Our 10 Selected Session Recording Software for Product and Engineering Teams
With so many options available, how do you choose the right session recording software for your team?
This article aims to simplify the decision-making process. We’ve researched, tested, and curated a list of 10 top-rated session recording tools to help you unlock valuable user insights and build better digital experiences. Whether you’re prioritizing budget, specific features, or platform compatibility, you’ll find the perfect solution here.
Best session replay software shortlist
- Userpilot – Best for product and marketing teams – Price starts at $249/month (free trial available).
- Microsoft Clarity – Suitable for SMBs with no heavy analytics needs – 100% free.
- Hotjar – Best for product managers, UX designers, and marketers – Free plan available; paid plans start at $32/month.
- Smartlook – Best for product managers, UX researchers, and mobile app developers – Free plan available; paid plans start at $55/month.
- PostHog – Suitable for developers and product teams – Free for up to 1 million events/month; paid plans are priced based on usage.
- FullStory – Best for product, engineering, and marketing teams – Custom pricing (free trial available).
- UXCam – Best for mobile app developers, product managers, and UX designers – Free plan available; pricing for the paid plan is not public.
- LogRocket – Best for developers and engineers – Free plan available; paid plans start at $69/month.
- Sentry – Suitable for engineering teams – Free plan available; paid plans start at $26/month.
- OpenReplay – Suitable for developers, engineers, and technical product managers – Free (self-hosted); cloud plans start at $5.95/month.
Best session replay software with detailed reviews
Ready to delve into the details? Below are 10 of our favorite session recording software:
#1 Userpilot
- Suitable for: Product and marketing teams. Userpilot is code-free and doesn’t require technical knowledge, so anyone on your team can learn to use it.
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Pricing: Userpilot’s pricing starts at $249/month with an option to take a 14-day free trial. Session replays are available across all plans for the first 5,000 sessions, but you can purchase more as add-ons if you’re on the Growth or Enterprise plan.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web for the time being and to be released in Jan 2025.
Userpilot is a product growth platform that helps companies increase adoption, user satisfaction, and product stickiness. It combines session recording with other features like product analytics, user onboarding, and in-app surveys, making it an all-in-one solution for understanding and improving the user experience.
Main Features
- Skip inactivity and jump straight to key user actions within each recording.
- Filter sessions by user attributes, company data, specific in-app events, and UI element interactions.
- Share recordings, leave time-stamped notes, and organize user sessions into playlists for teamwork.
- Safeguard sensitive data with enhanced privacy features like selective recording.
- Easily share insights and collaborate with your team to improve user experience.
Potential drawback
Userpilot is primarily designed for web applications, so users focused on improving the mobile app user experience can feel limited.
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#2 Microsoft Clarity
- Suitable for: SMBs with no heavy analytics needs.
- G2 rating: 4.5/5
- Pricing: Completely free with no limitations on traffic or features.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web only.
- Deployment: SaaS.
Microsoft Clarity is a free session recording tool that provides insights into how users interact with your website. It’s a great alternative to Google Analytics for teams looking to try session replays at no cost.
Main Features
- Visualize user behavior with heatmaps that show clicks, scroll depth, and mouse movements.
- Access a unified analytics dashboard that provides a clear overview of key metrics like page views, unique visitors, and bounce rate.
- Identify dead clicks on non-interactive elements and quickly spot potential areas of confusion.
- Filter and analyze specific user segments based on behavior, demographics, or devices.
Potential drawback
Some users have expressed privacy concerns regarding data collection, even though Microsoft emphasizes its commitment to user privacy and data anonymization.
#3 Hotjar
- Suitable for: A wide range of users, including product managers, UX designers, marketers, and developers.
- G2 rating: 4.3/5
- Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at €32/month, with a 15-day reverse trial for all new users.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web only (but captures sessions of users browsing the site on mobile).
- Deployment: SaaS.
Hotjar is one of the most popular user behavior analytics and session recording tools on the market. The platform’s user-friendly interface and visual reports make it easy to identify areas for improvement and optimize the user experience.
Main Features
- Watch actual user journeys on your website and web app.
- Segment recordings by user attributes like location, device, browser, and referral source.
- Combine heatmap data with session replays to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the user experience.
- Trigger automatic feedback widgets to collect feedback based on specific pages or elements.
Potential drawback
Hotjar operates on a session sampling model for plans with daily session limits—meaning it records only a portion of your website traffic once those limits are exceeded. This can lead to an incomplete understanding of user behavior, especially for websites with low traffic where capturing every session is crucial.
