Top 6 session replay tools for analyzing user behavior

Whether you’re an ecommerce business selling online or a SaaS company trying to engage new customers, it’s important to create a website experience your users love. A poor user experience or frustrating customer journey can negatively affect your site’s conversion rate and, ultimately, your revenue. To fully understand how users are interacting with your site and give them the best experience possible, you need to take a closer look at user behavior. That's where session replay tools come in.

What are session replay tools?

A session replay (also known as session recording) is a video-like rendering of a user's journey through your website that shows you what individual users saw and did on your site during their visit, including their clicks, page scrolls, and mouse movements. 

Design and UX, product, marketing, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts use session replay tools to truly empathize with their customers and understand how users experience their site from page to page.

Read on to discover our 6 top picks for session replay tools, understand why businesses like yours rely on session replay tools for in-depth user insights, and learn the key features to look for in a session replay tool, from advanced filtering options to error-tracking capabilities.

1. Contentsquare

Contentsquare (hi! 👋) is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that helps you understand how and why users are interacting with your site, app, or product. Its AI-powered analytics tools, which include session replays, help you improve conversion, retention, and customer delight.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool reveals exactly how users navigate your site, uncovering insights you would otherwise miss

Contentsquare’s Session Replay includes advanced customer segmentation, event tracking, error flagging, frustration signals, and find-and-fix notifications. It also offers advanced filtering options you can use for deeper insights into user behavior over time:

• Filter by traffic channels

• Analyze individual user groups

• Analyze mobile and desktop website versions separately

• Track individual users across multiple sessions

🤖 No time to watch session recordings? Use our AI-powered session replay summaries to get... well, summaries of what users experienced while on your site!

Combine session replays with Contentsquare’s other powerful features to get even more from your data:

Heatmaps: view heatmaps on key pages to get an aggregated visual view of user behavior. Find something interesting, like a page element that’s getting a lot of unexpected attention? Watch session replays of individual users to understand why.

Jump straight from heatmaps to session replays in a single click to get more in-depth insights

Error Analysis: quickly pinpoint where technical errors are happening and view related session replays to see what the root cause is. With a few clicks, you can then quantify how many other users are seeing the same bugs, prioritize what to focus on, and expedite the fix. 

💡 Pro tip: get real-time notifications about error spikes right in your Slack or Microsoft Teams channels to automatically flag emerging issues and deal with them immediately.

Dashboards: these customizable, high-level views of your most important metrics let you zoom in on individual user behaviors by navigating to relevant session replays in a single click.

Stay on top of key metrics with customizable dashboards

Surveys: capture feedback as users browse your website or complete certain events, then contextualize it with session replays to understand why they left the response they did.

2. Smartlook

Smartlook is a website conversion rate optimization platform that lets you perform qualitative analyses of mobile applications and web pages.

Smartlook’s session recording software includes event tracking, adjustable playback speed, and filters. It also provides a friction score for individual pages (much like Contentsquare’s frustration score) and allows you to view a log of JavaScript errors to help identify bugs.

Smartlook works with mobile apps, but doesn’t offer Voice-of-Customer feedback tools like Contentsquare does.

3. Mouseflow

Mouseflow is a real-time digital experience analytics platform that incorporates session replays with web analytics, heatmaps, and other conversion optimization tools. It’s designed primarily for marketing teams.

Mouseflow features adjustable replay speed along with a wide range of segmenting and filtering options.

While its features are similar to Contentsquare’s, Mouseflow is geared towards smaller businesses and may not suit larger companies.

4. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a platform designed to help businesses optimize their websites. Its features include session recordings, heatmaps, and A/B testing tools.

Crazy Egg’s session replays include site-wide visitor recording, filters, adjustable playback speed, tagging, and the ability to save favorites. These features help you determine different page variants to test with Crazy Egg’s A/B testing tool.

Unlike Contentsquare, Crazy Egg doesn’t let you filter for rage clicks or u-turns when you’re trying to find sessions that reveal user pain points.

5. Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange is a platform designed to improve conversion rates on your website through session recordings, heatmaps, forms, conversion funnels, and surveys.

Lucky Orange features full replays, a timeline view to jump to key events, and a live view to record and follow website visitors in real time. It also lets you adjust the play speed and skip idle time.

Despite some similar tools and features to Contentsquare, Lucky Orange lacks historical data and has few integrations to offer, meaning it’s a tool better suited to individuals flying solo, but not for businesses seeking to grow their revenue.

6. Microsoft Clarity

Clarity is an open-source tool that lets you see what users are doing on your site with the help of its session replays and heatmaps tools.

