Visitor AnalyticsVisitor Analytics
If you love your business, then you’ll definitely appreciate a heatmap tool with session recordings. Running a company relies on understanding your visitors, prospects, or customers.
Even when you have a user-friendly design that directs users to a certain section of the website (a sign-in button, a buy button, or a subscription form), conversions may not occur as frequently as you would like.
By providing first-hand information about how users engaged with the website or app features, heatmap tools and visitor recordings apps (also known as session replay tools) can assist you in determining why.
A feature-rich web analytics tool should provide you with both heatmaps and session recordings features as they are highly interconnected.
To help you achieve the best session replay experience for your website needs, we had a look at some tools which analyze user behavior.
This article only focuses on these two features, so if you need more information, you can take a look at the best website analytics tools that offer the full package.
Sign up to Our Newsletter for Regular Nuggets. And don’t worry, we won’t tell sales.
| Heatmap Tools with Session Recordings | Session Recordings | Heatmaps | GetApp Reviews |
| Visitor Analytics |
|
| 4.8 ⭐️ |
| Contentsquare (Clicktale) |
|
| 4.8 ⭐️ |
| Hotjar |
|
| 4.7 ⭐️ |
| Mouseflow |
|
| 4.7 ⭐️ |
| Lucky Orange |
|
| 4.7 ⭐️ |
| Smartlook |
|
| 4.7 ⭐️ |
| Fullstory |
|
| 4.6 ⭐️ |
| Crazy Egg |
|
| 4.5 ⭐️ |
| VWO |
|
| 4.4 ⭐️ |
| Inspectlet |
|
| 3.9 ⭐️ |
This “All-in-One Analytics App” integrates the three main categories of website analytics: website statistics, visitor behavior, and visitor communications. What does it mean?
Well, you get pretty much everything in terms of statistics - visitor statistics, page performance, traffic structure, campaign performance, and so forth.
Then, it lets you analyze your visitor behavior with heatmaps, session recordings, custom event tracking, and conversion funnels.
And last but not least, you can communicate and gain valuable insights from your visitors with surveys, and polls.
The best part is that Visitor Analytics is a lot more privacy-focused compared to most tools on the list. It doesn’t use cookies and provides ways of getting all visitor data without need for consent - so no cookie banner is required for it.
In terms of “hot” maps, you get to see click, movement, tap, and scroll actions that are available for desktops/laptops, tablets, and smartphone views. You can also geo-locate your visitors and see which of them was most active.
Heatmaps are organized by URL/page, so you can access a heatmap while also switching between mobile and desktop interactions in the same view. This is slightly more user-friendly than others.
Additionally, using Visitor Analytics heatmaps to display click maps for pages with lower traffic is much simpler than using any other heatmaps. When there are fewer clicks with some other tools, the click maps often appear scattered, making it challenging to identify any patterns in user activity.
In terms of session recordings, you can filter them by country, device, visitor type, operating system, browser, number of pages, duration and page visited. You can also decide to only keep data for visits lasting a specific amount of time (for example, min. 20 sec.).
More than that, it lets you add two filters at the same time to get organized visitor recordings.
Compared to other session replay tools, Visitor Analytics provides unlimited data storage and no monthly quotes, but rather general quotas. For instance, as part of the basic plan, you receive 500 recordings that you are free to use whenever you want and however you like.
When you've used up your limit, you can either upgrade to a different plan or delete the ones you no longer need to make room for new ones.
A recording can be kept for 7 years or more if you choose to - other providers only retain data for a brief period of time.
In terms of cost and value for money, this website analytics tool is difficult to beat. All services are available on the free plan, while the monthly costs for premium plans range from $12.99 to $69.99. Compared to other tools, this is 5–10 times less expensive!
It’s one of the least expensive apps accessible - using no cookies, offering a bunch of additional features, and providing more than adequate plan limits and comparable functionality to others. Visitor Analytics is one of the top heatmap tools available as a result of all of this - in fact, one of the best stats and insights apps altogether.
Clicktale is now part of Contentsquare. Every in-page contact and micro-gesture is recorded by Contentsquare's experience analytics platform in order to comprehend the what, how, and why of consumer behavior.
With Zone-Based Heatmaps, you can consider how each part of your site will be used by visitors. You can take advantage of an aggregated view of page activity, including clicks, pauses, and scrolling.
A cool element of this tool is that it shows how much money or how many conversions your business is making from each page's content.
You can also compare two website versions to choose the one that suits your visitors' needs.
The Session Replay feature recreates each visitor's individual online session. This can be used in conjunction with macro-level information to quickly identify the cause of an observed measure or to test a specific hypothesis.
