Imagine having a front row seat to your user’s product experience. You can see in real time the actions they take including mouse movements and clicks.
Session replay tools deliver just that: they enable product teams to watch and record the users’ sessions in their app, platform or on their website.
Not all session replay tools have the same functionality and features though. Use this guide to determine which tool makes the most sense for your product team’s needs.
What are session replay tools?
Session replay tools capture and record the real-time actions and behaviors of website visitors or app users as they navigate through the website or platform. This includes mouse movements, clicks, form submissions, and keystrokes.
By reviewing these replays, product teams can identify usability issues, user frustrations, and areas for improvement, helping them decide which features to build or improve.
What are the challenges of session replay tools?
Overall, the greatest challenge to session replay tools is the time-consuming nature of watching all the user sessions. There can be hundreds - even thousands - of user sessions to watch and evaluate.
That’s why it's important to pick a session replay tool that enables you to watch the part of a session that matters to you. For example, Sprig Replays allows product teams to trigger targeted user journey clips around a specific event like when a user downloads an app or makes a purchase.
Let’s jump into the top tools for session replay.
What are the top session replay tools?
Sprig
Sprig (that’s us!) is a product experience platform powered by AI. One of our key products is Sprig Replays which allows you to record a user's screen, providing you with short, insightful clips of exactly what your users are seeing and doing within your product.
Plus, unlike any other tools in the space, Sprig enables you to pair Replays with in-product Surveys to connect users' sessions and sentiments.
Key features of Sprig Replays:
Sprig offers a unique version of session replay with our advanced targeting and short clips that enable product teams to view quick clips instead of having to watch an entire user session. Here is a full summary of Sprig Replays features:
- Advanced Targeting: Replays can be triggered based on specific user actions and characteristics your product already tracks.
- User Engagement Tracking: Watch your users’ product interactions, including their cursor activity, clicks, page scrolls, and mouseovers.
- Customizable Privacy Settings: Blur out form content, images, password fields, and/or specific CSS selectors in your users’ screen recordings.
- Filtering Options: Filter Replay clips by time period and user attributes to see how product interactions change over time and across cohorts.
- Playback Functionality: Review Replay clips efficiently with the ability to adjust your video speed and skip past periods of user inactivity.
To learn more, visit sprig.com/replays.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a web analytics and user experience optimization platform designed to help businesses gain insight into user behavior on their websites. It is used by marketers, web designers, and businesses seeking to enhance their online presence and increase conversion rates.
Key features:
Crazy Egg offers user recordings for websites to see how users interact with your site in real-time. The feature is helpful to uncover usability issues and identify areas for improvement. Unlike Sprig and other insights platforms, Crazy Egg is optimized for websites and not all product experiences.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform that helps product teams improve digital user experiences. Their toolset includes a session recording tool, as well as interactive heatmaps, user feedback tools like on-site surveys, and feedback widgets.
Key features:
Hotjar’s session replay tool provides a visual representation of how users click, move, and navigate across multiple pages, allowing you to track their interactions.
You can filter your session recordings by:
User Attributes: Segment session recordings based on user attributes, such as demographics or user types.
Advanced Filters: Focus on specific user behaviors or actions to identify patterns and areas of improvement.
Fullstory
FullStory is a digital intelligence platform that gives businesses an understanding of user experiences on their websites and applications. FullStory allows companies to dive into user behavior by offering session replay, advanced search capabilities, and detailed analytics.
Key features:
FullStory's search, segmentation and filtering tools allow product teams narrow sessions by events. Fullstory also enables product teams to customize their privacy settings. You can essentially choose the privacy level that’s right for your organization and your users.
LogRocket
LogRocket is a customer experience monitoring platform that assists businesses in understanding and improving their digital product's user experience.
Key features:
Logrocket offers a session replay feature for product, design and marketing. Its tool is similar to the offerings from Fullstory and Hotjar, but it markets the tool as having “pixel perfect” replay.
What to consider when selecting a tool:
It can be daunting when selecting a session replay tool for your product stack.
When selecting a session replay tool, you’ll want to make sure the features meet your business and product needs. We recommend having at least three out of these six features:
- Advanced targeting capability that triggers your Replays based on specific user actions and characteristics your product already tracks.
- User engagement tracking so that you can watch your users’ product interactions, including their cursor activity, clicks, page scrolls, and mouseovers.
- Customizable privacy settings to blur out form content, images, password fields, and/or specific CSS selectors in your users’ screen recordings.
- Filtering options to filter Replay clips by time period and user attributes to see how product interactions change over time and across cohorts.
- Playback functionality to review Replay clips efficiently with the ability to adjust your video speed and skip past periods of user inactivity.
- And lastly, make sure the features are built for scale. Choose a product like Sprig that will grow with your product as we process over 500 million end-users and 10 billion user events per month.