Clarity features hi-def recordings at any speed, lets you share recording clips, and—like Contentsquare—discovers bugs that damage the user experience. This session replay tool also includes filters and integrates with heatmaps.

Unlike Contentsquare, however, Clarity doesn’t offer the ability to collect Voice-of-Customer data via AI-powered surveys and feedback collection. 

Why businesses use session replay tools—and why you should, too

Session replays show you how individual users explore your website—right down to their mouse movements and the places they click. They’re the perfect complement to quantitative web analytics or product analytics tools which help you identify trends across your site.

For example, traditional website analytics tools (like Google Analytics) answer questions like

• Which pages are getting noticeably fewer signups or sales than others?

• Which pages on your site do visitors spend the least amount of time on?

• Which pages do people visit just before they exit?

• Which pages have the highest bounce rate?

Having the answers to these questions is helpful, but session replays take it a step further by letting you understand individual journeys to see how and why users are completing—or not completing—certain actions on your pages.

So, what specific insights can you get through session replays?

Learn which changes to make to increase conversion rates

Session replay tools give you a detailed picture of how real users browse your site and interact with different page elements.

After watching a few replays, you might notice users scrolling past an important call-to-action (CTA) button or browsing a product page without continuing through the sales and conversion funnel. These insights help you make changes to improve the user experience—and ultimately increase your revenue.

💡 If you’re using Contentsquare: combine session replays with Impact Quantification to quickly understand how specific pages and elements impact conversion, revenue, and subscriptions.

Use session replays and impact quantification to understand how different elements affect conversion rates 

Find user pain points to lower bounce rates

Watching session replays can reveal where people are struggling on your site. For example, you might notice that users are going in circles, clicking on unclickable elements, or looking for information that isn’t there. 

Uncovering these pain points helps you create a friction-free website experience where users easily find what they need, making it more likely that website visitors will stay on your site and convert.

💡 If you’re using Contentsquare: use filters to home in on session replays that contain strong indicators of pain points. For example, session replays with rage clicks show you where users repeatedly and quickly click (or tap) in one place, indicating broken links, slow-loading pages, or even straightforward cases of confusing design.

Uncover unknown bugs to improve UX

Because session replays show you exactly what the user saw on their screen, they reveal website bugs you might have otherwise missed—for example, loading issues or buttons and forms that aren’t working correctly. Looking at session replays that include behavior analytics metrics like u-turns (where users turn back before completing a key action) is a great way to spot bugs.

This way, you resolve fundamental issues that could be causing people to exit your site out of frustration without converting.

💡 If you’re using Contentsquare: use the Contentsquare-Jira integration to quickly generate tickets with all the context required for developers to fix the issue.

6 features to look for in a session replay tool

Getting insights from session replays can take a lot of time—especially when you have thousands of sessions to sift through. Here are 6 features to look for in a session replay tool to save time and find the most relevant recordings.

1. 🎯 Segmentation: when you want to see session replays from users who took specific actions, creating segments (using user segmentation analysis) saves you a lot of time. For example, if you want to investigate why customers on your ecommerce site are abandoning their carts, you could create a segment for visitors who exited from the checkout page.

2. 🔎 Filters: look for the ability to filter by criteria such as page event, behavior or technology—like device, browser, and operating system—so you can find the right session replays to match your precise requirements.

3. 🔔 Alerts and notifications: stay one step ahead of issues with a session replay tool that sends you alerts and notifications about error spikes or key segments. Consider a tool that integrates with platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams (like Contentsquare), so your most important session replays will automatically be sent to a dedicated channel with all the right people.

4. 💻 Site-wide page viewing and recording: when you analyze user behavior, you might want to understand how individuals move through multiple pages. Look for a tool that lets you watch the user’s entire journey as they click through different parts of your site.

5. 🔨 Adjustable replay speed: watching session replays can be time-consuming, especially when your users make long visits over multiple pages. Look for a tool that lets you adjust the replay speed to get you the insights you need in less time.

6. 💬 Comments: align your team around a shared view by leaving comments in session replays for faster, more effective collaboration.

Leave comments directly in session replays to boost collaboration and provide extra context

Step into your users' shoes

Your website is a treasure trove of invaluable user data just waiting to be analyzed, and there's no better place to start than with a session replay tool. Combine these insights with data from Contentsquare’s other capabilities—like heatmaps, error analysis, impact quantification, and Voice-of-Customer tools like surveys—to understand how users behave and why, helping you empathize with them in ways you never imagined.

FAQs about session replay tools