With a single view, you can contextualize, quantify and further investigate any performance issues that may be contributing to unfavorable customer feedback.
Unfortunately, Contentsquare doesn’t offer pricing packages for its usersepending on your needs and requirements, they will make you an offer. If you are considering this tool, you’ll have to contact Contentsquare directly for pricing details.
Hotjar is a website analytics tool that includes session records, user feedback widgets, and survey capabilities. It is a user-friendly tool that marketers, product managers, and UX experts can use.
Hotjar has no limits to the number of heatmaps, but you’ll experience some limitations when it comes to the number of visits that process one of these snapshots, and they’re dependent on the plan you choose.
If you’re considering the free plan, you only get snapshots based on a maximum of 35 visits (sessions) per day. In the plus plan, it goes up to 100. Then, the heatmap doesn’t collect any more data and you’ll have to reset it for new results.
You can access the business or scale plan if you need heatmaps based on more data. You may need more than those 100 visits in some circumstances, especially if there are fewer and more scattered clicks on a page, in order to identify and comprehend a trend.
Hotjar session recordings options are pretty standard nowadays, but there are still a few functionalities that stick out.
The ability to detect and filter session recordings with "rage clicks" (when a user repeatedly clicks the page) and "u-turns" (when a user turns back before taking an action) is something that few other providers have.
Sadly, these options are only available in the Business or Scale plans, which can be quite pricey.
It's also nice how they tie the session replay feature in with their other services, such as "incoming feedback" and "Net Promoter Score".
Hotjar is one of the priciest heatmap solutions available, but keep in mind that for these costs, it also provides other services, such as surveys and feedback modules.
A "free forever" plan is also available, although it has a number of restrictions. Prices then begin at $31/month and rise gradually to $78/month (Business plan). For a pricing quote on their Scale plan, which offers limitless sessions and all features, you'll need to get in touch with them.
Hotjar would be an excellent analytics tool to use if your website has hundreds of thousands of views per day. In addition, there are additional solutions available that provide the same features at a lower cost for smaller websites.
Using Mouseflow will help you automatically create heatmaps for all pages so you can monitor how visitors are interacting with your site and make any adjustments. It also integrates session replays, funnels, and form analytics.
A nice touch is the capability to view real-time heat maps of your pages. The ability to examine heatmap results based on date ranges is another good feature that may make it easier to track changes in user behavior.
A stumbling block is that click heatmaps require a lot of data to develop an appropriate range of red to blue colors. The map's points appear to be quite dispersed when there haven't been more than about 100 clicks. This can be a slight disadvantage for tiny websites that don't get a lot of traffic.
This tool has every feature you would expect - the recordings screen has filters for country, page count, duration, visitor type, OS, browser, entry page, exit page, and visited page.
Additional capabilities provided by Mouseflow include the ability to filter recordings by referral source, a way to exclude and whitelist parts that should not be captured, and a live stream function that lets you see recordings in real time.
Each recording has a friction score, which is a statistic based on a number of user-frustrating actions - this is a unique feature.
Please note that Mouseflow uses the same set of initial settings for both recordings and heatmaps, so the recordings you set up will be used for generating heatmaps.
The premium plans range from $23/month to $292/month (if paid annually), and you get limits in terms of session recordings and months of storage.
Also, there is a free forever plan that offers many features, but stores data only for 1 month, so it resets every 30 days. All in all, not a bad option in terms of price, although still considerably more expensive than other tools.
Lucky Orange is another feature-rich tool that includes traffic statistics, recordings, chat, polls, heatmaps, funnels, and form analytics.
A remarkable feature is that you can customize your dashboard and move around stat boxes as well as remove what you don't use frequently.
The Lucky Orange heatmaps provide segmentation right on the map - this allows you to filter and select to only view a heatmap based on a specific user or visit type.
You can add filters based on behavior tags, type of browser, OS, country, region, date range, referral source, referral medium, UTMs, number of visits.
What’s more, heatmaps are immediately linked to the records of the visits on which they are based. You don't need to set up the feature because it creates heatmaps for all sites automatically.
Once more, the available filters and the overview of the recordings are fairly similar to those in the other tools on our list.
A nice touch is that you can observe in the overview section a symbol that indicates if the user typed anything on their keyboard during the session, and a variable indicating the intensity of user activity.
There is a connection from every video to the relevant heatmaps for the pages that the visitor navigated, allowing you to determine whether the behavior patterns you observe in the recording are generalized for additional users landing on a certain page.
Few other tools connect recordings and heatmaps as smoothly as this one does.
