Comparing and contrasting multiple Fullstory alternatives can leave you uncertain about which tool best aligns with your budget limitations and priorities in terms of core features— such as session replays, heatmaps, and AI analysis of user behavior and sentiment data.
Yet, if you don’t select the right tool, you could end up with an increased workload, fewer essential insights into your product and user, and hidden costs.
In this article, we outline Fullstory’s strengths and weaknesses and guide you on what to prioritize in an alternative. We review seven top tools, highlighting their key features, functionalities, and pricing to help you make an informed decision.
Why look for Fullstory alternatives?
Fullstory is a powerful behavioral data tool that helps you understand the user experience on your website or product through user session replays. Whether it’s the right fit for your team will depend on some of the following factors:
- Your goals will vary according to your growth stage, industry, and business model. For example, you might prioritize product development and conversion rate optimization over improving the user interface (UI).
- Some tools may offer more specialized features, like advanced heatmaps, A/B testing, or AI-driven insights, which could enhance your decision-making and optimization strategies.
- You might value specific integrations for your existing tech stack and workflows.
- You may be looking for a tool with a free plan or trial so you can test your solution first without committing to a paid plan.
Exploring Fullstory alternatives will help you select a tool that best aligns with your unique goals, budget, and technical requirements, ensuring you get the most value from your analytics spend.
Fullstory strengths and limitations
To better understand Fullstory, here's a product overview based on customer insights.
Fullstory strengths
Many users praise Fullstory for its session replays. This feature lets you see how people interact with your product so you can identify potential areas for improvement.
Customization is another Fullstory strength. You can decide what you want to monitor and how. For example, you can choose to run session recordings on a particular audience segment, like users with a high-tier plan versus a low tier. You can also set up replays for certain parts of the user journey, like the onboarding process.
Fullstory limitations
Many customers experience a steep learning curve before they feel confident using Fullstory. This is due to:
- An overwhelming amount of features to choose from
- A non-intuitive interface, making customization difficult (eg setting up user segmentation and reporting for the first time)
- Complicated advanced features. For example, integration with other analytical tools may require customer support help if you don’t have coding skills or a technical background
As Fullstory’s strength lies in its session replays, it leans more toward quantitative feedback rather than qualitative. But, the amount of data captured may overwhelm even large teams. Since Fullstory doesn’t use AI to summarize data into recurring themes, analyzing several user sessions individually to gain actionable insights can be time-consuming. Inaccurate data within Fullstory’s reporting and segmentation is also commonly reported.
Fullstory bases its pricing on user sessions. This means mid-size and enterprise companies with a large user base may see costs increase if they’re not careful with how they use the tool. Session replays are available for a set time because of limited storage capacity (based on your pricing plan). If you want to save new recordings, you need to clear old registrations first.
Key criteria for evaluating alternatives
Here are the top features to look for in a Fullstory alternative:
- Session replays. This feature lets you watch recordings of user sessions to see exactly how users interact with your website or mobile app. It can help identify obstacles or glitches in the user journey to improve the product experience. Replays can also provide real-time insights that standard metrics, like traffic and bounce rates, can’t show you.
- Heatmaps. These are usually color-coded images offering a visual representation of user activity, differentiating higher and lower engagement. Heatmaps show where users click, scroll, or hover on a page, enabling you to identify what’s "hot" and what’s not. With Heatmaps, you can experiment with improvements, like adding new button placements, layouts, and content to drive conversions while reducing frustration and churn.
- User journey tracking. You can see how users navigate your site, product, and even sales funnels. Tracking the user journey can help you spot common paths, friction, or drop-off points, so you can design a more intuitive interface and user-friendly experience. Look for tools that offer detailed analysis so you can track each step of a user’s journey.
- Event tracking. Product teams may be interested in monitoring specific user actions, such as clicks, downloads, or form submissions, without additional coding. Tracking events can help teams know which features or messaging drive engagement.
Other factors to consider include:
- Ease of Use. Make sure the platform is easy to understand so you can avoid learning curves and ensure every member of your team can use it effectively without training.
