That’s the purpose of digital analytics — to collect and analyze data from these different sources in order to make educated decisions.

However, a wide variety of software solutions fall under this definition. Any software that pulls data from a digital property and organizes it into a convenient view can be considered a digital analytics solution.

In this guide, we’ll help you understand the differences between these tools and find the right one(s) for your needs. To do so, we’ve organized the top 12 digital analytics tools into four categories:

• Web and mobile analytics tools: Smartlook, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Clicky. These tools help you analyze how users interact with your website, web app, and native mobile app. 

• Social media management and analytics tools: Hootsuite and Sprout Social. These tools let you manage your social media presence and analyze how users engage with your social profiles.

• Search engine optimization (SEO) tools: Semrush and Ahrefs. These tools help you monitor your website’s organic traffic, analyze its link profile, and track rankings for important keywords.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems: Salesforce and HubSpot. These tools can keep all your customer interaction data in one place, so you can use it to analyze interactions, manage relationships, and close deals.

We’ll explore key aspects of each tool, including its most important features, use cases, pricing plans, and more.

Smartlook captures every user interaction on your website or mobile app with a single code snippet and lets you create heatmaps, define events, build funnels, and watch session recordings. You can try Smartlook today with our full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. 

Web and mobile app analytics tools

These tools help companies analyze how users interact with their products by gathering traffic and behavioral data from websites, web apps, and native mobile apps. They’re crucial for marketers and product teams looking to:

• Understand how users navigate a page or app screen.
  
  
• Monitor which sources bring in traffic to their site or app.
  
  
• Segment their user base by their characteristics and behaviors.
  
  
• Find points of friction in key flows, like checkouts and onboarding tutorials.
  
  
• Calculate and improve key metrics like conversion rates, churn, and retention.

1. Smartlook

• Key features: Session recordings, heatmaps, events, funnels, behavior flows, and crash reports.
  
  
• Supported platforms: Web and mobile apps.
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $55/month for recording 5,000 monthly user sessions on your site or app. There’s also a free forever plan you can use without a time constraint or credit card.

Smartlook is our product analytics and visual user insights platform that combines key quantitative and qualitative analytics features, including:

• Session recordings, which let you watch users’ exact experience on your site or app. Suggested reading: How to record website visitors: Practical tips, tools & examples
  
  
• Heatmaps, which give you an overview of the typical user experience on a page or app screen. Suggested reading: How to read a heatmap and get actionable UX insights
  
  
• Events, which are user actions that you can track over time, like page visits, button clicks, or successful purchases.
  
  
• Funnels, which let you analyze how users navigate flows like checkouts, onboarding tutorials, and newsletter signups. Suggested reading: How to improve conversions, retention & UX with funnel analysis
  
  
• Behavioral flows, and much more.

You can use this versatile feature set to capture everything your users do and, more importantly, uncover why they do it, so you can improve their experience, as well as your conversions, retention, and revenue. 

Smartlook also supports a wide range of website, web app, and native mobile app technologies, including WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, and more. This, alongside its multifaceted feature set, makes Smartlook one of the most versatile digital analytics software tools on the market.

In the next sections, we’ll discuss three key benefits of using Smartlook to analyze user behavior.

Record all user interactions on your site or app with a single code snippet

Smartlook automatically records all user interactions on your site or app. 

All you have to do is add one code snippet and our platform will automatically start recording users’ sessions. You can find them in the “Sessions” tab of your dashboard, as shown below. 

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button next to each session. Clicking it takes you to a video (also called a session recording or session replay) that recreates everything that happened during that session — including which pages or app screens the user visited, which buttons they clicked, the error messages they saw, and so on.

For example, the screenshot below shows a session recording of a user navigating an onboarding tutorial.

Besides the video itself, there’s also tons of useful information, including:

• The user’s device, country, and other sessions (to the left).
  
  
• A timeline of all events they triggered during the sessions (under the video).

Session recordings can be a powerful tool for marketers, product teams, customer support specialists, UX researchers, and developers. If you haven’t worked with session recording software before, check out our in-depth review of the top 8 session replay and visitor recording tools.

Besides session recordings, you can also start using Smartlook’s other analytics features immediately after adding our code snippet.

For example, you can create heatmaps to see where users click, scroll, or move their mouse on a web page or app screen. The screenshot below shows a Smartlook click map that highlights the areas where most clicks were concentrated.

