In this blog post, I’m going to talk about website session recording tools. First, I’ll guide you on “What is Website Session Recording?”. After that, you’ll learn how to record user interactions on a website and replay them later.
Finally, I’ll give you an ultimate list of the free, online, open source, and paid user session recording tools available in the market. I have provided detailed information about the features, pros, and cons of each user behavior recording tool. It helps you select the best option according to your requirements.
What is Website Session Recording?
Website Session Recording is a video-like replica of visitor’s journey on a website. Basically, it’s like recording the screen of your visitors while they are on your website.
It help us look what users are doing on a website and find out issues they are facing.
For example, you can find areas of your website where users are doing rage clicks (repeatedly click or tap on an element in a website, indicating frustration).
How to Record & Replay User Interactions on a Website?
There are many online, free, paid, and even open source projects out there that enables you to record & replay user interactions on a website.
Mostly, these tools give you a small code-snippet that you need to add in your web pages where you want to record user sessions.
Best Website Session Recording Tools
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a completely free session recording tool that allows you to record user sessions on your website. The most important thing about clarity is that you will never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version.
It’s easy to use, and it’s cloud-based so you don’t have to worry about installing anything on your own servers. You just need to copy/paste a small code snippet in the <head> section of your web pages and Clarity will start working.
You can even install Clarity with a few clicks if you already have Google Tag Manager integrated with your website.
Clarity works with all web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
Features
- Always-on recordings
- Click and scroll heatmaps
- Instant heatmap generation
- Access to historical data
- Rage click and dead click insights
- Share heatmaps and recordings
- Multi-device support
- Rich segmentation with 25+ filters
- Support for Ajax and single-page apps
- Masking and more privacy features
- GDPR & CCPA compliance
- Easy integration with Google Analytics
- Single sign-on
- Email customer support
Benefits
- Unlimited traffic
- Unlimited heatmaps
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited team members
- Completely FREE
- Built on open source behavioral analytics library written in TypeScript.
- The official WordPress plugin of Clarity is available.
rrweb
rrweb refers to ‘record and replay the web’. It is the most popular free and open source website session recording library. rrweb is mostly written using TypeScript.
At the time of writing this article, rrweb has 11.9k stars, 1k forks, and 82 contributors on GitHub.
If you want a self-hosted solution for recording and replaying users’ interactions on the web then I would highly recommend you to use rrweb.
Project Structure
rrweb is consists of 3 parts:
- rrweb-snapshot – used to convert the DOM and its state into a serializable data structure with a unique identifier
- rrweb – record all the mutations in the DOM and replay the recorded mutations
- rrweb-player – provide GUI-based functions like play, pause, fast-forward, drag and drop to play at any time.
Features
- 100% Free and Open Source
- Pixel-perfect way to record web session
- Replay web session
- User analysis
- Reproduce bugs
- Real-time collaboration
OpenReplay
OpenReplay is an open source session replay suite you can host yourself. It lets you see what users do on your web app, in turn you can troubleshoot issues faster. It’s a great open-source alternative for rrweb.
OpenReplay is coded using a combination of Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Go.
You can deploy OpenReplay anywhere. The contributors of this amazing tool have even provided step-by-step guides for deploying OpenReplay on major public clouds, such as:
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Azure
- Digital Ocean
- Scaleway
- OVHcloud
- Kubernetes
If you are not looking for a self-hosted solution then don’t worry. You can also use OpenReplay as a service. The team behind OpenReplay will manage hosting, scaling and upgrades for you.
Features
- Session replay
- DevTools
- Assist your users in real-time using WebRTC call
- Omni-search
- Funnels
- Fine-grained privacy controls
- Plugins oriented
- Integrations with Sentry, Datadog, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Elastic and more.
Visit WebsiteDownloadOpenReplay as a Service
66Analytics
66Analytics is a self-hosted solution that offers lightweight tracking, session replays, heatmaps, user journeys, and more. Its user interface is super clean and intuitive. It is like an all-in-one tool for web analytics.