- Integration. Explore integration options and see if your main data and SaaS tools are compatible to improve your productivity and workflows.
- Pricing. Ensure the cost fits your budget so you can make the most out of the plans available to you.
- Support and resources. Enterprise plans will sometimes offer dedicated support. If you’re a small to mid-sized firm, look for educational materials, like documentation, video tutorials, and an FAQ to help you launch your behavioral analysis faster.
These criteria will help you select the best alternative for your specific goals.
7 best Fullstory alternatives
Now that you know what to look for, here are seven top Fullstory alternatives:
1. Sprig
Sprig’s intuitive dashboard lets you create behavioral studies in minutes and leverage AI analysis to quickly uncover product trends and opportunities at scale.Sprig is an all-in-one product experience platform combining user behavior and feedback data for a comprehensive product overview. This includes deeply understanding the user experience across your website and mobile apps.
With Sprig, you get a 360-degree view of user behavior, engagement, and sentiment that Fullstory and other behavior analytics tools lack. While quantitative results can help you identify patterns and measure impact over time, qualitative insights can put that data into context to answer the 'why' behind user actions. This means you can dig deeper to reveal users' pain points, motivations, and emotions within your product.
For example, you may spot rage clicks in a heatmap session. By surveying that event, you may discover an inactive button that causes the user to click repeatedly and get nowhere. The holistic analytical process that Sprig offers—of capturing user behavioral and sentiment data—can turn otherwise time and resource intensive data collection into a streamlined process for understanding the user journey and uncovering product optimizations.
Sprig also provides AI-driven analysis of your user feedback and behavior data. This means you won’t have to sift through hours of session recording videos and customer feedback responses to identify trends. AI summarizes key points for you across all Replay, Heatmap, Survey, and Feedback studies, helping you to quickly understand the top themes and takeaways.
Here’s an overview of Sprig's main solutions, use cases, pricing, and integration partners.
Key features
- Replays. Capture session recordings throughout your user journey with AI that analyzes and groups clips into actionable product themes. You can customize privacy settings to blur sensitive data (eg passwords) and create targeted Sprig Replays that are triggered by specific events.
- Heatmaps. Like Replays, you’ll have privacy settings and AI analysis to uncover behavior trends quickly. You can even customize Sprig Heatmaps according to user information or specific URLs and events.
- In-Product Surveys. Get in-depth insights with Sprig Surveys that you can customize for specific user segments or events. Or add a survey to replays, enabling a deeper view of user reactions.
- Feedback. Sprig Feedback enables you to tap into important usability information. How you use Sprig Feedback is totally up to you as it is customizable—choose the pages, audience, design, and questions. As with Heatmaps and Replays, Sprig AI analysis will summarize survey and feedback findings for you.
- AI Explorer. Capture a full view of your product lifecycle while saving time with AI insights. Sprig AI Explorer pulls and analyzes data from your platforms and your Replays, Heatmaps, Surveys, and Feedback studies.
- AI Recommendations. OpenAI large language models power automated analysis across all our solutions. Get automated recommendation updates each time you launch a new study, whether that’s Replays, Heatmaps, Surveys, or Feedback.
- Integrations. Choose from collaboration and data tools, like Slack and Segment, to analytics and experimentation, like Mixpanel and Optimizely, and get a full picture of customer interactions across touchpoints.
- Extra features for improved workflows. Tap into survey templates, shareable custom dashboards, and an AI study creator recommending the features that can help achieve your product goals.
Use cases
User behavior analysis. Unlike Fullstory, which relies on a manual analysis of session replays, Sprig’s AI solution automates the identification of opportunities and issues to resolve, saving time, especially for teams handling large volumes of data.
User Experience. Sprig excels in gathering qualitative feedback directly from users through surveys and feedback fields, providing a more direct line to user sentiment than Fullstory’s session-based insights.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). With Sprig’s AI insights, you can spot blocks and drop-offs affecting your conversion rates and use Sprig’s Surveys to dig deeper into the causes. Fullstory provides the data through its session replays but, without AI help or surveys, you’ll have to analyze on your own.
