Visitor Analytics - compare to Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a tool known not only for their heatmap and recordings features, but also for their A/B testing capabilities. One innovative approach they offer is the possibility to do simple edits to the elements of the website they are installed on, so that a customer could directly act on the user behavior data he/she is getting. Therefore, in addition to getting insights into user behavior (how users click, move, scroll), you can directly edit your web design to answer those behavior patterns.

For the time being, Visitor Analytics and Crazy Egg only share 2 features: visitor recordings (also known as session replays), and heatmaps (Crazy Egg has them in the snapshots section).

• Visitor Analytics also provides a full website analytics package, with visitor statistics, page statistics, device, OS and browser statistics plus more along these lines. You can also set up and follow conversion funnels.
• Crazy Egg does not have the analytics cluster. Nor does it provide conversion funnels. On the other hand, it provides an A/B testing feature and a Website Editor tool, that allows you to change the styling of elements and their position, without the need to know code.  

Similarities: 

• Both Visitor Analytics and Crazy Egg give the option to either record all visits to the website (regardless of visited web-pages) or visits to a specific page.
• The overview of the recordings has some common elements: a list of recordings, duration & time of visit, the entry/start page, nr of pages visited, the type of device used
• Both have filters for country, OS, browser, devices, page count, duration, visitor type (returning or new), visited page (or “contains page”) 
• Directly from the overview, you can manage your recordings by marking them as favorites for both Visitor Analytics and Crazy Egg

Visitor Analytics Extras: 

• With Visitor Analytics you can choose to set recordings strictly for visits with a certain minimum duration (e.g. minimum 10 seconds)
• The recordings overview gives more detail about the recorded session. Check if the session is from a returning or a new visitor. OS and browser details are also available in this view. The referrer URL is also available in this view.
• The ability to filter by entry and exit page, in addition to visited page.
• From the Visitor Analytics overview you can also mark the recordings as “seen” or “unseen”

Crazy Egg Extras:

• Crazy Egg automatically segments part of your recordings, in groups such as: engaged visitors, mobile visitors or new recordings for the current week
• Some extra features for excluding and whitelisting elements/pages to be recorded
• You can add tags/variables to recordings
• The ability to filter by referral source and ad campaign (if the page is a landing page for a campaign) are extras for Crazy Egg
• The possibility to do “advanced searches” in your recordings lists (please note that these searches may take 3 days to be completed, depending on the number of recordings available)

Conclusion: 

It is difficult to have distinctive features for the session replay tool. All providers of this service will likely have a very similar core functionality. The differences between Visitor Analytics and Crazy Egg in this concern are not very significant. 

• Some extras from Visitor Analytics, like recording only visits with a minimum duration, or filtering by entry and exit page may prove essential.
• On the other hand, Crazy Egg’s automatic segmentation is very user-friendly, and being able to filter by referral source can prove helpful.

A major difference is the pricing, as Crazy Egg starts from $24  / month and only offers annual plans. Visitor Analytics starts from $5.83 / month. 

Similarities: 

• The heatmap technology is the same. Both apps overlay heatmaps on top of a page screenshot taken at the first visit after the setup.
• Both show heatmaps for clicks/taps and scroll depth (although they are grouped differently and for Crazy Egg they are displayed under snapshots)
• Options to view the heatmap based on device (desktop, tablet, smartphone). But, again, there are differences in how and where you find these.
• Both have options for geo-locating users that the heatmaps are based on.
• With both services, you can reset a heatmap/snapshot.
• A table of the data that the visuals are based on is available for both cases. 

Crazy Egg Extras:

• Crazy Egg offers an Overlay view, which is not a heatmap in itself, but an overlay of clicks / element
• Crazy Egg also offers a confetti map, which allows you to filter clicks from the map, based on several criteria. So, you can actually see only the heatmap for a certain country, if you want. Or the heatmap clicks filtered for a certain referrer, if you think it would be relevant. There are more than 20 filters available: new/returning visitor, search term, search engine, OS, browser etc.

Conclusion:

All in all, in terms of heatmaps, Visitor Analytics seems slightly more user-friendly, but Crazy Egg is very powerful in terms of the ability to apply filters directly on the heatmap, with the confetti view.

As you can see in the table, the two providers use different methods for calculating limits for premium plans.

• Crazy Egg uses a monthly counter that resets regardless of how much of the features you use, while with Visitor Analytics, you get the limits based on all-time use. When you reach a limit, you can either free up some slots, by deleting old data (heatmaps or recordings) or upgrade to a plan with higher limits.
• Crazy Egg plans are based on total pageviews / month, while Visitor Analytics is based on number of heatmaps.
• Crazy Egg deletes data after some time, while Visitor Analytics offers unlimited data storage. 

All in all, Visitor Analytics gives you more control over which data to store and for how long. If you do the math, it also offers higher limits than Crazy Egg, both for heatmaps and recordings. It is also about 5x more affordable for most premium plans, which makes it a top alternative to Crazy Egg. All of this in the context of fairly similar functionality, but without taking into account the other features the two providers offer.