Because they’re so easy to create and intuitive to read, heatmaps are a great place to start your user behavior analysis. If you haven’t worked with them before, we highly recommend checking out our guide to heat mapping.

Analyze aggregate stats and metrics or zoom into individual user sessions

With Smartlook, you can easily move from high-level metrics to the sessions of individual users (or user segments) to find concrete points of friction or opportunities for improvement.

Here’s how.

When you open Smartlook, you’ll get a dashboard full of useful stats and metrics about your site or app, including:

• The top visited and exit pages.
• Users’ browsers, devices, and countries.
• New versus returning users.
• The most common errors, and much more.

These dashboards are easily customizable, so they can include any information that’s relevant to your business. 

For example, if you have an e-commerce site, you may want to track key marketing data, like the conversion rate for your checkout flow or the number of visitors to a product page. Or, if you have a SaaS app, you may want to track product metrics like the number of daily, weekly, or monthly active users.

If you want to get more specific, you can start watching individual session recordings, as we showed in the previous section. Smartlook makes it easy to find the sessions you need with over 30 filters, including:

• Dates.
• Users’ devices.
• Their countries and IPs.
• The events they triggered, and much more.

Additionally, you can locate session recordings of specific users by a unique identifier, like their names or emails. All you have to do is set up our Identify API and users’ identifiers will appear in their session recordings, as you can see in the lower left hand corner.

This capability can be extremely useful for user experience (UX), product, digital marketing, and customer support teams. For example:

• Marketers, product managers, and UX researchers can easily find the sessions of important users (e.g., high-paying customers) and come up with ways to improve the customer experience.
  
  
• Customer support teams can jump into the sessions of users who reported a bug to see exactly what happened, without bothering people for an explanation.

Combine quantitative data with qualitative product experience insights to improve your conversion rates

Smartlook can help you quantify user behavior with:

• Events, which let you monitor how often users perform certain actions, like button clicks, page visits, purchases, and more. Plus, Smartlook makes it easy to track events without coding by simply choosing from a list of template events or directly clicking on your site’s user interface (as shown below).

• Funnels, which let you calculate conversion rates and track how users navigate key flows, such as checkouts and onboarding tutorials. Building a funnel in Smartlook is as simple as placing events in the order you believe your users follow (the process is shown in the GIF below).

Both of these capabilities are essential for marketing and product teams but they’re often not enough to find exactly what’s hurting your users’ experience and conversions. That’s why Smartlook can combine event tracking and funnel analysis with session recordings to uncover the “why” behind users’ behavior.

You can instantly find all sessions where users triggered a certain event by simply clicking on the “Play” button next to its name.

This capability makes it much easier to find relevant sessions and see the full context behind certain actions.

Additionally, each step of your funnels, including the drop-offs, also has a “Play” button, which takes you directly to the relevant recordings. As a result, you have a much easier way to find points of friction in your flows.

For example, in the funnel above, 32 users dropped off after clicking the “Pay now” button and didn’t reach the “Thank you” page. In theory, this shouldn’t happen, but in practice, a whole range of technical issues can prevent users from checking out. By clicking on the “Play” button under the drop-off, you can quickly watch a few relevant session recordings and see the issue, instead of guessing what it is or trying to reproduce it via trial and error.

AstroPay — one of our fintech clients — used this exact process to massively improve the conversions of one of their key flows. They simply created a funnel, saw where the drop-offs were, and jumped into the relevant sessions. This revealed two points of friction, which AstroPay’s team fixed, resulting in a 56% increase in their conversion rate.

For more details on how Smartlook can benefit your business, book a free live demo with our team. Or, if you want to give Smartlook a go yourself, sign-up for a full-featured, 30-day free trial — no credit card required.

2. Amplitude

• Key features: Event tracking, funnel analysis, segmentation, retention analysis, and data unification. 
  
  
• Supported platforms: Web and mobile apps.
  
  
• Pricing: Available upon request. There’s a free plan with basic product analytics functionality.