#4 Smartlook
- Suitable for: Product managers, UX researchers, and mobile app developers.
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Pricing: Free plan available with the paid plan starting at $55/month.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Both web and mobile.
- Deployment: SaaS.
Smartlook is a session recording software that provides a detailed understanding of user behavior across web and mobile apps.
Unlike some session recording tools that rely on sampling, Smartlook takes an “always-on” approach, capturing every user interaction in detail. This allows you to identify friction points, uncover hidden opportunities, and optimize conversion funnels with confidence.
Main Features
- Automatically track specific user actions and events, like button clicks or form submissions.
- Capture user sessions on native iOS and Android apps, including gestures and screen transitions.
- View heatmaps alongside recordings to see aggregated user behavior and then dive deeper into individual user sessions for context.
- Easily share recordings with colleagues or embed them in presentations and analytics reports.
- Get instant notifications of anomalies like spikes in user activity, sudden drops in conversion rate for specific pages, etc.
Potential drawback
Compared to other session replay tools, Smartlook offers limited filtering and segmentation options. This can make it challenging to isolate and analyze specific user segments or behaviors.
#5 Posthog
- Suitable for: Developers and product teams.
- G2 rating: 4.4/5
- Pricing: Free for up to 1 million events/month. The paid plans are priced based on usage.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web and mobile.
- Deployment: SaaS, self-hosted, and open-source.
PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform that provides a comprehensive suite of features, including session recording, event tracking, user segmentation, and more.
It’s particularly appealing to developers, data-driven teams, and companies who prefer the flexibility of a solution they can own and customize.
Main Features
- Track user behavior, analyze events, and measure product performance.
- Watch user replays enriched with console logs to understand the technical context of user actions.
- Use feature flags to experiment with new features and target specific user segments for controlled releases.
- Use CSS selectors to obscure or block sensitive data and ensure data privacy.
- Export recordings for offline analytics and decision-making.
Potential drawbacks
PostHog’s open-source and self-hosting options mean you have complete control over your session recording data, including how it’s collected and where it’s stored. However, this can quickly become resource-intensive—you’re technically not paying PostHog for self-hosting or using the source code, but you’ll be spending on infrastructure like servers and databases, as well as ongoing maintenance and storage.
(PostHog Cloud might be a more suitable option if you’re a small team with limited resources or prioritizing rapid deployment).
#6 Fullstory
- Suitable for: Product, engineering, and marketing teams.
- G2 rating: 4.5/5
- Pricing: Fullstory has a more enterprise-focused pricing model. The full details are not public, but they offer a basic free version and a 14-day free trial of the premium features.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Both web and mobile.
- Deployment: SaaS.
FullStory is a digital experience intelligence (DXI) platform that captures and analyzes user interactions on your website or app. It provides pixel-perfect session replays, advanced analytics, and powerful segmentation capabilities to help teams understand user behavior and enhance the digital experience.
Main Features
- Capture every user interaction in high fidelity, including mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, page transitions, form inputs, and even dynamic elements like hover states and animations.
- Automatically detect user frustration signals like rage clicks, error clicks, and dead clicks, helping you pinpoint areas of friction.
- Leverage AI to generate concise summaries of user sessions, highlighting key moments and potential areas of interest.
- Search for specific user sessions using plain language queries.
- Use customizable data masking to protect sensitive user information while still capturing important insights.
Potential drawbacks
Due to its extensive data capture, FullStory can generate a large amount of customer data, which may require some time to analyze and interpret effectively.
In addition, the session recording software is more expensive than some other solutions, making it a better fit for larger businesses.
#7 UXCam
- Suitable for: Mobile app developers, product managers, and UX designers.
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Pricing: Free plan available. Pricing for the paid plans is not public, but users can access a 14-day free trial across all pricing tiers.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Mobile only.
- Deployment: SaaS.
UXCam is a mobile-first app analytics platform that specializes in providing deep insights into user behavior within mobile apps. It offers session replays, heatmaps, event tracking, and user analytics specifically designed for mobile app optimization.
Main Features
- Record every screen visit, gestures (taps, swipes, pinches), and interaction with UI elements within your mobile app.
- Track individual users across sessions and devices to understand behavior patterns over time.
- Detect crashes, UI freezes, rage taps, and other signs of user frustration.
- Track custom event data and analyze user interactions related to specific actions or features within your app.
- Easily share app logs with your dev team for prompt fixes.
