6 Great Smartlook Alternatives for Tracking User Behavior

Some 20 years ago, if you wanted to know what visitors were doing on your website, you mostly had to rely on pure guessing and an old-timey visitor counter on your homepage. Fast forward to the future and Google Analytics gives you deep insights into your audiences. And then come session recording and replay tools and it’s taken to another level.

Smartlook is a popular tool in the session recording/replay/heatmaps niche and for a good reason. It offers a great mix of features, a decent user experience, a solid list of integrations and affordable pricing for a usability testing app.

But what if Smartlook is just not right for you, for whatever reason? Here are the top Smartlook alternatives to consider to improve your sales and conversion funnels.

Why consider Smartlook alternatives?

This is one of the most widely used session replay/heatmap tools out there, but not without its flaws. Reading through the user reviews, you can see some common complains popping up over time.

For example, there is the complex UI that is not so easy to navigate for first time users. Customers also complain about the inability to export videos from session recordings as files - you can only watch them in Smartlook. Moreover, there is no integration with Google Analytics, a key piece of software for website analysis.

Smartlook’s pricing is definitely on par with the rest of the tools we’re about to mention, with the cheapest plan starting at $39. The problem is that this plan stores your data for up to just one month. There’s 5,000 monthly user sessions included, which is comparable with the other entries here.

In short, it’s a powerful tool but lacking in some aspects that are enough to make you look at competing options. Today, we’re listing some of the best Smartlook alternatives you should consider in 2023.

LiveSession

At LiveSession, we found that two specific types of audiences find the most value from our product. Those are SaaS businesses and eCommerce stores looking to improve their user experience (hence they may take a headless commerce approach) and skyrocket their conversion rate.

Using session replays, you can take a look at individual recordings and uncover potential UX issues as well as behavioral patterns on important pages on your website. 

However, taking a look at pages in isolation rarely gives you all the information you need about customer experience and customer behavior. This is why we have Funnels as a feature for full funnel analysis. Using Funnels, you can get a view of the pathways that customers take from the moment they land on your website until they make a purchase.

Couple this with heatmaps, and you’ll know exactly what pages drive conversions and which ones cause friction and make visitors bounce instead of purchasing. Besides the usual heatmaps that show where the mouse is going, clickmaps make it easy to recognize movement patterns and rage clicks.

Last but not least, you can use LiveSession to uncover JavaScript errors before your developers and QA teams can even spot them. No more spending hours going through Google Analytics to uncover user behavior issues.

If you’re looking for specific reasons why LiveSession is the best SmartLook alternative, let’s start with the engagement score. This metric will grade specific website visitors to let you know how likely someone is to convert based on their activity so far. In other words, the app automatically grades your visitors before they even reach your sales team or get to checkout.

Alerts are another great LiveSession feature for user feedback and user engagement. You can set up custom events in your user journey and set up LiveSession to send you alerts once customers get to it. For example, a custom alert can be set every time a user gets stuck on a checkout page, and LiveSession can send you a Slack notification. You can react immediately and reach out through your live chat app.

Finally, user journeys let you depict the entire path a customer takes on your website, no matter if it ends in a conversion or not.

If you want to give LiveSession a try, there is a free trial that lasts for 14 days so you can see just how much data on yout key flows you can capture on your website. As for the paid plans, those start at $65 per month, which gives you up to 5,000 user sessions monthly. You get clickmaps, heatmaps, engagement scores, session sharing and much, much more.

Ready to get started? Sign up for your free trial today!

Hotjar

It’s hard to talk about Smartlook alternatives without addressing the elephant in the room. Hotjar is not the oldest or the biggest session replay/heatmap tool in the market, but thanks to a good brand positioning, it’s one of the best known qualitative analytics solutions out there.

Hotjar’s offering is split up into three different products as of a few months ago:

• Hotjar Observe (heatmaps and visitor recordings)
• Hotjar Ask (feedback and surveys)
• Hotjar Engage (connecting with customers)

Through three different tiers, they manage to capture the entire customer journey and user behavior. And while heatmaps and session recordings are their most popular offerings, the rest does not fall behind much in terms of the value it provides.

There is, however, one noticeable difference. Smartlook allows for cross-device analytics and you can use all of their tools within mobile apps for analytics. On the other hand, Hotjar does not support mobile apps at the moment with their heat maps, which could be a deal breaker for many marketing teams.