Amplitude is a product analytics and event tracking platform. It’s comprised of a few different tools:

1. Amplitude Analytics, which provides customer behavior insights and lets brands perform complex data analysis.
   
   
2. Amplitude Experiment, which lets brands run A/B tests and improve conversion rates.
   
   
3. Amplitude CDP, which connects to multiple data sources and unifies customer data into a single, user-friendly view.

Overall, Amplitude is among the most powerful but most difficult-to-use analytics platforms due to its manual data collection and complex features. We’ve explored this issue in more detail in our comparison article for Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Smartlook.

3. Mixpanel

• Key features: Event tracking, funnel analysis, retention analytics, segmentation, and cohort analysis.
  
  
• Supported platforms: Web and mobile apps.
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $28/month for tracking 10,000 events per month. There’s also a free forever plan. 

Mixpanel is a popular product analytics tool for analyzing user behavior and helping product teams power their decision-making process with reliable data. They recently underwent a rebranding and expanded their use cases with a bigger focus on tracking marketing campaign performance and new features like root cause analysis.

Despite its popularity, Mixpanel has a steep learning curve and doesn’t offer any qualitative analytics features. As a result, some teams opt to look for simpler competitors and alternatives to Mixpanel.

4. Adobe Analytics

• Key features: Real-time data insights, attribution tracking, predictive analytics, and native integrations with the rest of Adobe’s suite.
  
  
• Supported platforms: Web and mobile apps.
  
  
• Pricing: Available upon request.

Adobe Analytics is an enterprise analytics platform that’s part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. It has both basic and advanced analytics capabilities, like segmentation, metric tracking, and predictive analytics. It also has three pre-made plans for different use cases — Select, Prime, and Ultimate — although there’s no publicly available pricing for either of them.

5. Google Analytics

• Key features: Event tracking, acquisition and attribution tracking, funnel analysis, and path exploration.
  
  
• Supported platforms: Web.
  
  
• Pricing: Google Analytics is free.

Google Analytics (GA) is the most popular marketing analytics tool on the market. It’s the default option for most website owners looking to monitor their traffic, understand their visitors (demographics, devices, countries, etc.), track metrics like bounce rate, and make data-driven business decisions.

At the same time, GA is also limited in the sense that it only tracks aggregate stats and metrics and doesn’t have any qualitative analytics features (like surveys or session recordings). These drawbacks often prompt teams to look for an alternative to GA.

6. Clicky

• Key features: Real-time traffic tracking, heatmaps, uptime monitoring, and anti-fraud capabilities.
  
  
• Supported platforms: Web.
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $9.99/month for websites with up to 30,000 daily pageviews. There’s also a free plan for sites with up to 3,000 daily pageviews.

Like GA, Clicky is a more traditional quantitative website analytics tool that helps brands monitor their website traffic in real-time. However, Clicky also offers some additional features like heatmaps and uptime monitoring, which slightly expand its scope beyond traditional web analytics. Its cost-effective pricing also makes it a popular choice for small businesses.

Social media management and analytics tools

These tools help organizations manage their social media presence by organizing data from their social media profiles into a single place. They’re typically used by social media marketers who want to:

• Plan and schedule their posts.
• See what their users are saying on social media.
• Analyze how people interact with their posts and find ways to boost engagement.

7. Hootsuite

• Key features: Social media engagement analytics, publishing calendar, social listening, and AI-generated texts for social media. 
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $99/month for 10 social accounts. All paid plans have a 30-day free trial.

Hootsuite is a social media management platform. It has a writing assistant (powered by machine learning) that helps social media marketers generate ideas for new posts or repurpose their existing content. Their analytics suite helps you track metrics from different social media platforms and build data-driven marketing strategies.

8. Sprout Social

• Key features: Social media analytics, pushing and scheduling, social listening, and employee advocacy.
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $249/month for five social profiles. There’s a 30-day free trial for all plans.

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media platform. It helps brands analyze results from their Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest accounts and create custom analytics dashboards. It also offers a unified inbox, so customer support agents don’t have to switch between tabs when talking to users on different social platforms.

Search engine optimization (SEO) tools

These tools crawl the web and provide insights into the organic ranking performance of websites or individual pages. This makes them invaluable for SEO professionals looking to:

• Monitor their site’s organic traffic.
• Track where certain pages rank for specific keywords.
• Analyze their site’s link profile, including backlinks and broken links.

9. Semrush

• Key features: On-page SEO suggestions, keyword research, competitor analysis, pay-per-click (PPC) ad research, and PR monitoring.
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $119.95/month for five projects and 500 tracked keywords. You can also create a free account to use a limited version of the tool.