Product Management and Development. Sprig’s in-product surveys and usability testing tools make it ideal for iterating on product design and features. You’ll have a holistic overview that offers more actionable feedback compared to Fullstory’s session replays.
For example, GoFormz used Sprig to optimize their product development. With Sprig Surveys, the task management tech company leveraged product feedback to improve its online and mobile form-building solution.
With the help of Sprig’s AI analysis, the GoFormz team made discoveries that led to better onboarding flows and new audience growth. Meanwhile, Sprig Replays provided richer user-behavior insights to optimize and launch high-performing features faster.
Pricing
All plans include unlimited AI use and seats within the account, so all your team members can use Sprig.
- Free. One study per month for a maximum of five thousand users per month.
- Starter. Choose from $175 to $550 per month, depending on if you need two, four, or six studies for 25k to 50k users per month.
- Enterprise. Custom pricing.
Best for
While useful for all companies, Sprig’s AI Analysis can help mid to enterprise-sized companies with large data volumes and user bases identify patterns fast to save significant time and resources.
With low or no code options, Sprig empowers product managers and teams of any industry, enabling them to quickly and easily collect and analyze user behavior.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides a suite of tools to get quantitative user and website visitor data.Key features
- Data collection. Tracks traffic from website and mobile apps, user engagement, and conversion events (i.e., clicks, form submissions, downloads).
- Audience information. Provides demographic and geographic user data.
- Goal setting & tracking. Measures marketing campaign performance against your custom goals.
- Multi-channel attribution. Helps you see the user journey and conversions across different channels.
- Custom reports & dashboards. Allows you to tailor reports and dashboards based on your business needs.
- Real-time updates. See live data on user activity.
- Integration. Connect Google analytical products, like Ad Manager, Search Console, and Data Studio, and even external partners like Salesforce, to get a 360 degree view of user behavior.
Use cases
- Website behavioral analysis. Unlike Fullstory, which focuses on session replay insights, Google Analytics provides more URL and click-related data, like traffic trends, bounce rate, and engagement time.
- Marketing ROI Tracking. Marketers can use GA4 to measure the ROI of campaigns across various channels, offering multi-channel attribution that Fullstory lacks.
- Reports. With Google Analytics, you can create custom reports to aggregate quantitative data, while Fullstory provides more behavioral data reporting.
- Data Processing. Google Analytics helps process large volumes of data, whereas Fullstory may be better for specific session analysis to identify UX improvements.
Pricing
- GA4 is free for small to medium-sized companies.
- Google Analytics 360 is for enterprise-sized companies. Custom pricing.
Best for
GA4 is best for digital marketers in small to mid-sized companies who need to measure and optimize campaign performance. Enterprise-size firms will also find GA360 scalable and suitable for their needs because it provides strong data analytics capable of handling large volumes.
3. Mouseflow
Key features
- Session replay. Record and save individual user sessions.
- Heatmaps. Use up to six different heatmaps to measure user behavior by clicks, scrolls, movement, attention, and geographic location.
- Funnels. Track and analyze sales funnels to see where users drop off or convert.
- Form analytics. Monitor how users interact with your form fields, helping you understand where hesitation or abandonment occurs.
- User feedback. Offer feedback widgets directly on your site to capture user opinions at any time.
- Friction score. Detect and track errors affecting user experience, and quantify the level of usability friction.
Use cases
- User experience optimization. Like Fullstory, Mouseflow provides detailed session replays and heatmaps, helping businesses identify and rectify UX issues. However, Mouseflow offers greater features in their heatmaps, and provides form analytics to analyze conversions and drop-offs.
- CRO. Mouseflow’s funnel analysis and form analytics offer insights into specific conversion stages to help you optimize the user journey. Fullstory offers similar functionality but doesn’t have a specific feature for form analytics—instead, it has a form abandonment filter you can use to search for drop-offs during user sessions.
- Behavioral targeting. Mouseflow lets you create targeted segments based on user behavior, offering a level of precision similar to Fullstory, but with a focus on session details.