Features
- Ease of use: good looking & friendly design, 5-min quick installation process
- Dashboard: real-time visitor analytics details (Devices, OS, Browsers, etc.), custom goals tracking, track UTM, evolution on the past 30 days
- Visitors: view and get details of all the visitors, analyze all their past sessions (including the flow of the visited pages and their actions), evaluating your visitors behavior, identify your visitors (by connecting your logged in users from your app, to the tracking system by any identifier)
- Session replays: visually see everything a visitor did, high quality replays, keep track of user journey throughout the site
- Heatmaps: understand where your users are clicking, find cold zones of your website pages, multiple heatmaps per website, desktop, tablet & mobile heatmaps, clicks tracking heatmaps
- Privacy: all the tracked data will be fully owned by you and stored on your servers, supports opt-out for your visitors, respects DNT (do not track), no IP addresses are being collected
- Lightweight mode: < 6 kB tracking script, fulfills the basic tracking needs while extremely fast, no cookies and no local storage, GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliant, no tracking consent needed
- Users management: a system to create, view, update and delete users
- Websites management: check out and delete any website that is currently on your system
- Pages management: manage all the extra and custom page on your website
- Discount & Redeemable codes system: you can give out discounts or fully redeemable plans for your users
- Taxes, billing & invoicing: configure and generate proper invoices and tax rates for you and your paid customers
- Payments management: check all the payments made on your platform
- Statistics page: see an overview of the growth of your website
- Website Settings: control the main settings of your website
FullStory
FullStory performs website session recording of users. It tracks every user’s action on a website by recording their screen. In turn, FullStory enables you to immediately find out the reasons behind why people are leaving your website.
For example, you can:
- Find out which button/link is not working when users click on it.
- Find out why people are struggling to create an account.
- Find out why people are not buying on your e-commerce store. Are they facing any errors?
- etc.
This comprehensive tool performs user session replay, extracts programming issues, evaluates web performance, etc. FullStory can determine which issue is more harmful to your business so that you could prioritize your focus on the most important things first.
FullStory is actively being used by many big companies such as Vmware, Forbes, and GNC. It puts a great emphasis on the privacy of users. So, you can completely trust this solution for your next web project.
Features
- 100% tagless autocapture
- Private and sensitive data excluded by default
- Retroactive data history
- Product Analytics: Frustration signals, User trends, User segmentation, Event funnels, Customizable dashboards, Page flow analysis, Watched elements, Journey mapping, and Conversions analysis.
- Session Insights: Pixel-perfect session recreation, Heatmaps, Scroll maps, Click maps, and Developer tools to analyze bugs.
- Workflow & Collaboration: Omnisearch, Co-browsing, Session notes, Shareable session links, and Real-time alerts.
- Data Management & Access: Replay retention, Analytics data retention, Integrations, Webhooks, Data export, Multi-organization management, and Role-based access control.
- Security & Privacy: Security compliance, Persistent data encryption using AES-256 standards, Restriction by IP address, Restriction by User Agent, Restriction by location, Consent API, FS.Identify API, Detections, and Single Sign-On.
Hotjar
Hotjar provides four different products to track your digital business. These products are Heatmaps, Recordings, Incoming Feedbacks, and Surveys.
Heatmap provides a visual representation of the clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior of visitors on your website. It identifies users by their device type to store the sessions correctly.
Recording tool records user screen including mouse movement which can be replayed later. The feedback box lets you receive the sentiments of the visitors.
Whereas, the survey form helps us retrieve meaningful information from users by asking targeted questions. It enables us to analyze the context behind certain user behavior.
