Is Fullstory Session Replay Worth It? A Detailed Analysis

Are you looking for a session replay tool but not sure if Fullstory is the right option for your SaaS?

This article will help you decide.

In the next nine or so minutes, you will learn about:

• Fullstory session recording features and use cases.
• Fullstory pricing.
• The tool’s pros and cons.

I also look at two alternatives, Userpilot and Hotjar, that can be a better match for your organization.

What is Fullstory session replay?

Fullstory session replay is a feature that allows you to watch real user interactions with your website or app.

It captures every click, scroll, mouse movement, or keystroke to help you understand user behavior, identify friction points, and improve UX. All of which are essential for improving user satisfaction, building loyalty, and boosting retention rates.

How can Fullstory session replays help analyze user behavior?

Teams can use Fullstory’s session replay to:

• Identify frustration signals like rage clicks or dead clicks to uncover UX pain points.
• Track and analyze user journeys to understand how users interact with your web pages or web/mobile apps.
• Understand drop-off points within user funnels to optimize conversion rates.
• Pinpoint bug locations by linking user sessions to bug reports or customer tickets.
• Monitor engagement with specific features or page elements.
• Improve collaboration and break down data silos by sharing session insights directly with your UX, development, or support colleagues.

Overview of Fullstory’s session replay software

Let’s dive deeper into Fullstory’s session replay functionality.

Automatic capturing of events

Fullstory uses autocapture to record every session interaction without manual tagging.

This is the foundation of the session recording functionality. If the sessions showed only the actions you chose to follow, they would offer an incomplete picture of user behavior, and you could miss important insights.

Segmentation and filtering options

Fullstory’s segmentation and filtering features allow you to filter sessions by device, location, page visited, or behavior, like frustration signals.

Thanks to this, you can hone in on the most relevant session recordings for focused analysis. For example, you could use it to pinpoint the pain points in the journey of a specific user group.

User session viewing controls

In addition to the standard control features like play and pause, Fullstory offers playback speeds and the option to skip inactivity.

This makes it easy to fast forward through less relevant moments and zero in on what matters for faster and more targeted insights. Because, let’s face it, not many of us have time to watch users take coffee breaks, especially with high session volumes to analyze.

Team collaboration and sharing

Fullstory lets team members add notes, highlight specific session parts, and tag colleagues directly within the platform.

This feature enables seamless knowledge-sharing across teams, allowing product, design, and customer support teams to collaborate on insights and quickly align on potential solutions.

The result?

Tighter feedback loops and faster improvements to user experience.

Privacy settings to mask sensitive data

Fullstory’s privacy settings allow you to protect user information by masking sensitive data like credit card numbers, passwords, and personally identifiable information within session replays.

This is essential for compliance with privacy and data protection regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

One-click AI summaries

Fullstory’s AI-powered one-click summaries distill long user sessions into concise, actionable overviews by highlighting key actions and interactions.

This feature helps teams understand user intent and identify major issues without needing to watch an entire session. This speeds up decision-making, allowing them to tackle pain points or optimize user experience more effectively.

Page insights for tracking user engagement

In addition to session replays, Fullstory offers Page Insights, which provides an overview of user activity on specific pages.

These include:

• Click maps – that show where users clicked on the page, including rage, error, and dead clicks.
• Scroll maps – which are visual representations of scroll depth.
• Inspect mode – that offers stats on users’ engagement with various page elements.

These insights allow teams to see which elements attract the most attention, where users linger, and where drop-offs might happen. Such visibility allows them to optimize page layouts, prioritize content, and reduce friction points for a smoother user experience and higher conversion rates.

Looking for a Fullstory Session Replay Alternative for Tracking User Engagement? Try Userpilot

Get a Demo

• 14 Day Trial
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How much does Fullstory’s session recording tool cost?

Fullstory has three pricing tiers — Business, Advance, and Enterprise — each with custom pricing, which depends on the number of recorded sessions, seats, data retention time, and additional features and integrations.

The lowest price reported by users I came across was $247 a month for 75k sessions and 2 months of data history.

Other analytics features, like funnels, custom dashboards, page flow analytics, segmentation, or trends, are available as add-ons.

What do real users say about Fullstory’s session replay feature?

To give you an objective picture of Fullstory’s capabilities and its strengths and weaknesses, I analyzed over 100 user reviews on G2.

Here are some takeaways:

Micheal J., an analytics manager, finds Fullstory’s session replays and heatmaps excellent for UX experience analysis:

Fullstory’s session replay and heatmap features are incredibly powerful for understanding the customer experience at a granular level. Being able to watch real user sessions and see aggregate engagement patterns helps pinpoint specific areas for UX improvements and conversion optimization. The insights have led us to make meaningful product enhancements.

Israel F, a VP of design, shares his sentiment:

As a UX designer, being able to view and analyze user behaviors through session replays and funnel is invaluable. The tool’s intuitive interface makes it super easy to pinpoint where users struggle and how they navigate in real-time. This direct insight helps in tweaking designs and improving UX and CX.