Their pricing is now a bit more complex thanks to the three-tier split. However, thre is a free plan in all packages, and for Observe, it means up to 1,050 user sessions per month. Paid plans for Observe start at $32 per month. If you want to add Ask and get feedback surveys in the mix, that’s an additional $48 monthly.

Crazy Egg

Unlike most of the tools on this list, Crazy Egg is a seasoned veteran. Launched in 2006, it was the first tool to introduce session recordings. And contrary to popular belief, it was Crazy Egg and not Hotjar that originally came up with heatmaps.

Despite being a bit dated, Crazy Egg offers an interesting mix of features that make it a competitive product in this niche.

Heatmaps are the very beginning of the story. Once you see where the “heat” is, you can take a look at scrollmaps, which essentially tell you when a visitor stops scrolling - so you can put a call to action at this very spot and help out your sales team.

The confetti report gives you a granular overview of the most frequent clicks across a page. Couple this with their session recordings and you get a very accurate picture of how people spend time on your website in this powerful tool.

A free trial is available and once you decide to upgrade, you’ll find that the Crazy Egg offer is quite affordable for something that offers funnel analysis and the ability to track each user inteaction. The cheapest plan is $29 per month, giving you up to 30,000 page views, 25 heatmaps and 3,000 session recordings. A great value for money.

Fullstory

Similarly to Smartlook, Fullstory is easy to set up and get started with - all it takes is copying and pasting a single tracking code. The product offering is similar as well, aiming to provide valuable insights to marketers and product teams looking to unearth actionable insights across user devices.

Fullstory uses autocapture to get data through every customer interaction so you’re not left wondering what happened before a certain moment in the entire customer journey, e.g. the checkout process. They also stress that they are private by default, which means that no matter how much text and sensitive data your customers enter, you won’t be able to see it in the recordings.

Besides session replays, recordings and heatmaps, you can also get specific event-based notifications. For example, for rage clicks, dead clicks, broken pages and more. Combined with Google Analytics, this can give real time data of value to product managers, marketers and website admins.

What makes them stand out in this listing is that they’re the only tool that does not offer a free trial. You can only ask to get a demo of the product to see what it looks like from the driver’s seat. Moreover, pricing is not disclosed publicly so you really have to get in touch with their sales team to find out how much you’ll be paying.

UXCam

If you have a mobile app and you want to track how your users behave while interacting with it, this might be your best out of the lot. While other tools here are built for a variety of different platforms, UXCam is a product analytics tool made specifically for mobile applications and it’s currently used in over 37,000 of them across the world to improve digital products.

Being focused on mobile apps is already a huge strength and UXCam fortifies this position with a wealth of great features. Some of these include session replays, user analytics, detailed dashboards with key metrics, funnel analytics, event analytics and many others to round off this UX testing tool.

Heatmaps and user sessions are adapted for mobile app use, so you can see specific gestures that your customers would make on a mobile app. Funnel analytics are also adapted for a mobile app customer journey.

In short, it’s a pretty niche product compared to Smartlook and some other entries here, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you need user analytics for mobile apps, it fits the job extremely well.

The free plan is valid for up to 10,000 user sessions per month, which is pretty generous. Unfortunately, there are no pricing details for any other paid plan, so you’ll have to reach out to get pricing details.

Refiner

Like UXCam, Refiner is also a user testing tool with a more specialized audience. It offers microsurveys as a way to capture customer feedback in SaaS products. It’s not a Smartlook competitor in the sense of their key features (heatmaps and session replays) but it is does compare well against Hotjar and other entries thanks to its use case.

One great feature in Refiner is that you don’t have to rack your brains to figure out in which way to use it. There are numerous templates available for different survey types you can use in a SaaS product - NPS, CSAT, CES, product-market fit, you name it.

Whether you want to engage your existing customers or nudge your free trials into becoming customers, there is lots that you can do within Refiner. Whether you need a full funnel analysis or just some help for your customer service, this tool fits the job.

There’s a free trial to give it a spin and paid plans start at $79 per month for 5,000 users. While it is a good digital marketing tool, the price and the niche use case make it a bit less interesting compare to some alternative solutions.

Wrapping up

While Smartlook is one of the most popular analytics tools out there, perhaps it’s not built for you or the pricing just does not meet your requirements at the moment. All of the tools mentioned on this list have similar features, while some stand out with their funnel analysis offer.

Speaking of which, why not give LiveSession a try? You can give it a spin for 14 days and reveal just how much information you already have on your customers, ready to be used. Sign up now to get started!