Semrush is a platform that can help you improve your paid and organic search results. It can analyze data from your site and ad accounts to help you find opportunities for new content, Google Ads keywords, and content distribution. It can also pull data from the web to help you analyze competitors’ sites, organic search performance, and social media presence.

10. Ahrefs

• Key features: SEO dashboard, keyword tracker, site explorer, organic position history tracker, and backlink analysis. 
  
  
• Pricing: Starts at $99/month for up to 5 unverified projects and 750 tracked keywords. Two of Ahrefs’ tools — Site Explorer and Site Audit — have free versions.

Ahrefs is an SEO platform with products for monitoring and improving your organic traffic. You can connect your website to it and analyze your organic ranking performance for key queries. You can also use it to analyze data from the web — including keyword search volumes, competitor rankings, backlinks, and much more.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

These final tools pull customer interaction data from multiple sources — like email and live chat — and organize it into a single source of truth for all customer interactions. Sales, customer support, and marketing teams use CRMs to:

• Track all interactions customers have with their brand.
  
  
• Manage customer relationships through the entire customer journey.
  
  
• See the status of potential customers in the pipeline (first meeting, negotiations, contract signing, etc.)

11. Salesforce

• Key features: Customer 360 CRM, sales and marketing clouds, customer data platform, and customer service software.
  
  
• Pricing: Varies depending on the products you need. The CRM starts at $25/user/month, with a free trial that doesn’t require a credit card. 

Salesforce is the category-defining CRM. They made the term CRM popular over 20 years ago and remain a leader in the space until today. While you can use Salesforce to just monitor and nurture customer relationships, it also offers a plethora of other products for use cases like data unification, order management, and more.

12. HubSpot

• Key features: CRM platform, marketing and sales hubs, content management system (CMS), and operations software.
  
  
• Pricing: Varies depending on the products you need. The CRM suite for small teams starts at $50/month. There’s also a free plan that comes with basic sales, marketing, and operations tools.

HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps teams connect their sales, marketing, and customer service operations. It brings together tons of different tools, while also offering a generous free tier. Each of its products can be purchased separately, so you can try its CRM if you’re only interested in bringing together customer interaction data or expand to use cases like content marketing, marketing campaign automation, and more.

Capture everything your website or mobile app users do with Smartlook

Smartlook is the only combined product analytics and visual user insights platform that won’t take your team forever to set up. You can use it to gather user behavior data from your websites, web app, or native mobile app with minimal to no intervention from your team.

You can see Smartlook in action without spending any time registering or setting it up. Just book a free demo using this form and our team will give you a detailed Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business. Customers leave positive feedback about our demos 99% of the time, so you’re bound to learn something useful from our team.

Lastly, you can also give Smartlook a go yourself by signing up for a full-featured, 30-day trial of Smartlook today (no credit card required).

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post The 12 best digital analytics tools in 2023 (by category) appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

However, LogRocket is still primarily built for technical roles (developers, quality assurance experts, etc.), so it has some drawbacks for teams looking to use it for web or mobile analytics. Specifically:

• Key analytics features like funnels, path analysis, and heatmaps are only included in the “Professional” plan which starts at $550/month. Most product analytics tools include these features in much cheaper plans, and sometimes, in their free tiers. Overall, LogRocket’s “Free” and “Team” plans don’t include any analytics features outside of session replay.
  
  
• You need coding skills to track individual user actions (events). Because LogRocket is built for technical roles, it relies on users being able to write JavaScript code and use their SDK to track events. 
  
  
• There’s no mobile app crash detection feature. While LogRocket detects front-end errors, it can’t track mobile app crashes, which are among the biggest catalysts for poor user experiences and churn. 

In this article, we’ve compiled the seven best LogRocket competitors that can help you overcome these limitations, starting with Smartlook — our comprehensive product analytics and visual user insights platform.

Here are all the LogRocket alternatives we cover below:

1. Smartlook
2. FullStory
3. Hotjar
4. Datadog
5. Dynatrace
6. Sentry
7. Glassbox

We’ll explore each tool’s key features and pricing, so you can make an informed decision.

Smartlook is the only combined product analytics and visual user insights platform that won’t take your team forever to set up. Book a free demo with our team to learn how Smartlook can benefit your business or try it yourself with a full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. 

