Zipy team for Zipy

Posted on Mar 18 • Originally published at zipy.ai on Mar 15

Best session replay software for product & marketing teams

#sessionreplay #replay

Anom Warbhuvan

~ 18 min read | Published on Jan 31, 2024

TABLE OF CONTENT

Have you ever wondered what your customers and website visitors are doing on your product or site? How do they navigate, where they click, what they type, or what frustrates them? If you want to improve your app or website conversion rate, you need to understand how to deliver a greatdigital experience platform for your customers. That’s where session replay software comes in handy.

Nowadays, 89 % of consumers use the internet to find information on products, services or companies before purchasing. Therefore, it is essential for website or mobile app owners to invest in a user-friendly and attractive design that can engage and improve the user experience of your customers. According to the latestUX statistics, website conversion can go up by 200 % with a good website design and better website monitoring tools.

In this blog, we will explore the benefits of session replay software, what to look for in session replay software, and compare some of the best session replay software available in the market, based on their features, pricing, reviews, and integrations.

So, if you are ready to take your website or app to the next level with session replay software, dive in with us!

What is session replay software?

Session replay software is a powerful tool that can help you understand how your users interact with your web or mobile app. Itmonitors users in real time and shares the user session recording with you, and you can replay these sessions to track how your visitors and users experience your digital products. It even helps you figure out errors and customer issues, which your development teams,debug and make the fixes live.

Session replay to work for websites, web apps, and mobile apps. It is an important tool to ensure a great digital experience for your website visitors and app user stays great. Now, let’s see in what ways session replay softwares helps product managers, marketers, customer success folks, and developers:

Track user journey and identify usability issues and gaps in the user experience
Optimize conversion rate for your user’s entire digital journey
Reduce customer churn and keep the revenue locked
Ensure product and feature adoption by analyzing user behavior
Identify rage click and frustration issues on the website and product
Form analytics help you in monitoring how visitors interact with your forms.
Analyze user behavior and feedback of your customers.
You can pinpoint product gaps or issues that are driving users away
Get bugs fixed faster live in engineering teams.
Improve customer support and support for your product

Now that you understand how a session replay tool can be a game changer, let’s figure out what you should look for in a session replay software. There are many options available in the market, each with different features, pricing, and benefits, and we have created an exhaustive list of these tools.

How to choose the right session replay software?

Here are some of the criteria that you should consider when evaluating different session replay tools:

Session recordings with high quality and accuracy : Session replay software should capture high-quality and accurate data of user sessions, including mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, keystrokes, form inputs, errors, and more.
User identification : This software should help youidentify the user who is facing any issue. Allowing you to link sessions to individual users or user segments so that you can link the user’s persona with action on your product.
Real time monitoring :Monitoring users in real-time refers to the capability of observing and analyzing user behavior and actions in time on your website or application. It enables you to observe how your users navigate your product.
Error tracking : Error tracking is all aboutmonitoring errors that occur on your product and managing them. With this, you can identify any code-related issues that might be affecting a few or many users.
Cross browser support: You should be able to record and replay the user sessions in different browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Safari, etc.
Data analysis and visualization : Session replay software should provide easy-to-use and intuitive tools to analyze and visualize the data. You should be able to filter and segment user data.
Data security and privacy : Majorly, all session recording tools should comply with the relevant data protection laws and regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, etc. You should be able to control what data is collected, stored, and shared. You should also be able to mask or exclude sensitive or personal data from the recordings.
Integration and compatibility : Your session replay software should integrate seamlessly with your alerting or ticketing tool, as well as with other tools that you use for analytics, A/B testing, etc. You should be able to install and configure the software easily and quickly.
Scalability and performance : The session replay software should be able to handle large volumes of data without compromising the performance of your website or mobile app. Having the power to adjust the sampling rate and data retention period according to your needs, would be a plus point.
Customer support : The session replay software should offer responsive and helpful customer support via chat, email, chat, or call. You should also be able to access documentation, tutorials, and FAQs as well.
Pricing: To use any tool, it is a good idea to go with a free trial as it does not take your card details. This way, you can test the tool and see if it meets your needs and expectations before committing to a paid plan.

Best session replay tools

Now that we have established what to look for in the session replay platform and software, let’s compare some of the best session replay tools available in 2023. We will use a table format to summarize their main features and benefits.

