Web session recording software tools allow website owners to record user behavior on their website, such as clicks, and scrolling across multiple web pages, and approach those activities so they can be replayed and analyzed later.
As a website owner, you must use session recording software tools as part of your optimization to fully understand how your users interact with your website and the product you can put yourself in your users' shoes by using website recording tools to develop empathy.
Here are the topics that we will cover in this blog:
- What is session recording software?
- Why is using session recording software important?
- How to use session recording software?
- Who can use session recording software?
- Features to consider while buying session recording software
- Here is the list of 9 Top Web Session Recording Software Tools
What is session recording software?
Session recording software is a qualitative research tool that lets website owners record sessions of website visitors in real-time to gain insights into digital user behavior and analyze user activity.
Session recording software tools enable webmasters to replay and watch sessions at different playback speeds.
You can watch your website visitor’s session on their user behavior from the landing page to the exit page.
Session recording software allows you to watch all the clicks, scrolls, and navigation from page to page.
Why is using session recording software important?
1. Find bugs, problems, and pain points
One of the quickest ways to improve your website is to watch session recordings to understand where users struggle and get frustrated. You can fix broken elements, deceptive call-to-action, loading problems, and even vague guidelines.
2. Explore how users engage with website structures
With a wide range of sessions o all your website visitors you a watch closer and get deeper insights into how users engage with your website structure, this understanding will definitely help you with A/B testing and optimize the right website design and as well as product design.
3. Become a team player
Most of the session recording software tools have notes that you can tag your teammates or co-workers like UX designers, product designers, CRO specialists, product managers, or marketers to rectify pain points and optimize with qualitative insights.
4. Understand the user experience
session recording software enables you to develop and optimize a product so that potential customers have the greatest feasible experience every time. Driving action on guessing can be difficult as well as sometimes lead to wrong actions. Understanding and making potential insightful actions are the right ways to optimize websites.
How to use session recording software?
- Step 1: Choose the right actionable and easy-to-use session recording software like ReplayBird to start with.
- Step 2: Add your domain.
- Step 3: Wait for some of your website visitors to engage with your website.
- Step 4: Find recordings in the left sidebar.
- Step 5: You will see a set of videos to watch. Each video is a session of each website visitor.
- Step 6: Play your session recordings and watch your user interact with your website.
In session recording software, you can watch them at different playback speeds.
You can also find more potential qualitative data like the names and locations of the users, durations, visited pages, and devices.
Who can use session recording software?
Session recording software is specifically designed to optimize website user experience, so whoever works to improve the user experience definitely needs session recording software to make potential and insightful decisions.
Let's see who are the major roles that need session recording software to make their work more efficient.
1. Ux Designer
Designing with insights is what a good UX designer should do.
Providing insights on user behavior and their pain points in an interface is the main purpose of session recording software.
Whereas with session recording software, UX designers don't have to guess when making a decision as session recording software provides potential qualitative analysis.
2. Product Designers
The major purpose of the best product design is to improve user engagement and product adoption for any SaaS.
Session recording software uncovers which of the ideal processes characterized in your customer journey map just aren't being followed by displaying how users are engaging with each element of your product.
Wherever users deviate from the optimal path, the recordings clearly show which customer difficulties are guiding them down the wrong path.
3. Developer
Session recording is used by developers to investigate website issues.
This leads to a high bounce rate, as users will abandon the site if they are inconvenienced.
Debugging is significantly easier when the developer knows which element is causing the problem.
4. Product Managers
Recordings can help you improve key workflows and conversion rates.
By viewing sessions from beginning to end, you can see precisely where users expressed interest when engaging with your app.
Even elements that actively manage to drive them away, also including forceful pop-ups or difficult-to-navigate settings, can be identified.
Alternatively, you can use session recording software in conjunction with funnel analysis tools to determine which functionalities urged users to convert to customers.
5. Marketers
Targeting the right audience and displaying the ads to them will boost the conversion rate.
Providing offers to visitors who clicked the buy button and stayed on the page for a longer period of time.
This shows that the visitor clicked the call-to-action to purchase the product.
The user then stared at the price for far too long. Perhaps user would have reviewed the pricing with others or assessed the pricing he could afford.
Targeting users and offering a good deal or a free trial may help turn visitors into a customer.
What are the features to consider while buying session recording software?
- Sessions have to be in good pixel quality.
- Session recording software tools should allow us to skip inactive actions.
- It must be able to play at different playback speeds.
- Notifications on sessions with errors
- Segment your sessions with issues to be rectified.
- Tag team members in session to look after errors.
- filters with duration, conditions, and more.
- Affordable pricing
9 Top Web Session Recording Software Tools in 2023
#1 ReplayBird
Replaybird combines session recording software, performance monitoring, and product analytics into one platform, delegating businesses and their teams to create a better user experience.
Replaybird analyzes customers’ digital experiences and identifies errors on your website before your website visitor finds them.
Customizable dashboards give exact UX metrics on how your website is performing.
Replaybird is a full package for anyone looking to boost your website traffic, analyze the digital user experience, and optimize conversion rates.
Features:
- Session Replay
- Heatmap
- Funnel analysis
- Product analytics
- Multiple users
- Rage clicks & error clicks analytics
- Multiple websites
- Unlimited reports
- Customizable dashboard
- Accurate User Identification Data
Pricing:
Replaybird is an affordable session recording software tool for websites with five pricing plans.
- Free version - $0/month - 1000 sessions
- Basic - $79/month - 25,000 sessions
- Startup - $149/month - 50,000 sessions
- Growth - $329/month - 100,000 sessions
- Premium - $599/month - 250,000 sessions
- Custom package for sessions over 250,000 sessions
A free trial is also available.