With Lucky Orange, you can benefit from 7 days free trial for every plan as well as a free plan that includes 500 Pageviews/month, 30 day storage for heatmaps and recordings, and 365 day storage for surveys, chat logs, and events.
Premium plans start at $18/month and you get 10,000 pageviews, 30-day storage for heatmaps and recordings, and 365-day storage for surveys, chat logs, and events.
The most expensive plan is $150/month. The fact that you receive more than simply heatmaps and recordings makes everything quite realistic. Lucky Orange earns a spot in the list of best heatmap tools.
Smartlook is a qualitative analytics solution for web and mobile. They offer session recordings, heatmaps, conversion funnels, and event tracking. This tool highly focuses on user behavior and doesn’t include website statistics and visitor communication functionalities.
They have an intriguing feature where you can quickly create heatmaps using historical data. The fact that you don't have to wait for the heatmap to start collecting data after it has been set up makes this a rare and valuable solution.
Filtering visitors by type also allows you to see if, for example, returning visitors have different behavior than new visitors.
Another noteworthy feature is the ability to modify the color intensity and opacity of the overlaid heatmap colors.
This can be useful in situations where the dark red color is on top of a red element and you can't see them properly. Simply reduce the opacity to see what's behind the overlay.
The session recording feature of Smartlook is "always on," similar to a few other products.
Session recordings can be categorized easily, with up to 30 different filters available. This includes some you might not have thought about, including filters for users that clicked on specific text, the CSS selector, and so forth - there's even a filter for rage clickers.
Then, Smartlook connects every piece of information it possesses, allowing it to recognize users by name and/or email. But in light of the current GDPR and privacy context, pay attention when configuring and using it - you'll need visitors’ permission for this, without a doubt.
All of Smartlook's price tiers come with a free 10-day trial period and are fully customizable. A free lifetime plan is also available, but it only provides 3 heatmaps and 1,500 sessions each month - it might be sufficient for small websites.
Beyond that, heat maps are quite limited and upgradable for other plans and you can decide how many sessions per month you want as well as how long the data will be stored.
The price range is from $30/month to $90/month - the most expensive plan gives you 15,000 sessions/month, 3 months of data retention, 12 events, 4 funnels, and 30 heatmaps. It is a little bit pricey compared to other session recording tools from our list.
You can also customize your pricing plan, choosing only what you need, for a price proposed by them.
One of the most complex tools on this list is FullStory because it offers developers a lot of support and extends beyond heatmaps, session recordings, and stats.
This solution is able to track single-page apps and frameworks. It also claims to be able to record just about anything related to your website, regardless of the technical complexity behind it.
Additionally, it collects data without requiring any prior setup and actually records everything. Unfortunately, this can result in higher costs.
Fullstory's heatmaps are called Engagement Heatmaps, and they allow you to dive into your recorded session replays to understand why visitors click on certain elements or not.
The cool part of FullStory is that it attempts to automatically identify patterns in how users interact with various website sections. In addition to the standard heatmaps, it can also display "most rage clicked" maps, highlighting areas of potential user frustration.
It can also provide maps of clicks that resulted in JavaScript errors and clicks on non-clickable elements - "most dead-clicked". These maps can be useful when looking for errors on your site or issues with your user experience.
In addition to the heatmaps, they also add network views and identify your slowest pages.
You can watch the sessions in real-time. “User is active” is showcased in green, inactive users are displayed in yellow, and “tab is unfocused” will appear in gray.
Another noteworthy feature is the availability of advanced search options, which essentially let you locate any kind of action and watch recordings of it, in a playlist.
Here comes the biggest issue - recording every action on your website requires a lot of resources, which raises the costs.
You get to benefit from a 14-day free trial. After that, you need to choose a plan.
Pricing plans are not public and are calculated on demand. Previous users describe instances when they reached $700–$800 per month. That depends entirely on the extra features you require.
For example, it will cost you extra to keep the data for longer than a month. So it's a fantastic, advanced, and complex tool, but it might be better suited for larger businesses.
The fact that Crazy Egg provides a website editor linked to the heatmaps and recordings sets it apart from other competitors. The website elements that customers previously examined in the heatmap tool can be directly moved around and changed in appearance using this tool.
Although there are certain restrictions on what you can really change, the fundamentals are there.
Do you like confetti? If you do, then this tool might surprise you! It offers a confetti map, which displays color-coded dots and lets you filter clicks from the heatmap, based on several criteria.
For example, you can actually see only the heatmap for visits from a certain country. You can filter your users by new/return visitors, search terms, search engines, operating systems, browsers, etc.
Again, the settings are pretty standard. Your recordings can be filtered by region, operating system, browser type, device type, page count, duration, and visitor type (new or returning visitor).
