8 best session recording tools to understand user behavior on your site

Today, we’re exploring eight of the best website recording software so you feel confident in your tech stack and the changes you make to your site.

What is website session recording software?

Website session recording software is any tool that lets website owners track and record user interactions and sessions on their websites. These tools give you playbacks (or videos) of real user actions on your digital product, so you can closely monitor:

• User movements 

• Searches 

• Clicks

• Pages

• Keyboard strokes 

• Taps

• Scroll depth 

And when you pair this information with metrics from other analytics tools (like Google Analytics) you can uncover why people behave the way they do on your site.

Benefits of adding session recording software to your tech stack

Recording software gives you insight to:

• Improve user experience: See where users run into bugs, hit dead ends, or get distracted so you can implement fixes to better your site’s UX. 

• Increase conversion rates: See where users drop off and abandon their carts. Then, test changes to reduce these drop-offs.

• Improve customer experience: Watch how users perform with post-purchase pages and fix any places they may get stuck.

• Understand user behavior: Observe how users behave so you can build better products and better experiences, which can ultimately increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Top 8 session recording tools for website owners 

When searching for a website session recording software, you’ll want to find one that:

• Takes a privacy-first approach so you can still glean valuable insights from your recordings without risking customer loyalty or legal complications

• Encourages cross-functional team collaboration and makes it easy to share recordings and insight with other team members

• Presents data in a way that’s easy to interpret and analyze so you can prioritize updates 

• Helps you understand user behavior across segments 

Our list of tools takes these points into consideration so you can be confident with whichever recording software you add to your tech stack:

1. Contentsquare

Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience platform that teams can use to monitor their site’s digital experience. 

Its Session Replay tool captures anonymous user sessions so you can see every interaction on your site, including where people get stuck, what they click, and the path they take to convert.

Session Replay’s also has a module that summarizes key events within each recording, so you can quickly jump to relevant points.

It also alerts you to spikes in errors and links each error to the relevant user session, so you can watch the errors occur in real-time and identify a fix.

How Contentsquare’s Session Replay software helps you delight your users:

• Follow a privacy-first approach by using a software that records user sessions anonymously 

• Find and fix bugs on your site with Contentsquare’s error modules that list out errors so you can quickly jump to the right spot in each replay

• View the entire performance of your product and understand why users behave the way they do by combining Session Replays with other tools like:

  • Customer Journey Analysis so you can see how users move through your site

  • Zone-Based Heatmaps that show you how users interact with each element on your site

  • Impact Quantification so you can tie site errors back to important KPIs and prioritize what to fix first

  • Form Analysis to help you optimize site forms and increases conversions

• Increase team collaboration and alignment by leaving and reviewing comments at key instances with replays

• Compare replays with visitors who rated their sessions either highly or poorly to spot commonalities and identify fixes

• Confirm hypothesis by watching how real users interact with your site

2. Hotjar 

Hotjar (hi there, that's us 👋) is a product experience (PX) insights platform that lets you easily monitor, analyze, and share recordings of user actions on your site.

Its user-friendly interface and ability to track users across multiple tabs or windows ensures that you can understand their full journey without missing crucial insights.. And you can save, share, and comment on clips of important recordings for quick organization and team access.

Here’s everything you can do with Hotjar Recordings:

• Go deep into user behavior patterns: Combine Recordings with other analytics tools, like Heatmaps (which are free forever) to get a combined view of user activity on individual web pages. For example, say you notice a similar behavior in a series of recordings (like users skipping over a CTA or ignoring a button). Use heatmaps to validate whether each visitor has a similar experience. Then, hypothesize a fix.

• Understand how different user segments interact with your site: Filter Recordings by user behavior and actions (like rage clicks or u-turns), user attributes (like job role or purchase behavior), new and returning visitors, referrals, negative or positive feedback, errors, and more.

• Understand what makes certain A/B test variants successful: Integrate A/B testing tools (like Optimizely and Google Optimize) with Hotjar Recordings to watch playbacks of your A/B tests. Then, filter recordings by user type to see why certain variants are successful among different customer profiles.

• Share insights with your team: Use Hotjar Highlights to quickly save, sort, and share snippets of key visitor recordings and create 'collections' of related insights, so it’s easier for your team to spot trends and discover opportunities. Or, integrate Hotjar with Slack to share more urgent insights or recordings with your team.

• Sort and watch the most valuable recordings: Hotjar calculates engagement and frustration scores based on a range of user behavior and feedback signals to help you spend less time watching uninspiring user sessions and more time checking insightful ones.

• Get the ‘why’ behind user behavior: Place Hotjar's Feedback widgets on pages with unusual or interesting behavior to understand the reason behind their behavior, so you know exactly what to improve. 

• Fix errors faster with console tracking: Use Hotjar’s console tracking feature while watching session replays to see exactly when errors happen, which user actions might be causing them, and how these errors impact your UX.

Hotjar is also fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, EU-US Privacy Shield, LGPD, and PCI-DSS laws, and will never sell, mine, or harvest personal data. 