Pricing for Heatmaps and Recordings
Basic
- $0 / Forever
- Up to 1,050 sessions/month
- Automatic data capture
- Unlimited heatmaps
Plus
- $31 / month
- Everything in Basic, and:
- Up to 3,000 sessions/month
- Filter and segment data
- Events API: track custom user actions
Business
- $79 / month
- Everything in Plus, and:
- Starting from 500 daily sessions
- Custom-built integrations
- Identify API: track custom user attributes
- Frustration and confusion signals
- Removal of Hotjar branding
Scale
- Contact Hotjar for custom pricing
- Everything in Business, and:
- Unlimited daily sessions
- Dedicated customer success manager
- Unlimited sites under the same plan
- SAML single sign-on (SSO)
- Enough data for the largest sites
- Full access to every feature
Pricing for Feedback and Surveys
Basic
- $0 / Forever
- Create and store 3 surveys & 3 feedback widgets
- Feedback in 40+ languages
Plus
- $47 / month
- Everything in Basic, and:
- Up to 250 monthly responses
- Create unlimited surveys & feedback widgets
- Events API: target survey & feedback widgets by custom user actions
Business
- $63 / month
- Everything in Plus, and:
- Starting at 500 monthly responses
- Identify API: target feedback by custom user attributes
- Remove Hotjar branding and customize colors
- Analyze survey performance
Scale
- Contact Hotjar for custom pricing
- Everything in Business, and:
- Unlimited monthly responses
- Dedicated customer success manager
- SAML single sign-on (SSO)
- Full access to every feature
Smartlook
Smartlook lets you go into the mind of the user by recording user interactions on the website. It consists of 30 filters that can be used to attain your desired information.
You can provide a replay link or add a note on the website whenever an issue occurs.
Smartlook record each event of the visitor on your website. It records the timing of each event that occurs on the website. Therefore, you can use the visitor timing for your website service conversions. Smartlook provides custom filters to perform statistics for your business. It sends statistics reports to your inbox weekly. You can compare the new feature of your store website with the function people already applied for their business websites.
Further, Smartlook contains the Funnel feature. The funnel feature helps you to figure out the progress of your mission to make people act on your website.
Smartlook provides a customized dashboard. A customizable dashboard provides all the information about your digital business users in one place. This information is in pictorial form which can be visualized easily for your business strategies modification. It will notify you in case any funnel stops.
It also provides location information of the visitor.
Smartlook has both Free and Paid packages that you can subscribe to from their website.
Features
- Session recordings – Watch real user behavior
- Heatmaps – Visualize user engagement
- Events – Check all user actions
- Funnels – Analyze user paths
- Cross-platform – Web and mobile analytics in one place
- Mobile app analytics – See in-app user behavior
Mixpanel
Mixpanel helps you to gain, convert, and involve more users in your eCommerce store. It helps us with four different features. That features are behavioral analytics, data science, data governance, and user analytics infrastructure.
Behavioral analytics visualize where the user started to interact with the website, the whole path, and where he stopped interaction on the website. You can compare the behavior of paid and free traffic on your website. With behavioral analytics, you can categories the interest and actions of different types of visitors to your website.
Behavioral analysis insists you make conversions by providing the funnels feature. Funnels tell you where, why, and which user dropped services. It notified you when an important change occurs in the matrices.
Data science discovers what behaviors of users lead to a specific action. So, you can prioritize the events based on public attitude.
The data governance feature keeps your data clean. Therefore, any member of your team can conveniently access, understand, and use it.
The user analytics infrastructure feature of Mixpanel offers a custom database that can store data to answer complex behavior questions. It answers 95% of queries in less than two seconds from a tremendous amount of data.
Features
- Interactive Reports – learn about your users
- Team Dashboards and Alerts – monitor your metrics
- Limitless Segmentation – surface hidden trends
- Group Analytics – measure B2B account health
- Scalable Infrastructure – ingest and query at any volume
- Data Integrations – connect to your warehouse
- Data Management – keep data clean and usable
- Security and Privacy – protect customer data
- Integration Directory – 50+ connections to top tools
Its free package includes 100K monthly tracked users.
