Session recording software lets you capture and study visitors’ browsing sessions on your website. Clicks, scrolls, heatmaps, and other user actions are enormously useful for optimizing user experience.
So in this guide, I’m sharing the best session recording tools out there. You’ll learn about top tools, their features, and their pricing.
By the end, you’ll know exactly what software you need.
Why Should I Record Website Sessions?
Using recording sessions, you can better understand visitors’ behavior and improve the user experience. It helps you answer questions like:
- What’s the user experience like?
- If a user clicks a button, what happens?
- How do people use your site?
- Is there anything wrong with your website?
You’ll understand every user’s decision, including why some users never browse past a certain point.
Best Visitor Recording Tools to Optimize Your Website
Lucky you, I’ve reviewed and ranked the best recording tools so you don’t have to. Here are my top picks this year:
1. Hotjar
Hotjar is a comprehensive web analytics tool that lets you see everything that happens on your site.
It uses interactive heatmaps of clicks and activities, recordings of your users’ sessions, and surveys and feedback polls to help you understand your users’ behavior. Its huge featureset coupled with its intuitive UI makes it my top session recording choice.
Key Features
- Compliant with all major consumer protection laws
- Filter session recordings by rage clicks, u-turns, and referrers
- Hotjar saves filter combinations as segments
- CSV export of heatmap analytics data
- 365 of data storage
- Unlimited users
- Run Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
- Heatmaps
- Conversion funnel reports
- Form analysis
- Feedback polls
- Visitor surveys
Pricing
| Plan | Pricing/month |
| Basic | Free |
| Plus | $39 |
| Business | $99 |
| Scale | $389 |
2. Mouseflow
Using Mouseflow, UX specialists, product managers, digital marketers, startups, small businesses, and corporations can boost conversions on their websites.
It helps you find answers that conventional analytics tools can’t provide by letting you:
- Analyze your visitor’s sessions
- Create six types of heatmaps funnels to understand why visitors leave
- Learn more about your visitors with form analytics and feedback campaigns
Key Features
- GDPR and LGPD compliant
- Single sign-on (SSO)
- Two-factor authentication
- US and EU server locations
- Heatmaps don’t require advanced setup
- Automatically create six different heatmaps
- Automatically tagged problematic sessions
- Forms (with analytics)
Mouseflow also has over 30 integrations. You can connect with tools like HubSpot, Intercom, and Magento to supercharge your analytics ability.
Pricing
| Plans | Pricing/month |
| Free | $0 |
| Starter | $24 |
| Growth | $79 |
| Business | $159 |
| Pro | $299 |
3. Smartlook
200k companies use Smartlook’s session replay tools to understand user behavior on their websites and apps. It’s GDRP compliant, offers over 30 integrations, and has a 4.7/5 star rating on G2.
Key Features
Conversion Funnels
Find out where visitors fail to follow your desired sales path and why. Smartlooks visualizes your funnel activity by combining thousands of interactions into a single report.
Always-on Visitor Recordings
Record every interaction on your site. Smartlook saves these recordings and filters based on device, location, and events.
Heatmaps
Aggregate countless interactions into a single viewport based on what parts of your pages get the most interactions.
Pricing
| Plans | Pricing/month | Sessions/month |
| Free | $0 | 1,500 |
| Startup | $31 | 5,000 |
| Business | $93 | 15,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
As you can see, Smartlook’s free plan is incredibly generous. Even if your site gets more than 1,500 sessions per month, that amount of data is still insightful.
4. Inspectlet
Inspectlet is comprehensive session recording software with a generous free plan. It’s got tracking heatmaps, A/B testing, and other functionality to match Mouseflow and Hotjar.
You can filter videos on many criteria, like new or returning users. Inspectlet also lets you track users by IP address (according to local privacy laws).
Key Features
- Error logging. Understand whenever Javascript errors happen on your live site
- Form analytics. Know what people do on your registration pages. Inspectlet gives you metrics like engagement rate, hesitation time, interactions, and more
- Feedback surveys. Run Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys on your site with minimal intrusion
Pricing
| Plans | Pricing/month |
| Free | $0 |
| Micro | $39 |
| Startup | $79 |
| Growth | $149 |
| Accelerate | $299 |
| Enterprise | $499 |
5. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange is feature-rich and user-friendly. You can capture page scrolls, clicks, and everything else happening on your site without coding skills.
You can compare the activity of new and returning visitors directly, different versions of your site (A/B testing), and view sessions side-by-side. Lucky Orange also offers heatmaps, conversion funnels, and analytics (though not as advanced as Inspectlet and Hotjar).
It also offers a live feed of visitors on your site.
Key Features
- Live chat
- Dynamic heatmaps
- Surveys
- Visitor profiles (privacy compliant)
- Announcements
- Dashboard insights
- Form analytics
- Real-time session recordings
Pricing
| Plans | Pricing/month |
| Free | $0 |
| Build | $14 |
| Grow | $28 |
| Expand | $58 |
| Scale | $128 |
6. Glassbox
Glassbox’s goal to track the whole customer journey. Their UI is intuitive, making it easy to filter thousands of recordings and heatmaps at once.
Seriously, its filters are some of the best—device, operating system, behavior, traffic source, and location are just a few.
Glassbox is also one of the best session recording tools for mobile devices and apps. It gives you a top-down view of interactions on any device.
Key Features
- Real-time reporting
- Advanced mobile-app tracking
- Massive session archive
- Customer surveys and feedback forms
- GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27701, and PCA compliance
Pricing
| Plans | Price/month |
| Free Trial (50 sessions) | $0 |
| Small Business | $50 |
| Enterprise (custom) | $200 |
7. Contentsquare
Contentsquare is on a mission to revolutionize web analytics. Sick of software that sees visitors as only numbers, Contentsquare created a platform recognizing each visitor as unique.
Sure, it’s a great session recording tool, but it goes beyond that. AI insights, zone-based heatmaps, and friction analysis, are just the start of its one-of-a-kind featureset.
Its profound power is why HP, Adobe, Walmart, BMW, Verizon, and other top firms rely on Contentsquare for its analytical abilities.
Key Features
- Applications for a huge range of industries (B2B, retail, telecom, and more
- APIs and integrations for personalized A/B testing and analytics
- Struggle analysis to understand where friction occurs in your customer journey
- Cookie-less and compliant with all major privacy legislation
- AI detects issues by itself
Pricing
Contnetsquare hides its pricing. You’ll need to book a demo and speak to a sales rep to get a quote.
Session Recording Software Boosts Analytics
As you can see, there are many feature-rich choices in session recording software. Each of them promises to overhaul your understanding of user activity and pave the way for more revenue.
But the best choice ultimately depends on your needs. My pick is Hotjar, but you might have great reasons for wanting Glassbox.
In any case, I’ve vetted each of these tools for their session analysis features. Each one gives you a massive edge in optimizing your site.