1. Zipy: Session replay software with user behavior analysis & error tracking

Zipy is an end to end digital experience tool that records user sessions and monitors errors. You can use it to track user behavior, identify user experience gaps, and resolve issues then and there.

We know that to deliver a great user experience, your product, marketing, support, and engineering teams need to come together, and Zipy provides an eco-system for it. You can record and replay your user recordings, identify errors, resolve them, and improve your user experience and conversion rate.

“5 stars! In no time Zipy has become our go-to place for watching user’s journey and fix most important bugs or workflows that our users are experiencing.” — Sandeep Rangdal , Mindtickle

Real time user monitoring for all user sessions

By implementingreal time user monitoring you can record and track all the actions taken by users visiting your digital product. This includes capturing details, like clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, form inputs and more.

Zipy records all user activities on your website and applications, this makes sure that you do not miss any data that can be crucial for your business. This is a glimpse of Zipy’s user session:

Moreover, capturing every user session also means customer success teams can resolve customer issues faster. When a ticket is raised, your success or support team members can look up the session recording and involve the development team to debug issues.

Link sessions with user identity

You canlink your user sessions with session recording on Zipy. It even allows you to filter users on the basis of different parameters like email id, error type, or session details. It ensures that you understand how different individuals navigate through your application, resolve customer issues faster, and even understand different user segments better.

Filter and segment your users

With Zipy, filter users on the basis of user, sessions, and errors details. Once you come down to the session that you want to study, you can jump in and track your users activities. You can even create user segments and save them, if you want to monitor these users later.

This feature is best to:

Pinpoint any customer issue and dive into it
Track reason for form abandonment
Monitor a user segment
Study user behavior on a particular web page
Study beta users for your new feature launch
Track behavior and experiences of different personas

Track user events

You can track events in Zipy and see clicks, errors, and how a user navigated from one page to another. You can use these events to dig in the user’s behavior. Track their activities and how much time they are taking to complete an action on your web or app pages. It even makes it a lot easier to study any website or product issue and resolve errors fasters.You can even add events of your choice in the filter and create relevant segments.

Not just this, your user’s environment is also captured. This means you can see what device, browser, operating system, screen resolution they are on. Along with their location, language, and other information. This information is gold for error analysis and resolution.

Error and performance monitoring

A good chunk of product issues go unreported. These unreported issues do not mean that your website visitors or app users had a great experience. It simply means that they did not report any issue and silently abandoned your product.

Zipy captures code errors and performance issues and creates reports for you. Helping product managers reduce churn and marketing teams improve website conversion.

Development teams can also track and manage these errors using and use theadvanced dev tools to resolve the identified issues. In the below image, both error section and API performance are clearly visible.

Integrations

Zipy supports integration with alerting, ticketing, and product related tools to help you enhance the digital experience. Some of the integrations at Zipy are Segment, Amplitude, Shopify, Mixpanel, Sentry, Google Analytics, Intercom, etc. It has more integrations to suit your preferred technology stack.

Cross team collaboration

Product managers, marketing, support, and development teams can easily collaborate on Zipy. You can create project based teams and involve only relevant members and keep the noise down. You can manage sessions and errors within Zipy, and even mark errors resolved when they are closed, making sure your entire team has visibility. If you are a Jira fan, you can even use Jira integration to instantly create tickets with error details and save loads of time and make co-ordination easier.

Zipy pricing plan:

Zipy offers the best pricing for session replay software in the market. Zipy has a 14 days trial and plans designed to scale according to your business needs.

Trial: Get 14 day free trial.Sign up now!
Free plan: Offers life long free plan with 1,000 sessions/month. No credit card require

Now that you are familiar with Zipy,talk to product experts for more details and enhance your digital products performance and end to end user experience.

Analyze user behaviour in depth with Zipy’s session replay.

Try for free

2. FullStory: Digital experience platform

FullStory allows you to gain insights and enhance user experience of your websites and apps. It lets you record how users use your platform and you can see where they have problems and why they might leave.

Additionally, FullStory lets you create and save user segments based on attributes, behaviors or events. This segmentation allows you to compare groups of users in terms of conversion rate, customer satisfaction, and retention.

To further enhance your insights FullStory seamlessly integrates with tools such as Segment, Google Analytics, Shopify and more. These integrations helps enrich your data and provide a deeper understanding of user behavior.