What’s more, your recordings are automatically segmented by Crazy Egg into predefined target groups. Some examples include engaged users, mobile visitors, and new recordings from the most recent week.
It provides you the option to whitelist and exclude specific items from recording.
Crazy Egg also gives you the option to conduct "advanced searches" within your lists of recordings. However, depending on the number of recordings available, these searches could take up to three days to complete.
Crazy Egg comes with plans starting at $29/month (for which you get 3,000 recordings/month) and going up to $249/month.
An advantage of Crazy Egg is the fact that it has 30-day free trials for any plan you choose. But - there’s always a but - you get no free plan after 30 days, so you can’t stay free forever.
VWO is an A/B testing and conversion optimization platform that allows businesses to conduct qualitative and quantitative visitor research, create an experiment plan, and run ongoing tests on their digital properties.
VWO gives businesses the tools they need to gain detailed insight into their website visitor behavior with features like heatmaps, surveys, visitor records, and more.
VWO heatmaps capture visitor information while your website is live. As a result, you can quickly see how components like modal boxes, login-required pages, and dynamic URLs behave. While seeing visitor information on each component of these pages, you can explore more pages on your website using the navigation mode.
You can get up-to-date information on visitor click-through rates, find important key actions on your pages using click data, and remove anything that might drive the user away.
Additionally, you can select different sections of your page and compare how many clicks each received.
As users navigate between pages on your website, VWO records their precise mouse movements. You can observe where they clicked on a page (including left and right clicks) and how frequently they scrolled up and down.
What’s more, you can fast-forward to observe hundreds of people sign up, skip the time when visitors didn't take any action, or go slowly and pay attention to each mouse movement and click.
To find insights from a particular group of visitors, you can use VWO to filter recordings based on a variety of criteria.
A striking feature that VWO provides is the Visitor Profile which collects users’ information and actions, enabling you to analyze their journeys.
VWO is divided into several analytics packages - Test, FullStack, Insights, Personalize, Deploy, and Services. You'll need the VWO Insights package because it includes heatmaps and session recording features to help you analyze user behavior. Like other tools on this list, you'll need to request pricing details regarding your feature package.
Another well-known visitor recording and session replay service is Inspectlet, which provides customers with 2,500 free sessions each month.
Session recordings, dynamic heatmaps, A/B testing, form analytics, and error logging (monitors all Javascript errors on your site) are all features of the tool.
Although it may initially appear like Inspectlet offers "eye-tracking Heatmaps," no technology exists that would allow any tool to truly follow a website visitor's eye.
This is just the name given to the mouse movement map, which is thought to be related to eye movement.
In terms of heatmaps, there is nothing that distinguishes it from other providers. However, we would like to point out that the tool is one of the most user-friendly, and even users with limited technical knowledge find it simple to use.
There are also a few extra details for mobile device data, such as the ability to see zooms and orientation changes.
They appear to have made Session Recordings the centerpiece of their package and the compatibility with dynamic sites stands out - other tools have a lot of trouble with providing playback of certain elements and pages that use a lot of Javascript.
However, Inspectlet “makes it possible to playback pages that are otherwise impossible, such as dynamic pages that only show once“. It also supports single page apps.
In order to prevent the disclosure of private information during recordings, it is also possible to hide certain screen elements, such as form fields. This is not unusual. This feature is also present in other tools, albeit with a somewhat different presentation.
The Demo tool in their Recordings is a stunning feature. When users access their sample page, Inspectlet immediately records and replays their visit for a full minute.
After that minute, the visitors will see their registered visit on that demo page so they can get an idea of how it works. Also, they don’t need to register or create an account in order to use this feature.
When it comes to pricing, Inspectlet is more expensive than most other options. The free plan offers a decent number of 2,500 recordings per month and the heatmap suite as well, but only 1 week of storage, so the data is deleted quite soon.
Premium plans range in price from $39 per month to $499 per month, however, the most expensive one is only available to consumers that require data from more than 2 million pageviews and 250k recordings.
Some users have complained that for the lower premium plans, they only get 2-3 months of storage and they sometimes need to keep data for longer. For them, there is the option to download session recordings, but only starting with the $79 plan.
Using heatmaps and session recordings can help you achieve two important factors which are increasingly lacking in the age of data-driven analytics: understanding and empathy.
Not only that, it’s a stunning tool for finding usability problems and shaping new hypotheses as well.
With that being said, we really hope you find the light at the end of the tunnel and already have an idea of what tool to choose.
As knowledge is power, don’t hesitate to share this article with your fellas in order to help them pick the most suitable heatmap tool with session recordings.
Share
Share
Share
Share
Share
