The 5 best user session replay tools

Comparing FullStory, Inspectlet, Session Rewind, and more

Great product and design teams have to balance the need to continuously innovate by adding new features with the need to optimize existing features. Every new feature dilutes existing features and adds complexity to your product. Building new features when you have a simple product with just 10 early adopter customers is drastically different than when you have an already robust product with 500 corporate customers that want stability.

Around when we reached 1,000 customers on Coderbyte, we had to shift from daily product releases to carefully staged and limited beta releases to first monitor adoption to validate both value and usability. If we made a mistake and rolled it out to our entire customer base, we would immediately receive hundreds of support tickets and complaints. To help us ensure the usability of new and existing features, we heavily used user session playback tools. They basically record all of our users navigating the site and let us replay them to analyze trends and usability issues:

• How do customers navigate certain features?
• What about our user experience is confusing?
• Do customers understand what certain features offer?

With more than 100,000 visits per month, we had to find a solution that was affordable, scalable, and easy to use. My team has tested dozens of user session playback tools through the years — let’s explore each in detail, in no particular order.

FullStory

Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews

Boasting a range of innovative features and capabilities, Fullstory is by far the most powerful platform for identifying and addressing usability issues across your website and apps. So that you don’t have to manually watch every single user session, Fullstory offers actionable insights in the form of funnel analyses and heatmaps. They also have clever features to identify user frustration like “rage clicking” when a user repeatedly clicks somewhere on your site but nothing happens. The best part is that you can combine all the relevant metrics into a sleek real-time dashboard for your product and design team.

Pros

• Web and native mobile
• Robust features for searching through sessions, identifying issues, and visualizing trends
• Enterprise-grade features like SSO and integrations

Cons

• Free trial is very limited and enterprise pricing is too expensive for most companies
• Great user experience, but can be overwhelming to those unfamiliar with advanced design processes

Great for

• Large corporations with media and ecommerce properties that need to be fully optimized for usability and conversion goals

Inspectlet

Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews

At first glance, Inspectlet seems to offer most of the features of Fullstory from heatmaps to form analytics. To some extent that’s true, but you’ll find most of the features are quite limited and the user experience can be frustrating (oh, the irony!). Also, the sessions themselves are a lot lower ‘resolution’ than Fullstory — certain user interactions won’t be properly captured and viewable in the video replays. The site also crashes if sessions are too long.

Pros

• Straightforward pricing and not expensive if you have less than ~100,000 visits per month
• Many features for searching through sessions, identifying issues, and visualizing trends

Cons

• Web only
• Not a high quality session replay, so some user events and interactions won’t be captured

Great for

• Small businesses with non-critical usability issues and a tech-savvy designer who can navigate a more complicated platform

Session Rewind

Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews

Session Rewind is a simple, no frills user session playback capability that quite frankly just works. The session playback capability is snappy and much higher resolution than Inspectlet, and has an easy-to-use timeline so you know when the user was active and switching pages. It offers a core feature set that might not address most enterprise needs but will be more than enough for your everyday startup or small business.

Pros

• Super generous free tier (3,000 sessions per month and access to every feature)
• Incredibly affordable pricing ($14/month for 10k sessions, $99/month for 100,000 sessions) with low-price add-on for issue monitoring (and integrations with error logging tools)
• Unlimited admins included on every plan
• Shockingly high quality session replays, great for analyzing nuanced and detailed user interactions
• Easy-to-use search, filter, and notification capabilities

Cons

• Web only
• 60-day data retention
• Heatmaps and funnels are coming soon but not available yet

Great for

• Startups and small businesses that are savvy enough to use affordable software without needing hands-on account management.

Smartlook

Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews

Like Fullstory, Smartlook makes it easy to go from countless individual user sessions to quantitative insight quickly. It offers a robust number of analytics features and can probably replace other analytics tools that you may be using. However, the site can be a bit slow, clunky, and overwhelming at times due to the sheer volume of features and options.

Pros

• Affordable entry-level pricing, although many critical features will require plan upgrades, so expect to spend minimally $250/month
• A full analytics platform
• Web and native mobile

Cons

• The pricing plans are very confusing
• The user experience is overwhelming

Great for

• Small businesses with critical usability issues and analytics requirements, and a tech-savvy designer who can navigate a more sophisticated platform

SessionStack

Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews

SessionStack takes a different approach than all the other platforms on this list. They focus primarily on solving customer support issues in real-time, rather than addressing usability problems afterward. You can join customers in real-time by ‘co-browsing’ and guiding them through an experience if they’re having usability issues or console errors. They aren’t a hardcore customer support tool like Glia, but give you some of the basics. Like the other tools on the list they also of course offer the ability to define events and identify trends.

Pros

• Great and straightforward user experience, similar to Session Rewind
• Basic features for real-time customer support use cases
• API and suite of integrations

Cons

• The starter plan is affordable but very limited, after which you’ll have to engage in an enterprise sales process

Great for

• Businesses of any size where customer support works closely with product development to solve customer problems and iterate quickly