Visitor Analytics - compare to Mouseflow

Mouseflow is a SaaS-based tool for performing website analytics and real-time user tracking on websites. They record whole visitor sessions including mouse movements, scroll events, clicks and keystrokes. Mouseflow helps you find out where users are having trouble on your website, know the pages that render slowly or have a high bounce rate and more. 

For the time being, Visitor Analytics and Mouseflow share these three features: visitor recordings (also known as session replays), heatmaps and funnels. 

Visitor Analytics also provides a full website analytics package, with visitor statistics, page statistics, device, OS and browser statistics plus more along these lines. 

Mouseflow does not have this analytics cluster as a core component. But it offers features for generating and operating polls and form analytics.Polls, surveys and form analytics are coming soon to Visitor Analytics as well.

NOTE: Mouseflow uses the same set of initial settings for both Recordings and Heatmaps. This means that the Recordings you set up will be used for generating Heatmaps.

Similarities: 

• Both Visitor Analytics and Mouseflow 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, the approximate location of the user, the referrer URL where the click came from, the entry page, nr of pages visited, details about the device used (browser, OS, resolution) 

• Both have filters for country, OS, browser, devices, page count, duration, visitor type (returning or new), entry page, exit page and visited page (or “contains page”), 

• Directly from the overview, you can manage your recordings by marking them as favorites, as seen or unseen for both Visitor Analytics and Mouseflow

Visitor Analytics Extras: 

• With Visitor Analytics you can 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. See each URL the visitor accessed (in addition to the entry and exit pages). Check if the session is from a returning or a new visitor.

• You can see the exit page in the main dashboard, as well as the date and time of the visit

Mouseflow Extras:

• Some  extra features for excluding and whitelisting elements to be recorded

• Directly from the overview, you can add tags/variables to recordings

• For each recording there is a friction score, which is a metric based on several behaviors that indicate user frustration and problems on the site (errors, failed submits, bounces, click and movement patterns)

• The ability to filter by referral source

• A livestream option that allows to see recordings in real time

Conclusion: 

Visitor recordings are similar for the two services, but the Mouseflow extras like friction score and livestream are significant advantages. But this difference is also reflected in the price. Mouseflow starts from 24 Euros / month and can get to 399 Euros / month for users with several websites or big traffic. Visitor Analytics is between $5.83 and $34.99 / month. This makes it a sensible choice if you feel like you don’t need the two extra options, which are nice to have, but not really essential.

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, mouse movement and scroll depth
• Options to view the heatmap based on device (desktop, tablet, smartphone).
• Both have options for geo-locating users that the heatmaps are based on.
• In Mouseflow, you can’t reset a heatmap the same way as in Visitor Analytics. Yet, you can filter the heatmap-view based on a date-range, which gets you to the same result. The difference is that in this case, you get to keep different heatmaps for different moments in time.
• A table of the data that the visuals are based on is available. 
• You can generate heatmaps for a specific page or for similar pages (e.g.product pages).

Mouseflow Extras:

• The Mouseflow heatmap has got the extra option to track users who trigger a JavaScript snippet
• You can also see the live heatmap of your website
• Mouseflow also offers an attention map, in addition to the others, which is a type of scroll map which also takes into account the time spent on any given section of the webpage being tracked

Conclusion:

All in all, the functionality is similar, but the data is slightly better presented on Visitor Analytics. Taking into account that the pricing is also a lot lower, Visitor Analytics can be seen as a viable Mouseflow alternative for heatmaps.

Similarities: 

• The entire technology and display are practically the same. 
• Both show conversion rates and drop-outs at every step of the funnel.
• Both link to video recordings to find out more about the reasons for the dropouts in the funnel.

Mouseflow Extras:

• Mouseflow has an unlimited number of steps in the setup of the funnel, while Visitor Analytics has a maximum of 8 steps per funnel. However, a funnel with more than 8 steps probably relies on a complicated path to a conversion. It would not be recommended.

Visitor Analytics doesn’t offer unlimited funnels, but even at 9.16 USD/month you get 8 funnels. If users don’t want to track more than 8 different conversions at the same time, there is no need to spend more. The highest plan goes to 25 funnels, which should be more than enough for most users. 

Although the two apps use different systems for establishing plan limits, it is easy to see that Visitor Analytics is a lot more affordable and, in some cases, even offers higher limits for the features. For instance, the Advanced plan is almost 10x less expensive than the Growth plan from Mouseflow. At the same time, it offers almost the same amount of funnels and you can use it for generating 15 heatmaps, based on up to 8,000 pageviews each, at the same time.

When you reach the limit for number of recordings or heatmaps, you can delete old ones to make space for newer ones in Visitor Analytics. This is a lot more user-friendly than blocking new data upon reaching the limit before the end of the month, like Mouseflow does.