3. Mouseflow

Mouseflow is a website tracking tool that monitors clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement within recordings of user sessions. It lets you watch retroactive recordings of your entire funnel, so you can see where users drop off or what makes them stay along their journey.

Mouseflow also lets you watch recordings of users navigating different forms on your site so you can understand how forms block or trigger conversions,

However, Mouseflow’s data retention varies depending on the pricing plan you select—which can negatively impact teams collecting insights or recordings over a longer period of time.

How Mouseflow's website session recording software helps you understand your users:

• Sorts recordings by the number of friction events with a friction score

• Observes funnel health and user drop-off with funnel analytics

• Monitors user behavior with form analytics on specific website forms 

• Segments users with six types of heatmaps

• Filters recordings by traffic sources and user type

• GDPR and CCPA compliant with data centers in the US and Europe

4. FullStory

FullStory is a behavioral analytics platform that lets you record and filter user sessions and collaborate with your team. The platform lets you index and search for recordings by event and user data, so you can sift through user sessions based on criteria like buttons clicked or URLs visited. 

It also indexes recordings by frustration signals like error clicks, rage clicks, and thrashing cursors, which help you isolate and spot problem areas on your website. 

Since FullStory records all user sessions (instead of samples), it automatically includes links to session recordings on related support tickets or bug reports, so you can identify the root of the problem. 

However, FullStory lacks crucial voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback tools that let you ask users questions to understand why they behave the way they do. Read our Hotjar vs. Fullstory comparison.

How FullStory's website session recording software helps you understand your users:

• Indexes recordings by event data, user data, and frustration signals to isolate and spot problem areas

• Speeds up research and analysis with the 'skip inactivity' feature

• Links recordings to bug reports and support tickets  

• Privacy control features 

5. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a popular website session recording tool. Its session recordings feature helps you track and segment the journeys of specific types of customers—giving you key insights into form abandonment based on user personas, so you can improve your lead-generation process. 

Although it has a less intuitive user interface (UI) compared to other tools and doesn’t let you ask users why they act the way they do, Crazy Egg helps you monitor the effectiveness of your web pages and adjust your design and content according to what users click on—and what they don’t. Read our Hotjar vs. Crazy Egg comparison.

How Crazy Egg's website session recording software helps you understand your users:

• Dashboard for data visualization 

• Filters recordings by campaign or user segment

• Displays session recordings from new or returning visitors 

• Segments customers with 22 heatmap filters

• Recording annotations and notes

• GDPR compliant

6. Lucky Orange 

Lucky Orange offers session recording and replay tools that capture user-generated gestures and movements. It’s an intuitive platform that gives you control of your recordings by attaching them to specific customer profiles, and showing you when visitors enter your site in real-time, as well as the number of visitors currently active on your site.

It lets you filter and segment recordings to see where users drop off in their journey—so you can better understand why your website’s generating traffic that doesn’t convert. Read our Hotjar vs. Lucky Orange comparison.

Lucky Orange's key website session recording attributes include: 

• Visitor profiles containing links to recordings history 

• Real-time website visitor alerts and updates 

• Unlimited and customizable dashboards 

• Form analytics and recordings for conversion rate optimization

• Dynamic heatmaps for layered insights 

• GDPR compliance 

7. Smartlook

Smartlook’s session recording and replay software lets you choose your recording quality output, so you can strike a balance between recording users without overwhelming your server’s infrastructure.

The software takes an ‘always-on’ approach to monitoring user sessions and records every single visitor session on your website or app, while automatic event tracking lets you see when users complete certain actions, and how often. Although it can be tricky to filter recordings based on user type, it’s a powerful tool that helps you understand precisely how users interact with your app or website. Read our Hotjar vs. Smartlook comparison.

SmartLook's key website session recording features include: 

• GDPR compliance 

• Session recording on Android and iOS devices 

• Wireframe mode to zoom in on recordings based on UI 

• Retention tables to spot user engagement and churn

• Always-on event tracking, statistics, and breakdown

• Heatmaps with options to filter by device or visitor type 

• Conversion funnel optimization 

8. Microsoft Clarity 

Microsoft Clarity is a user-friendly website session recording software that typically helps SMBs—like startups, personal bloggers, or small ecommerce site owners—better understand and retain their visitors. Its simple-to-use UI lets you keep track of user session recordings without needing to navigate additional bells and whistles.

While Clarity offers a lot of heatmaps and recordings functionality, users express concerns around its GDPR compliance, and often comment that it is a cumbersome tool that leaves you to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Read our Hotjar vs. Clarity comparison.

How Microsoft Clarity's session recording software helps you understand user actions: 

• Filters recordings by customer segment for added insights

• Integrates with Google Analytics 360

• Gives you detailed user behavior tracking with heatmaps

• Dashboards for comprehensive overviews and visualizations

Pick your website session recording software and delight users

There’s no easier way to gain empathy with users than by seeing what frustrates and delights them in real-time.

With a website session recording software in your tech stack, you’ll have no problem empathizing with users and making website improvements based on your observations. 

Remember: choosing a tool that gives you granular insights into what your visitors do on your website and why they do it lets you prioritize updates that will delight your users.