Mouseflow
Mouseflow records frustrated users, JavaScript errors, friction, and much more. It records the screen of the user just like CCTV. Each click, mouse movement, and scroll is tracked. You can filter based on the user’s dissatisfaction, mistakes, compatibility issues, and many more factors.
Heatmap shows the summarized behaviors and activities of the public. It tells us what is running and what doesn’t. It maintains custom date limits as well as mobile and responsive layouts.
Funnels keep track of each user throughout the journey. You can visualize where the user is dropping out with the funnel feature.
Mouseflow also records user actions on forms. You can use the recorded sessions to detect problems faced by a user and hence improve the UX. It also asks for user feedback for future practices.
Features
- Session Replay – Watch and learn from actual user behavior
- Six Types of Heatmaps – Click, Movement, Scroll, Attention, Live, and Geo. See where your users are most likely to convert.
- Conversion Funnels – Dive in and start watching session recordings of dropped and converted users to optimize each phase of the customer journey.
- Form Analytics – Analyze and optimize forms field-by-field
- Feedback – Ask the right questions at the right time
Inspectlet
Inspectlet discovers the tracks of users on your eCommerce store. It stops you from guessing the expectations of users about your service. With Inspectlet session recording, you are just standing on the shoulders of the user and visualizing their activities.
You can learn about the trends that are most attracting for the users by observing priceless information about potential customers.
Inspectlet provides powerful filtering. You can easily filter the desired users with the filtering feature. The funnel tool tells which users add products into the cart but never performs check out. This tool also keeps track of users from one page to another page. You can visualize where the user is dropping off with the funnel feature.
Inspectlet is designed using the latest technologies. It can be integrated with any website by copy/pasting a small but unique code snippet.
With Inspectlet, you can tag the data of the user with session information. So, you can find users with their email session information. Inpectlet also offers a search with a particular event e.g. pressed-play.
Features
- Record and Replay Sessions
- A/B Test Visitors
- Heatmaps Suite
- 100% Compatibility with dynamic sites
- Mobile Device Support
- Download Session Recordings
- Give your team access to Inspectlet
- Conversion Funnel Analytics
- Targeting Controls
- API Access
- In-Page Form Analytics
- Custom Services
- Email and Phone support available
Heap
Heap saves every activity of the user all the time. It processes everything the user performs in your online store. There, you don’t need to decide anything in advance or write code.
Heap is a single tool that automatically captures all the data of users from your website. With heap, API use can attain the whole user journey on your site. The sources of heap extract information from other tools as well. Therefore, you can track the actions of the customers.
Heap provides an event visualizer to examine each event on your website. Heap understands the confidentiality of your business data. It keeps your data trustworthy and clean with a data dictionary for usage. The governance tool provides an analytical platform to measure data and communicate with teammates. Security and compliance features of heap keep your data secure.
Heap can analyze the data to improve acquisition and retention. With Heap, behavioral perceptions keep you associated and produce outcomes in the organization. Heap Connect is an intelligent and easy-going way to allow the analysis of data.
Features
- Analytics – Ad-Hoc Analytics, Reporting, Account-Based Analytics
- Data Capture – Autocapture, APIs, Connect to Enrichment Sources, Projects (Product/Website)
- Data Engine – Event Visualizer, Data Dictionary (Basic Governance), Governance (Advanced)
- Insights – Report Alerts
- Integrations – Heap Activate, Heap Connect
- Security – SOC-2 Compliance, Single Sign-on, Two-Factor Authentication
- Customer Success – Basic Technical Support, Standard Support, Premium Support, Onboarding & Implementation, Professional Services Packages, Heap University, Training Sessions with Heap Experts, Customer Success Manager, Success Architect
Uxcam
Uxcam tracks the experience of user on your software application. It records every minor action of the user and permits you to optimize your software application. So, you no longer need to guess what your users are looking for.