FullStory pricing plan:

Trial: Offers 14 day free trial

Price: Hidden

3. LogRocket: Frontend analytics platform

LogRocket is an analytics tool for frontend development that offers insights to enhance your web and mobile apps’ performance and user experience. It allows you to effortlessly capture and analyze user interactions and errors on your web app.

With LogRocket, you can even watch session replays of user interactions with your web app. Gain valuable insights into real users navigate their behavior pain points and reasons for leaving.

Among the features LogRocket offers are:

Session Replay: Watch recorded videos of users sessions to observe how they interact with your web apps or mobile apps, where they face obstacles and understand their reasons for leaving.
Performance Monitoring: Gain visibility into frontend performance metrics such as page load times, AJAX calls, component rendering, CPU and memory usage and browser crashes.
Product Analytics: Visualize user behavior, track user flows, retention rates, and identify trends over time. Create segments, funnels, cohorts, and dashboards for comparison.
Error Tracking: Identify and resolve errors that may impact user experience, including JavaScript errors, network failures or UI glitches on your web app.

Connect LogRocket with tools such as Segment, Google Analytics, Sentry and others to enhance your data and gain insights.

LogRocket pricing plan:

Trial: Offers 14 day free trial
Free plan: Avail up to 1000 sessions/month
Price: Paid plans start at $69/month

4. Smartlook: Product analytics and insight platform

Smartlook is a tool that offers, in depth insights into user behavior and analytics for your website or mobile app. It allows you to effortlessly capture and analyze every user session, interaction and event. With Smartlook you can gain information about your users behavior by watching session recordings, studying heatmaps, creating funnels, and tracking customer behavior flows.

It also helps you identify and rectify bugs optimize your website performance and design and ultimately improve your conversion rate and user satisfaction. One of the things about Smartlook is its integration with popular tools including Segment, Google Analytics, Survicate and Google Tag Manager.

You’ll have no trouble setting it up as its user friendly, secure and fully compliant with privacy standards. Regardless of whether you’re a product manager, UX designer, marketer, or a developer Smartlook empowers you to gain an understanding of your users.

Smartlook pricing plan:

Trial: Offers a free trial
Price: Paid plan starts at $55/month

5. Hotjar: Website heatmaps & behavior analytics tool

Hotjar is a session recording tool that lets you capture and replay how users interact with your website. With the help of heatmaps, you can see every click, scroll, form input, and page transition. Hotjar helps you understand your customer interaction, the factors responsible for it. It helps you identify usability issues and improve the website design and functionality for better conversion.

Hotjar has some great filters that allow you to narrow down the number of posts and find the most important discussions based on certain criteria. Here are some:

User segment attributes to filter customer data
Session attributes to filter visitor sessions length, no of pages visited and last page visited.
Event attributes used to filter rage clicks and U-turns.

Hotjar pricing plan:

Free plan: Up to 35 sessions/daily
Price: Paid plans start at $39/month

6. Mouseflow: Session replay and user analysis

Mouseflow captures all user actions performed during their session, including mouse movements, clicks, typing and scrolling. These session recordings can even be replayed later to gain insights, into user behavior, on your website or app. It also provides the capability to create funnels, which can be used to analyze your website’s conversion rate.

It’s important to note that tracking actions like clicking a call to action button or submitting a form is not currently supported within the funnel analysis. They majorly focus on observing the transitions between pages.

While Mouseflow is a good option for session replay with basic funnel analysis, it may not provide the depth and comprehensive insights needed for advanced analysis. If you’re interested in capturing events, setting up funnels, and tracking mobile app sessions, Mouseflow is worth exploring.

Mouseflow pricing plan:

Trail: Has 14 day free trial
Free plan: Avail up to 500 sessions/month ‍
Price: Paid plans start at $31/month

7. Lucky Orange: All-in-one conversion optimization suite

Lucky Orange records all of your user sessions, so you can watch them later and see their clicks, mouse movements, and page views. It allows customer support teams to get back to your visitors through its live chat feature. You can initiate chats with visitors based on their behavior or traffic source, or respond to their inbound chats.

Moreover, Lucky Orange offers other features to help you optimize your website and mobile apps conversion rate. You can see what elements on your page attract the most attention and interaction. The conversion funnels tell your visitors each step, and where they drop off. Each visitor’s complete history is available, including their sessions, pages, chats, and basic metadata.

Lucky Orange also integrates with popular tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Shopify, so you can connect your data and get more insights. If you want to see how your visitors use your website and provide them with real-time assistance, you might want to try Lucky Orange.