#2 Clarity
Clarity is a session recording software tool provided by Microsoft. They also enable you to access session replays, heatmaps, and insights.
Another tool can make an integration with Google Analytics to have access to session replay and heatmaps and get user activity by combining both.
Clarity is GDPR & CCPA ready. Furthermore, Clarity is an open-source tool.
Features:
- Session replay
- Heatmaps
- Insights
- Integrate with google analytics
Limitations:
- It does not have smooth video playback.
- The deleting option is complicated.
Pricing:
- Microsoft Clarity is a free tool.
#3 Hotjar
Hotjar is one of the session recording software tools, which is Product Experience Analytics, which explains how people act and what they care about, allowing product teams to provide genuine value to customers and customer retention.
Features:
- Session Replays
- Heatmaps
- Web analytics
- Survey templates
- Conversion opportunities
- Webpage element analysis
Limitations:
- Not user-friendly
- Difficult payment process
- Cannot apply more filters
Pricing:
- The basic plan is free with limitations
- Plus plan for $31/month
- Business plan for $79/month
- Scale plan for $311/month
#4 Fullstory
FullStory is a Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platform that combines comprehensive product analytics, robust session information, and collaboration tools to give real-time analytics on online and mobile experiences.
Features:
- Analysis
- Conversion Tracking
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Funnel Analysis
- Search/Filter
- Session Recording
Limitations:
- Difficult to search and use features
- Transparent less pricing
- Expensive pricing.
- Upgrades to the more expensive versions by sessions.
- Intimidation on degradation.
Pricing:
- A free trial for all the plans is also available
- Free for startups with base-level data
- The business plan is not revealed and you have to contact fullstory
- Fullstory gives customized billing for the Enterprise plan
#5 Logrocket
LogRocket is a performance monitoring tool that captures logs and session recordings from your web and native mobile apps to help you fix bugs and analyze user behavior.
LogRocket makes it simple to replicate user-reported issues.
Search for user sessions and view session replays to determine the root cause of any problem.
Features:
- Session Recording
- Funnel Analysis
- Data Visualization
- Heatmaps
- Behavioral Analytics
- Application Management
- Website Analytics
Limitations:
- Expensive pricing.
Pricing:
- Free for 1000 sessions/month
- Team 10k sessions per month $99
- Professional 25k sessions per month $500
- Enterprise package has custom pricing
#6 Dyntrance
Dyntrance is a digital experience monitoring, you can improve user experiences.
Session replay of Dynatrace ensures that all applications are accessible, functional, quick, and efficient across all channels, including mobile, web, IoT, and APIs.
Features:
- Performance Monitoring
- Data Visualization
- Real-Time Monitoring
- Session Replay
- Behavioral Analysis
Limitations:
- Not a user-friendly User-interface
Pricing:
- Digital experience monitoring Starts at $11
#7 Posthog
PostHog is a self-hosted all-in-one product analytics tool.
It allows software teams to capture events, perform analytics, record user experiences, run tests, and deliver new features all from a single platform.
PostHog is expandable to any size team and priced based on usage.
Because it is completely open source, you may check every line of code, offer ideas, and even build directly on top of the product to add new features and integrations.
Features:
- Product Analytics
- Funnels Analytics
- Session recording
- Feature flags
- Experimentation
- Heatmaps
Limitations:
- Difficult to setup
- Some bugs are found as it is developing the site
Pricing:
- PostHog is an open-source tool.
#8 UXcam
With an easy-to-use analytics solution, UXCam helps businesses understand their mobile app users.
Session Replay Analysis, Heatmaps, User Analysis, Screen Analysis, User Journey Analysis, Crash & Issue Analytics, and other features are included.
UXCam believes that simply delivering a product is insufficient.
Every successful company is in the business of providing a positive user experience.
Features:
- Heatmaps
- Funnel Analysis
- Event Analytics
- Session Replay
- User Analytics
- Data visualizations
Limitations:
- No transparent pricing
- Expensive pricing
- The dashboard isn't customizable
Pricing:
- UXCam has not yet provided pricing information.
#9 Contentsquare
To understand the how and why of client behavior, ContentSquare's experience analytics technology records every in-page interaction and behavior.
This analysis is transformed into ratings, visualizations, and suggestions, making it easy for every team member to do the correct thing.
Because our digital experience stack supports the whole digital improvement cycle, Contentsquare assists you in making better decisions at every stage.
Features:
- Funnels
- Conversions
- Sessions recording
- Real-Time Reporting
- Segmentation
- Performance and Reliability
Pricing:
- ContentSquare has not yet provided pricing information.
Final Words:
If you are a developer, marketing team, or in UX/UI designing team, the session recording software tool is a treasure, you will know if you have used one before.
No analytics or insights can equalize a quality screen record of your website visitor's point of view.
ReplayBird - Driving Revenue and Growth through Actionable Product Insights
ReplayBird is a digital experience analytics platform that offers a comprehensive real-time insights which goes beyond the limitations of traditional web analytics with features such as product analytics, session replay, error analysis, funnel, and path analysis.
With Replaybird, you can capture a complete picture of user behavior, understand their pain points, and improve the overall end-user experience. Session replay feature allows you to watch user sessions in real-time, so you can understand their actions, identify issues and quickly take corrective actions. Error analysis feature helps you identify and resolve javascript errors as they occur, minimizing the negative impact on user experience.
With product analytics feature, you can get deeper insights into how users are interacting with your product and identify opportunities to improve. Drive understanding, action, and trust, leading to improved customer experiences and driving business revenue growth.
Try ReplayBird 14-days free trial
Further Readings:
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