With the session recording of Uxcam, you can see your online store with the customer’s eyes. You can replay anytime the user experience and evaluate it for optimization purposes. Uxcam allows you to search for any session that matters to your business optimization rule. It tells you about the sessions that face crashes and rage taps. It lets you watch the session experience quickly and on a particular screen as well.
You can watch visitor session recordings from different angles. You can easily find out the reason for dropping out of users on your app. It facilitates you with strong machine learning tools to uncover the hidden points of user frustration from an enormous amount of data. Uxcam exposes the different directions of usage of your online store. The zero instruments of Uxcam can extract the micro-interaction activity of users. So, you don’t need to worry about the coding for user experience extraction.
Uxcam gives you the intention of the user behind the utilization of your app. It discovers the hidden bottleneck. You can see the big picture of your software application in a single view. You can see the user experience on different devices and identify different device issues during the handling app.
Funnels analytics tells you which navigation path the user chooses for a visit on your app. It provides different funnels for different paths and informs you which funnel faces more dropout. You can find out the reason of dropout by watching the session recording of the user. You can compare it to the users who completed their tasks for app conversions.
Uxcam facilitates the integration sessions with your tools for quantitative measurements. It allows your customer support agents to replay any session of ticket raised.
Features
- Free plan includes 10,000 monthly sessions
- Capture – Tagless autocapture, Event Analytics, Session Replay, User Analytics, Integrations
- Insights – Heatmaps, Funnel Analysis, User Journey Map, Frustration signals
- Monitoring – Technical issues & bugs, Log capture, Issue Alerts, Priority support
- Connect – Data export API and CSV, Data visualizations
- Manage – Enhanced collaboration tools, Advanced organizational permissions, Recording rules, SSO / SAML, Structured Onboarding support, Dedicated Customer Success Manager
VWO
VWO enables the organizations to conduct successful A/B tests across users’ lifecycles on their digital stores. You can increase revenue for your digital brand without the involvement of the development team. You can modify the title, page, style of your websites, and mobile application without writing a single line of code.
VWO provides to ready-made widgets library to apply for your website and test its impact on conversions. You can easily change the HTML, CSS, and JS code according to your desire as well.
It facilitates you with funnels to identify the dropping points of visitors. It recodes every click of visitors for your understanding. With VWO full stack, you can test anything search algorithms or recommendation engine,s or subscription workflows.
Features
- Cross Device Heatmap and Visitor recording
- Clickmap
- Heatmap Comparison
- Funnel
- Page and Session Level Recordings
- Basic and Advanced Form analysis
- Basic Website Survey, Exit intent survey, White-labelled Surveys
- Scrollmap
- Advanced Heatmap & Session recording filter
- Basic/Advanced Targeting and Segmentation
- API Access
- 3 months data retention
- Dedicated Account Manager
- Onboarding & Training
- Email, Chat, and Phone Support
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange help you improve your website’s conversion rate using a collection of tools including Dynamic Heatmaps, Session Recordings and Live Chat.
Its intuitive dashboard is full of meaningful information that gives you quick insights about your website’s real time user experience (UX).
Features
- Session Recordings
- Dynamic Heatmaps
- Live Chat
- Dashboard Insights
- Conversion Funnels
- Form Analytics
- Visitor Profiles
- Surveys
- Announcements
- GDPR and CCPA Compliant
Crazy Egg
Make your website better. Instantly.
Over 300,000 websites use Crazy Egg to improve what’s working, fix what isn’t and test new ideas.
Features
- Heatmaps
- Recordings
- A/B Testing
- Traffic Analysis
- Errors Tracking
- Surveys
VisitorLAB
No more guesswork! Let your visitors tell you what they want. Make your website perfect based on visitors’ actions, needs and wants.