Pricing
Mouseflow offers a wider variety of plans than other Fullstory alternatives:
- Free: Up to 500 sessions per month with limited features.
- Starter: $39 per month for 1,500 sessions and basic features.
- Growth: $119 per month for 5,000 sessions, including advanced features.
- Business: Like Growth, but $249 per month for 15,000 sessions with premium support.
- Pro: Like Business, but $399 per month for 50,000 sessions.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Best for
Mouseflow is best for small to medium businesses in e-commerce, healthcare, and travel, looking for detailed behavioral insights without the high cost of enterprise tools.
It’s also a good option for agencies that manage multiple clients' websites and want to optimize the end users’ digital journeys.
4. Amplitude
Key features
- Behavioral analytics. Provides user behavior analysis across websites and mobile with automated AI-powered reporting.
- Session replays. Captures individual user sessions with built-in compliance and privacy features.
- Web analytics: Includes event tracking, funnel analysis, and user session tracking.
- Data management system. Enables you to pull all your data into one place to connect the dots of your analytics, revealing the reasons behind user behavior (eg drop-offs or cart abandonment).
- A/B Testing & Experimentation. Offers experimentation tools with audience segmentation to analyze how website, product, and feature changes affect user behavior.
Use cases
- Product development. Unlike Fullstory, Amplitude doesn’t stop at behavioral analytics. It includes features dedicated to product development, like experimentation and management, to help product, engineering, and design teams understand feature usage, user retention, and lifecycle.
- User behavior analysis. Both Amplitude and Fullstory offer behavioral analysis. But Amplitude is more quantitative, focusing on long-term trends and patterns, while Fullstory focuses more on immediate data, like session replays.
- Monetization. Unlike Fullstory, Amplitude provides a comprehensive mix of both qualitative and quantitative data, enabling you to discover how to cross-sell and upsell better, like turning free clients into paid plans.
Pricing
Amplitude has three plans:
- Free: Core features and up to 10 million events per month.
- Growth: Custom pricing based on usage and features.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Best for
Amplitude is suitable for data-driven businesses that want hard facts to guide their decision-making and growth strategies. This makes it a great fit for companies in the financial services, healthcare, e-commerce, media, and B2B space.
5. Smartlook
Key features
- Session recordings. See replays of user sessions to understand how users interact across your site and/or mobile app.
- Heatmaps. View user clicks, scrolls, and movements.
- Events. Track specific user actions without needing to input additional coding.
- Funnel. Monitor user conversion paths to identify and improve drop-off points.
- Crash reports. See where crashes occur on session recordings, including the user’s actions before these disruptions happen.
- Custom reporting. Create tailored reports and dashboards based on key metrics.
- Integration. Standard integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot and Slack, while Jira, Mixpanel and Zapier are among the premium integrations. Smartlook also offers mobile integrations, like Amplitude, Crashlytics and Heap.
Use cases
- UX & UI Optimization. Like Fullstory, Smartlook provides session recordings and heatmaps. Unlike Fullstory, it offers no-code event tracking, making it easier for teams without technical expertise to analyze user behavior and improve the user journey and interface.
- Mobile App Insights. While Fullstory also covers mobile, Smartlook offers a specific focus on mobile app analytics, making it more suitable for mobile-first businesses.
- Cross-platform analysis. Smartlook makes mobile insights easier and enables you to analyze user behavior across devices, from smartphones to desktop and vice versa. Fullstory doesn’t offer cross-platform analytics.
- Behavioral retargeting. Both tools offer behavioral insights. But Smartlook’s no-code setup makes event tracking and analyzing retention easier to reduce churn.
Pricing
Like most Fullstory alternatives, Smartlook sticks to a few simple pricing plans:
- Free: Basic with limited features.
- Startup: $55 per month for 5,000 sessions and standard features.
- Business: $111 per month for 15,000 sessions and advanced features.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Best for
Industries where multiple device usage before conversion is common, like travel and e-commerce, will benefit from Smartlook’s cross-platform analytics. Other sectors Smartlook works well with are B2B, tech, and finance.