Reviewers also praise Fullstory for easy implementation, rich integrations, and excellent customer support:

Ease of implementation (single tag and you’re good to go), 3rd party integrations (Slack, Jira, Google Analytics and Qualtrics have been game changers for our organization), and quick and friendly customer support have also been great as well as our great customer success manager.

On the flip side, users point out that Fullstory’s pricing isn’t as competitive as other tools.

FullStory’s pricing can be on the higher end compared to some basic session replay tools.

However, the main criticism seems to concern the reliability of Fullstory’s flagship features, like rage click tracking. Users also mention usability issues:

Some features like “frustrated sessions” and “rage clicks” sound helpful, but they aren’t as smart as they sound, and the events list in the session replay sidebar is difficult to quickly scan. It would also be useful if similar behavior patterns by other users were shown, to be able to spot recurring issues.

Finally, users report occasional performance issues, especially when working with large data sets:

Data load times can occasionally be slow, especially when dealing with a high volume of sessions.

Pros of viewing user sessions with Fullstory

Fullstory session replays are a powerful feature. Its strengths include:

• Comprehensive session insights with autocapture and AI-powered summaries.
• High customization with filtering and segmentation options.
• Strong collaboration tools for team-wide analysis.
• Privacy and compliance features for sensitive data protection.
• Integrations with traditional web analytics tools and feedback platforms for comprehensive data insights.

Cons of viewing user sessions with Fullstory

The main downsides of the product include:

• Pricing can be high, particularly for smaller businesses that want additional user journey analytics features like funnels.
• Complexity: Some features, like rage click detection, can be less intuitive than expected, and there’s a learning curve involved.
• Cluttered interface, which makes navigation clunky.
• Performance issues: There are reports of occasional lag times and slow data load times, especially when managing a high volume of sessions.

Alternative tools to Fullstory for monitoring session recordings

If you’re on a tight budget, need a more comprehensive analytics solution, or would like a tool that will allow you to act on the insights, you may be looking for an alternative to Fullstory.

Here are two picks: Userpilot and Hotjar.

Userpilot for medium and enterprise companies

Userpilot is a product growth platform. This means more comprehensive functionality than the other two tools.

Apart from session recordings (and heatmaps), it offers advanced analytics features:

• Funnels and Paths.
• Trends and Retention Analysis.
• Custom dashboards.
• Autocapture.
• Segmentation.

To track user sentiment and get to the heart of their needs and wants, you can run in-app surveys. And use the insights to design onboarding experiences to remove friction from the user journeys and improve conversions.

Userpilot features

When it comes to session recordings in Userpilot, its features match those of Fullstory pretty closely.

• Advanced filters allow you to find relevant sessions by user actions, pages visited, or company/user attributes.

• Collaboration tools, including adding notes, flagging bugs, and tagging teammates, for improved teamwork efficiency.

• Inactivity skipping so that you can jump directly to relevant moments of user interaction without wasting your precious time.
• Activity log panel where you can find all user actions during the session and jump to specific events.

• Session playlists allow you to organize your recordings for easy access and analysis.

• Privacy protection with features to mask sensitive data, ensuring full compliance with privacy standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2.

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot pricing is based on monthly active users, not events, which makes it easier to predict your expenses.

The lowest Start plan starts at $249/month, but to get access to the session recording feature, you need the Growth plan, which costs $799/month. The feature is also included in the Enterprise plan, which comes with custom pricing.

Hotjar for small companies

Hotjar is a product experience insights platform that provides behavior analytics and feedback data to help you understand your customers.

It offers a range of features that allow you to visualize user behavior and collect customer feedback, including:

• Heatmaps: Like Fullstory’s Page Insights, but more comprehensive, they include click/tap, move, scroll, engagement, and rage-click maps.
• Feedback surveys: For gathering qualitative data about user needs and their pain points.
• User interviews: You can automatically schedule user testing sessions with participants from its extensive pool.

Hotjar features

With respect to its session recording functionality, here are Hotjar’s top features:

• Frustration and engagement filters to highlight recordings with rage clicks, u-turns, and other key behavior signals.
• Playback speed controls to watch sessions at different speeds and skip idle time.
• Path and action filters to narrow down sessions by landing page, user actions, and device type.
• One-click highlights to save important clips for team collaboration and quick reference.
• Funnel filters and segmentation for a targeted analysis.
• Privacy-first data capture with automatic anonymization of sensitive user inputs for GDPR and CCPA compliance.

Hotjar pricing

Hotjar offers three plans.

The basic plan is free but comes with limited features.

Paid plans start at $32/month and are more suitable for small teams needing more sessions, heatmaps, and analytics.

Conclusion

Fullstory’s session replay offers powerful insights, but it can be costly and complex for smaller teams.

For a cost-effective alternative, Hotjar offers similar session replay and heatmap functionality combined with funnels and feedback surveys.

If you’d like a more comprehensive solution, Userpilot combines session replays with advanced analytics, feedback, and engagement features. This makes it ideal for teams seeking to improve user experience and optimize conversion rates with data-driven in-app experiences.

Want to learn more? Grab a Userpilot demo today!

Looking for a Fullstory Session Replay Alternative to Improve Your User Experience? Try Userpilot

Get a Demo

• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required