Features
- Heatmaps
- Session Replay
- Error Detection
- AI LAB – VisitorLAB will give predictions about the future behavior of new visitors while even they don’t know how they will behave.
WP Visitors Tracker
This WordPress plugin records the actions of your website visitors and allows you to visualize their visits by replicating them.
It helps you understand the behavior of your website visitors. You can then use this session recording data to improve the user experience.
It provide a nice user interface through which you can play, pause or navigate the complete user journey just like you are watching video of your visitor’s screen.
Features
- Replay the visits of your users.
- Identifies connected users.
- You can navigate through the steps of a visit
- Reproduces the screen resolution of the visitor
- Option to automatically delete old visits
- Visits information : date, duration, user, country, IP and browser
- Reactive support from its developer!
Freshmarketer Session Replay by Freshworks
Understand visitor’s experience on your website. With Session Replay in Freshmarketer, pinpoint user struggles on your website or application, improve user engagement, and deliver exceptional experiences.
Previously, this tool was known as Session Replay by Zarget.
Glassbox Session Replay (formerly SessionCam)
Capture every moment from every user using Session Replay. Understand what happened in front of the user and behind the scenes to create happier customers forever.
It is the quickest way to identify and resolve user struggles on a web page.
LogRocket
It is a modern frontend monitoring and product analytics solution. LogRocket combines session replay, performance monitoring, and product analytics. It empowers software teams to create the ideal web and mobile product experience.
Features
- Session replay: Reproduce every user session with a pixel-perfect replay
- Frontend performance monitoring: Correlate frontend performance with business impact
- Product analytics: Convert, engage, and retain customers
- Error tracking and management: Surface the most impactful issues affecting your users
- User experience analytics: Use heatmaps, clickmaps, and scroll maps to optimize page layouts
- Native mobile apps: Everything you love about LogRocket, now on mobile
- SaaS or Self-hosted
- Privacy / Compliance: SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR- and CCPA‑compliant. HIPAA and FedRAMP hosting options
- Enterprise: SSO integration with most providers, including Okta, Google, and Active Directory
- Works with your stack: LogRocket works regardless of language or framework
- SDKs for specific technologies: React, Angular, Redux, Plain JS, Ember, Vue.js
- Integrates with the tools you already use
SessionStack
Digital Experience Insights that empower product teams. Improve your customers’ experience. Boost engagement, adoption, and conversion.
A comprehensive yet agile platform with 100% session capture, session replay, and auto collection of events.
Help your product team make data-driven decisions to improve users’ digital experience.
Features
- Session Replay: Watch live or replay user sessions. Collect all mouse movements and clicks. Track individual users by email, name, or any other personal information. Easily export sessions in HTML or JSON file format.
- Session Segmentation: Filter sessions based on user attributes, session details, and Visited URLs. Share your segments with teammates.
- Co-browse & Collaborate: Join customers in real-time while they navigate your web app to provide hands-on guidance and help when they stumble upon UX glitches, errors, or simply need advice. Once you start collaboratively navigating your web app with your customer, use the Live Support Toolkit available in the player to assist them real-time. The pointer tool helps you attract their attention to different elements of the web app by moving the cursor. Point and click to show the user how to navigate your web app. Draw directly on the user screen
- Recognize user experience trends
- Monitor network traffic
- Uncover defects that affect users
- Craft custom recording rules
- Integration with helpdesk platforms: Zendesk, Intercom, and Freshdesk
- Integration with error tracking tools: Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, and Errorception
- Integration with analytics solutions: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Segment
Conclusion
An effective website session recording tool should be easy to use, keep track of every website visitor, and provide real-time analytics. It should also have the ability to share recordings with others in order to increase transparency in your business.
There are many tools available to help you record your website’s user sessions. While some of these tools are more expensive than others, they all have their own strengths and weaknesses.
As with any new technology, it’s important to research what works best for your specific needs. Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas about which tool might be right for you.
If you think I missed anything important, please let me know in the comments below!
