wish heap allowed you to watch user sessions live or recordings similar to other tools. It’s excellent for quick analytics, but not if you’re looking for more visual data, such as what users are looking at on the page or what they are doing before taking the action you have tagged.
Raeann K., Growth Marketing Manager
Germain UX Session Replay Tool
Germain UX is a powerful session replay tool with numerous advantages over its competitors. It has an intuitive, user-friendly interface designed to maximize usability and effectiveness, allowing businesses to quickly and accurately record user sessions and replay them later for analysis. This session replay software offers advanced features, such as automated user feedback collection, real-time issue detection, workflow analysis across multiple channels, and 24/7 troubleshooting automation.
Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, and the company is led by Yannick G., its CEO & Founder. This powerful session replay software is designed for businesses that want to gain insight into user behavior, optimize their processes, and identify issues before they impact conversions.
Links to their social accounts:
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
Real User Session Replay feature is the most impactful; it is relatively easy to use and was intergrated easly with very clear instructions from the vendor.
What do you dislike?
This is not actually a dislike, but I suggest adding graphs on Real User Session Replay feature to graph common metrics. I understand you can create these but adding a few samples will be great.
Gilbert O., Director and CTO
LiveSession Session Replay Tool
LiveSession is a powerful session replay tool designed to help businesses track their users’ journeys and identify any bottlenecks in the process. Its main advantages include real-time reporting, custom reports, and advanced visualizations, which enable businesses to gain insights into user behavior quickly and accurately. It also offers a wide range of features for analyzing website performance, including heatmaps, form analytics, and funnel analysis.
LiveSession is headquartered in Wrocław, Poland, with CEO Kamil Drazkiewicz at the helm. The session replay software is tailored for eCommerce, tech companies, marketing agencies, and financial institutions looking to optimize their website or application performance by understanding users’ behavior better. LiveSession offers an easy-to-use platform that helps users get the most out of their user data without requiring large technical investments or long onboarding processes.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @LiveSessionHQ
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
Works fast (page loading)
Nice, clean UI
Fully working recordings
What do you dislike?
Price quite high
Not possible to search by email.
A User of Information Technology and Services
Contentsquare Session Replay Tool
Contentsquare is a powerful session replay tool designed to help businesses uncover customer pain points and drive intelligent resolutions. With offices in Paris, the company is led by founder and CEO Jonathan Cherki. This session replay tool can be used for eCommerce, SaaS, mobile, IoT, and other online business models. It offers unique advantages over competitors, such as replay with no latency, automated root cause analysis of recurring errors, filtering capabilities to pinpoint exact sessions impacting key metrics, and multiple options for data export. Contentsquare’s session replay software also features improved scalability and faster response time, making it easy for users to tackle technical issues quickly at scale and allowing them to focus on optimizing their website’s performance.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @Contentsquare
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
The session replay service is great. Contentsquare is very intuitive.
What do you dislike?
Sometimes I cannot find the session recordings for a specific customer, and the Controlled Exposure is confusing, but nothing major.
Luiggi M., Customer Support
Quantum Metric Session Replay Tool
Quantum Metric is an advanced session replay tool designed to gain unprecedented insights into user activity. It features incredible depth and breadth of capture, enabling users to see all the metadata behind a replay, such as platform information, API calls, and network details. Such replays make it easy for businesses to quickly discover errors and conversion events. Furthermore, the session replay software’s intuitive UI provides instant aggregation without binge-watching.
The company is headquartered in Colorado Springs, CO, and was founded by Mario Ciabarra. This session replay tool helps businesses to uncover users’ behavior patterns and opportunities for improvement that would otherwise have gone unseen.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @quantummetric
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
The ability to see the full customer experience (everything happening on the front end + the back end). I learn something new every time I watch a session replay. I also love that the tool help can help quantify the number of users experiencing an issue as well as the ability to segment users based on: a particular action, a/b test they are in, users who hit a certain page, etc.
What do you dislike?
I wish we were able to keep session replays for a longer time frame or the ability to pull heat maps for an older date range.
Erica D., Product Manager, Lifestages
LogRocket Session Replay Tool
LogRocket is an innovative session replay tool that accurately reproduces a user’s DOM, including iFrames, network requests, and performance telemetry. It helps you mask the most sensitive user data and inspect the original HTML/CSS to understand and reproduce UI bugs. With its advanced filters, LogRocket allows the segmentation of sessions for unique cohorts to be used in analytics.
The company is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and is headed by CEO Matthew Arbesfeld. This easy-to-integrate session replay software is perfect for developers looking to expand their understanding of user behavior on their website or application. The LogRocket session replay tool offers an invaluable benefit over competitors since it can easily traverse shadow DOM nodes and mask sensitive data from ever showing up on servers or session replays – ensuring the safety of users’ data for businesses of all sizes.
Links to their social accounts:
Twitter – @LogRocket
User’s reviews on the Session Replay tool
What do you like best?
Session recordings that are tagged with geography information, the ability to create heatmaps, filter conditions – conditions that allow filtering by user, geography, URL, email.
What do you dislike?
Sometimes there are no sessions recorded for a user session. Those are usually when errors occur in our application, and we expect LogRocket to capture the issue and send a notification.
Mayur S., QA Manager
Finally, these 16 best session replay tools can help you gain various customer insights, as well as understand their behaviors and preferences. By understanding customer interactions with your digital products, website or applications, you can make better decisions for your business. Not only that but also interact with users more meaningfully and ensure better user experiences. With the help of these session replay tools, you can tweak specific areas of your websites or improve communication between customer service teams and customers.
Conclusion
Session replay software is a powerful and valuable tool for website owners to gain insights into users’ activity on their websites. By replaying users’ sessions, they can identify user problems and improve the website to increase user satisfaction and conversion. Such tools provide increased visibility into how users interact with your website. Thus, they help you make more informed decisions about design changes or feature implementations that may improve the user experience. Thanks to these innovative session replay tools, understanding users’ behavior has become as accessible and beneficial as never before.