6. Contentsquare
Key features
- Experience analytics. Get a full user journey analysis. This includes form analysis, session replays, heatmaps and color-coded visualizations summarizing the insights.
- Product analytics. Includes retention analysis, user segmentation, session replays, and AI analysis.
- Experience monitoring. See error and speed analysis and session replays. And ”impact quantification” shows you how obstacles can affect not just the user experience but different areas of your business (eg revenue)
- Customer feedback. Send Net Promoter Score (NPS) and exit surveys. Add feedback buttons and activate concept testing to get user opinions, like on a new logo or page design.
Use cases
- Product and experience optimization. Similar to Fullstory, Contentsquare offers session replays and heatmaps. But Contentsquare places a stronger emphasis on AI-driven insights and analysis.
- CRO. Both Contentsquare and Fullstory can help with CRO. But Contentsquare’s AI tools and impact quantification feature make it easier to link UX improvements directly to revenue.
- Customer support. Contentsquare serves up insights that customer support agents need to troubleshoot, which Fullstory doesn’t offer.
- Customer loyalty. Whereas Fullstory specializes in session-based analysis, Contentsquare can provide a fuller view, with segmentation and personalization insights.
Pricing
Only custom plans are available.
Best for
Contentsquare is best for enterprise-level companies that need advanced analytics and insights into complex user journeys across multiple touchpoints. This includes online retailers looking to optimize the user experience and maximize conversions.
7. Mixpanel
Key features
- Event Tracking. See where users interact with your product, including clicks, page views, and custom events, without code changes.
- Funnel Analysis. Follow users through key conversion path steps to identify drop-offs and successful optimization.
- Session replays. Currently in testing mode, with a waiting list.
- Segmentation and cohort analysis. Segment users based on behavior to analyze retention and engagement over time.
- Retention analysis. Track user retention.
- Integration. Mixpanel offers API integration to collect all your data into a single source, import data into Mixpanel, and connect to A/B testing and experimentation tools, which can help measure the impact of product and funnel changes on user behavior.
- Predictive analytics. With machine learning based on historical data, you can predict future user behavior to optimize product journeys.
Use cases
- Product development. You can get insights into user engagement and product interaction thanks to rich data and experimentation. While Fullstory can also help with product optimization, Mixpanel focuses more on quantitative analysis than session replays.
- Behavioral analytics. Mixpanel offers more quantitative data, which can make it better than Fullstory if you need to analyze user behavior on a large scale. However, with the introduction of session replays, Mixpanel may be able to balance quantitative with qualitative data analysis.
- Retention and growth. Mixpanel’s retention and cohort analysis tools can help you grasp the full picture of how to optimize for user growth and retention over time, while Fullstory offers a more narrow scope with short-term insights through individual sessions.
Pricing
Mixpanel has three plans:
- Free: Up to 20 million events per month.
- Growth: Starts at $25 per month, up to 20 million events per month, and 1,000 tracked users.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing and up to 1 trillion events.
Best for
Mixpanel is best for startups and scale-ups in the financial, healthcare, B2B SaaS, e-commerce, and media sectors that need to track user behavior and optimize journeys across their different growth stages. Its API integration is also good for companies with a growing development team and enterprises that need to handle large amounts of data.
Choose the Fullstory alternative right for you
When selecting a Fullstory alternative, consider where each tool excels: Mixpanel and Contentsquare are top choices for retention analysis, Smartlook stands out for cross-platform capability, Amplitude and Google Analytics are strong on quantitative data, and Mouseflow specializes in heatmaps.
However, for a more holistic approach, Sprig is a comprehensive solution that saves you time.
Sprig combines user behavior and sentiment data with AI-powered analysis across mobile apps and websites. This means you can keep out of the weeds when performing your data deep-dives—Sprig AI analyzes experience data collected via Replay, Heatmap, Survey, and Feedback studies to instantly identify trends, issues, and opportunities that you otherwise might miss when relying on manual analysis alone. You can book a demo of Sprig to see the platform in action.