1. Smartlook

• Pricing: Starts at $55/month for sites and apps with up to 5,000 monthly user sessions. All Smartlook accounts start with a full-featured, 30-day free trial.

Smartlook is our product analytics and visual user insights platform that combines session recordings, heatmaps, events, funnels, DevTools, and other powerful analytics features.

Organizations like Tesco, Papa John’s, and Kiwi.com use Smartlook to:

• Automatically record everything their users do with a single code snippet.
  
  
• Quantify user behavior with features like event tracking and funnel analysis.
  
  
• Uncover why users do what they do and find ways to boost customer engagement, conversions, and retention.

Smartlook’s versatile features, plus its support for websites, web apps, and native mobile apps, make it a powerful tool for:

• Marketers looking to analyze user behavior and boost conversion rates.
  
  
• Product managers who want to uncover exactly how customers use their product and where they get stuck.
  
  
• Developers and quality assurance (QA) teams struggling to understand how bugs, app crashes, and other usability issues occur.
  
  
• And many other team members.

In the next section, we’ll discuss five benefits of using Smartlook over LogRocket for various analytics and debugging use cases.

#1. Get a complete analytics suite in one cost-effective package 

Smartlook was built to help organizations analyze users’ behaviors, get qualitative insights into their experiences, and make educated product decisions. 

Because these are complex, multi-team tasks, our platform brings together versatile features that can help many teams in their day-to-day work. For example:

• Session recordings (available on all Smartlook plans, including the free one) show you exactly how users navigate your site or app, from the moment they open it, to the moment they close it. Session recordings are a great way to understand user behavior and see exactly how issues occur. Learn more: How to record website visitors: Practical tips, tools & examples. 

• Heatmaps (available on all Smartlook plans, including the free one) give you an overview of the typical user experience on a page or app screen. They’re super easy to create and analyze, making them a great starting point for user behavior analysis. Smartlook supports three types of heatmaps — click maps (left in the image below), move maps (in the middle), and scroll maps (to the right). Learn more: 9 best heatmap software tools for websites and mobile apps. 

• Events (available on all Smartlook plans, including the free one) are user actions you can track over time, like button clicks, page visits, purchases, and more. Smartlook automatically collects user interaction data and lets you track lots of events without coding, as we’ll discuss later.

• Funnels (available on all Smartlook plans, including the free one) let you analyze how users navigate multi-step flows like checkouts or onboarding tutorials and calculate their conversion rates. Learn more: How to improve conversions, retention & UX with funnel analysis 

• Key metrics (available on all Smartlook plans, including the free one) let you track the top visited pages, users’ locations and devices, daily, weekly, and monthly active users, retention, and more.

• DevTools (an add-on for our “Pro” and “Enterprise” plans) gives developers and QAs the technical data to understand what’s happening in users’ browsers, including network activity, console logs, JavaScript errors, and more. You can learn more about Smartlook’s DevTools in our documentation.

These essential analytics features are available in all Smartlook plans (with the exception of DevTools). As a result, you can get a complete suite of web and mobile analytics capabilities at a much more cost-effective price compared to LogRocket’s $550/month starting price tag.

#2. Track business-critical user interactions and build event-based funnels without coding

Smartlook makes it easy to quantify user behavior by:

• Tracking individual user actions (events).
• Building event-based funnels that show how users navigate key flows and where they drop off.

Here’s how.

First, Smartlook automatically records all user interactions with a single code snippet. This means you don’t have to specifically tell it which user actions to capture (unless you want to track custom events).

With the user interaction data automatically collected, all you have to do is select which actions you want to track as events. This is as simple as selecting from a list of standard events or clicking on your site’s UI, as shown in the screenshot below.

And since Smartlook also has session recordings, you can quickly find all sessions where a certain event was triggered. 

Additionally, Smartlook also tracks JavaScript errors and rage clicks as events, so you can watch the sessions of users who experienced an error or were frustrated.

You can also use your events to build funnels — sequences of steps users go through to complete a goal, like:

• Buying a product. 
• Subscribing to your newsletter. 
• Completing an onboarding tutorial.

This is as simple as placing the events in the order you believe your users follow, as shown in the GIF below.

For example, the screenshot below shows a three-step checkout funnel.