Potential drawback
UX Cam doesn’t offer session recording or analytics for websites. So, if you need a session recording tool that can analyze web and mobile user behavior, you’ll have to consider other options.
#8 Logrocket
- Suitable for: Primarily developers and engineers.
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Pricing: A free plan is available, with the paid plan starting at $69/month. As with most other session recording tools, LogRocket offers a 14-day free trial across all its paid plans.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web and mobile.
- Deployment: SaaS.
LogRocket is a frontend performance monitoring and session recording software that helps teams resolve user problems faster.
As its name probably suggests, LogRocket goes beyond basic session recording by capturing console logs, network requests, and JavaScript errors. This provides a complete picture of what the user experienced and the underlying technical factors that may have contributed to any problems.
Main Features
- Filter user sessions by a wide range of criteria, including user ID, location, device, browser, URL, and custom events.
- Perform issue-specific replays to quickly find sessions where specific errors occurred.
- Share session replays with colleagues, add comments and annotations, and collaborate on analysis.
- Integrate with various bug tracking, project management, and communication tools to improve your workflow.
Potential drawback
Compared with other session recording software, Logrocket’s pricing is relatively high for organizations with large session volumes.
#9 Sentry
- Suitable for: Engineering teams.
- G2 rating: 4.5/5
- Pricing: Sentry offers a basic free version suitable for solo developers. The paid options start at $26/mo, and free trials are available.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web and mobile.
- Deployment: SaaS, with options for self-hosted and on-premise deployments for larger enterprises.
Sentry is a popular error-tracking and performance-monitoring platform that helps developers identify and fix bugs in real time.
While its primary focus is on error tracking, the platform also offers session replay as a valuable feature for understanding the context of errors and crashes. It allows developers to see exactly what a user is doing before an issue occurs, making it easier to diagnose and resolve problems quickly.
Main Features
- Capture and report errors across various programming languages and platforms.
- Access console logs, network requests, and inspect the DOM to understand the technical context of user actions.
- Mask all HTML text, images, and user inputs by default to protect user privacy.
- Highlight rage clicks and dead clicks to quickly identify areas where users are experiencing frustration.
- 90-day data retention to help you understand user behavior in the long term.
Potential drawback
While Sentry is a useful session recording tool for developers, it’s important to note that it’s primarily designed for debugging and troubleshooting. The software is not as feature-rich as dedicated session replay tools when it comes to analyzing user behavior or identifying UX issues.
#10 OpenReplay
- Suitable for: Developers, engineers, and technical product managers.
- G2 rating: No profile on G2/Capterra.
- Pricing: Free for up to 1,000 sessions per month. The paid plan starts at $5.95/month with a 7-day free trial.
- Shareable session replay: Yes.
- Supported device: Web only.
- Deployment: Self-hosted (open-source) or SaaS.
OpenReplay is a developer-focused session replay platform that provides a detailed view of user interactions on web applications.
The platform is highly customizable and extensible, making it a great choice for teams that prefer to avoid vendor lock-in.
Main Features
- Track page load times, resource usage, and other performance metrics to identify friction points and optimize user experience.
- Enjoy fine-grained control over data privacy, including data masking and anonymization options.
- Capture console logs alongside session replays to easily identify and diagnose errors.
- Collaborate on session replays, add comments, and share insights across your team.
Potential drawback
Scaling your self-hosted OpenReplay to handle large volumes of data requires significant infrastructure investment and optimization.
Conclusion
Choosing the right tool depends on your specific needs, budget, and technical expertise. Hopefully, today’s roundup has shown you some tools that can perfectly suit your needs!
Userpilot can help if you’re looking for an all-in-one session recording software that lets you perform comprehensive product analytics and act on user insights. Book a demo today to try it!
Session recording software FAQs
What is a session recording?
A session recording (sometimes called a session replay) is a privacy-enabled video of a user interacting with your website or app. It captures everything they do, including mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, page transitions, and more.
What is session replay software?
Session replay software or session recording tool is any platform that allows you to record user sessions and watch them later. This software typically provides features like visual replays, heatmaps, analytics, and segmentation.
What is the best recording software?
There is no single “best” session recording software, as the ideal choice depends on your specific needs and priorities. However, some of the top-rated options include:
- Comprehensive features: Userpilot, Smartlook, FullStory.
- Mobile-first analytics: UXCam.
- Developer-focused session recording tools: LogRocket, Sentry, OpenReplay.
- Budget-friendly website session recording software: Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar.
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