Lucky Orange pricing plan:

Trial: Get 7 day free trial
Free plan: Offers 100 sessions/month
Price: Paid plans start at $32/month

Start recording sessions with Zipy. Analyze user behavior and fix frustration issues.

Try for free

8. CrazyEgg: Conversion rate optimization tool

CrazyEgg is a conversion rate optimization tool that helps in boosting the number of visitors who make purchases on your store or web page. CrazyEgg provides insights into visitor behavior which helps dissect the buyer’s journey and identifies audience segments.

CrazyEgg has certain features that can help you in conversion rate optimization for your product. Heatmaps will help you gain visibility into where visitors click, scroll and hover on your pages. Error tracking helps identify and resolve any issue on your website that could hinder conversion. You can also compare and analyze your traffic sources and marketing channels to evaluate their impact on page performance and conversions.

To add to this CrazyEgg seamlessly integrates with platforms, like Shopify and WordPress simplifying the installation process, making it a good option for e-commerce sites.

CrazyEgg pricing plan:

Trial: Gives 30 day free trial
Free Plan: Has no forever free plan
Price: Paid plans start at $29/month

9. Inspectlet: Session recording and behavioral analysis

Inspectlet is a powerful customer experience analytics software that helps you understand and improve your web app’s user experience.

It helps you capture and analyze user behavior, feedback, and errors on your web app. Inspectlet also works with all the latest technologies and frameworks, such as React, Angular, Vue, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, and more, so you can use it on your web/mobile app.

Inspectlet, lets you optimize your web app design and performance with various features. With its session recordings, you can watch individual user sessions and see how they interact with you web app. Users click, scroll, and hover on your web app pages is easily available with heatmaps. It has surveys which lets users ask questions about their preferences, problems, or feedback and get valuable insights in real-time.

Inspectlet pricing plan:

Trial: Not available
Free plan: Gives up to 2500 sessions/month
Price: Paid plans start at $39/month

10. Clarity: User behavior analytics tool

Clarity is a free session recording and heatmap tool that helps you understand and improve your website or app’s user experience. It helps you capture and analyze user behavior, feedback, and errors on your website or app.

With clarity, you can see where your users click, scroll, and hover on your pages, and watch videos of their sessions. Some of the features that Clarity offers are session recordings, heatmaps, and insights which are powered by machine learning such as rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling.

With Clarity, you can narrow down your data by page URL, country, page count, device, and more. It also has extensive integrations to boost your website performance smoothly. You have the option to seamlessly connect Clarity with tools, like Google Analytics, WordPress, Shopify and others.

Clarity pricing plan:

Free plan: You can use Clarity at absolutely zero cost. The reason it’s free is because it’s one of the ways Microsoft gathers anonymous data for analysis.

11. Dynatrace: Monitor your digital experiences efficiently

Dynatrace allows you to capture and analyze user behavior, feedback, and error occurrences within your web and mobile applications.

With Dynatrace you can also view session recordings and see how users interact with your applications. Additionally it provides performance metrics and insights powered by machine learning. Some noteworthy features offered by Dynatrace include real user monitoring, session replay, synthetic monitoring, and product analytics.

Overall, Dynatrace is a solution for monitoring digital experiences. It helps you understand and improve how your app looks and behaves, by identifying and resolving user experience, JavaScript, or network related issues.

Dynatrace pricing plan:

Has hourly pricing for different capabilities. You can select the capability and pay as you scale.

12. Zoho PageSense: Product conversion optimization platform

Zoho PageSense is a tool, for enhancing your websites, web app and mobile apps performance and also allows personalization. It allows you to keep track of visitor interactions conduct A/B tests to identify the design and content variations and customize the website’s experience for each individual based on their unique data and behavior.

What sets Zoho PageSense apart is its integration, with Google Workspace, Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Google Tag Manager. It is also not suitable for cross-domain tracking.

Zoho PageSense pricing plan:

Trial: It offers a 15-day trial plan
Free plan: No lifelong free plan
Price: Paid plans start at $9/month

13. VWO: Website behavior tracking tool

VWO offers an alternative, for tracking visitor interactions on your website and applications and get insights about their user behavior. It captures code errors and moments of confusion that users experience.

With its multitude of features and functionalities VWO empowers you to optimize your website in terms of conversions and user satisfaction. VWO allows you to leverage its capabilities in A/B testing, split tests, multivariate tests. It also helps you to create heatmaps, scrollmaps, clickmaps, and session recordings to visualize and analyze your user’s behavior. It is a bit complex tool and not recommended for beginners.

VWO pricing plan:

Trial : 30 day free trial
Price : Paid plans start at $155/month

14. UXTweak: Improve user experience and usability

UXtweak helps you understand and improve your user experience and product usability. It allows you to record and replay the user’s interactions on your website or app, such as mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, taps, and keystrokes. You can also see heatmaps, insights, and reports that show how your users behave and what they think of your website or app.

UXTweak also organizes content with card sorting and tree testing tools. These tools help you design intuitive navigation menus or content structures where users will no longer be lost. You can test your usability with mobile testing, first click test, prototype testing, and website testing tools.

UXTweak helps designers evaluate how easy and effective your website or app is for your users and identify any issues that may affect the user experience.

UXTweak pricing plan:

Free plan : 1 month free plan for 1 user
Price : Paid plans start at $80/month billed annually

15. Plerdy: Improve user experience and SEO

Plerdy serves as a tool that aids in enhancing the performance and user experience of your website. With its assistance you can effectively assess your website performance, analyze visitor behavior, conduct experiments, and personalize user experience.

Plerdy also has some exciting features where it offers event tracking, like SEO checker, popup forms, net promoter score, conversion funnel and more.

Plerdy pricing plan:

Free : It offers 100 page views per day with 500 video sessions in total
Trial: 14 day free trial
Price : All-in-one plan starts at $26/month

Monitor users in real time with Zipy. Track how they navigate your product and what makes them drop off.

How to use session replay software effectively

Session recordings have a potential to surface user insights that can give you an entirely new perspective about your user behavior, and make a decent impact on your company’s revenue. So it’s best to use session replay tools effectively. Here are some easy steps you can follow:

Define a goal : Have a clear understanding of the goal you want to achieve such as improving user retention, reducing bounce rate, optimizing website conversion, preventing form abandonment, reducing customer churn, resolving customer issues faster, or any other burning issue.
Watch and analyze the recordings : Once you have defined the goal, track a relevant segment of users and analyze their journey. Look for patterns, trends, anomalies, and outliers that can reveal the trends and glitches. At this stage it would be a good idea to maintain a record of your product and website metrics, so that you can compare it to numbers after implementing the changes.
Get issues resolved with engineering team: If you identify an issue like click rage or any design issue, involve your development and design team to resolve it. Session replay software also log errors and performance issues, which yourdevelopment team can debug.
Track sessions for same segment: Once you fix the identified issue, you need to track the same segment of users to understand the impact of the fix. Tracking user sessions allows you to monitor and measure the impact of your changes on your user experience and performance. You can even compare the product and website metrics you measured earlier.

Frequently asked questions about session recording tools

What is session replay?

According to the session replay guide, these are replays or recordings of user behavior on your digital products. These record tracking user clicks, mouse movement, scrolls, typed text, and even the pauses for your website visitors, and web and mobile app users.

Session replays help you optimize conversion, identify usability issues, user frustrations, rage clicks, form abandonment, bugs and errors, issues around feature adoption, or why churn is happening. They even assist in resolving customer issues.

How much does session replay tools cost?

The cost of a session replay software or tools can vary depending on the monthly session recordings it allows, supported features, and product stability. The price for a decent session recording tools that can be used by a small team can start from $30/month, billed annually. The cost will be higher if you go for a monthly billed plan.

Conclusion

There are many session replay software out there, that can help you keep your customers really happy, without even chasing them to understand what happened or why they dropped. With the power to read your users mind, you as product, marketing, or customer success leader, you can impact user retention and customer satisfaction at multiple levels.

Session recording softwares is not limited to app and website optimization. They also help with user behaviour analysis,error monitoring, qualitative data analysis, and debugging. Once you improve the user experience with digital experience platforms, your product and website metrics will also get better. ‍

More resources on Session Replay Software

What issession replay? Why & how to use it effectively?
Achieve seamless experience with thissession recording tool
Masteringwebsite visitor tracking: A comprehensive guide
The art ofwebsite recording to improve conversions and sales
B2B website visitor tracking strategies and success metrics
10 factors to consider while choosing the bestvisitor recording software for you
8+1 bestmobile session recording tools to revolutionize mobile UX
How to improve your conversions withsession recordings for ecommerce?

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