As you can see, there’s a play button under each step, including the drop-offs, allowing you to jump into the sessions of users who dropped off between specific steps. This means you can find points of friction in your flows much faster compared to watching the sessions of all users who entered this funnel.

#3. Record sessions compliantly and efficiently by default

A common concern about session recorders is that they have the potential to capture personal and sensitive data. While all reputable session recording tools have features for avoiding this problem, they require different levels of setup.

For example, LogRocket lets you mask and exclude elements that contain passwords, credit card info, or personal data, but this has to be done manually via code changes.

On the other hand, Smartook can do most of the heavy lifting for you.

First, our SDK was created with privacy in mind, so any potentially sensitive data — like passwords, credit card info, and IP addresses — is not recorded by default.

Second, Smartlook also offers Wireframe Rendering Modes for mobile apps. When enabled, these modes draw a representation of the content on a screen, instead of capturing your app’s UI as users see it, as shown below. 

You can still watch all user interactions but without any possibility of revealing any personal data. This means your session recordings are compliant by default — no need to mask or exclude anything by hand. Plus, this recording method is much less taxing on users’ devices, as we’ve explained in our article on the top mobile app analytics tools.

Lastly, you can also manually mask or exclude any additional elements from appearing in session recordings, just like you can in LogRocket. 

#4. Automatically detect app crashes

App crashes can ruin your users’ experience and lead to higher churn. That’s why it’s crucial to have a way to quickly detect and debug crashes when they occur.

This is where Smartlook’s Crash Reports come in.

When you open this feature, which is included for free in every plan, you get a list of all app crashes, alongside information about the version of your app where a crash occurred and the number of users that experienced it.

From here, you can click on a crash fragment to see the entire stack trace and get details about the user who experienced it (their platform, device location, etc.).

Lastly, you can click on the “Play session” button above the stack trace and watch all session recordings where a crash happened. This means you can watch every interaction inside every user session leading up to a crash, making it much easier for your developers and QAs to debug.

#5. Monitor user behavior across platforms

While LogRocket can help you monitor user behavior on websites and mobile apps, it can’t track the same users as they move between platforms. 

As a result, teams who have both a website and a native mobile app can get a misleading view of the customer journey.

For example, say you have an e-commerce brand and users can start their journey on your site, add items to their cart, and finish their purchase on your mobile app. Without the ability to track users as they move between platforms, you’d only be able to see two different journeys — one that ends after users add items to their carts and another one that begins after they log into your mobile app.

To overcome this blindspot, Smartlook offers cross-platform analytics — a feature that lets you track and combine user behavior data from different platforms onto a single, unified dashboard.

You can also build funnels with events from different platforms, as shown below.

Going back to our e-commerce example, you can build a funnel that starts with users visiting your website (Event 1), adding an item to their carts (Event 2), and completing their purchase on your mobile app (Event 3). 

In short, cross-platform analytics lets you track complex user journeys, understand how customers navigate your properties, and find points of friction you otherwise couldn’t. For more details, check out our cross-platform analytics guide.

If you want to learn more about Smartlook, book a free demo with our team or try the platform yourself with a full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. 

2. FullStory

• Pricing: Available upon request.

FullStory is a digital experience intelligence platform that combines session replay, heatmaps, events, conversion funnels, and segmentation functionalities. It takes a similar approach to Smartlook by automatically capturing every user interaction and letting you track events without coding.

One downside to FullStory is that it can get expensive, with many users reporting they couldn’t afford a plan that records 100% of their user session. For more details, check out our article on the top FullStory competitors.

3. Hotjar

• Pricing: Different for each of Hotjar’s products. The session replay and heatmap tool starts at $39/month, while the user survey and feedback tool starts at $59/month.

Hotjar is a behavioral analytics and user feedback platform. It combines a few different products:

• Observe, which includes heatmaps, session recordings, and event tracking
  
  
• Ask, which includes user interviews and real-time feedback widgets
  
  
• Engage, which lets brands perform user interviews

While useful for getting qualitative insights, the platform is very limited in the quantitative analytics department, which prompts many teams to look for an alternative to Hotjar.

4. Datadog

• Pricing: Varies depending on the capabilities you need. The real user monitoring and session replay suite starts at $2.60 per 1,000 sessions/month.

Datadog is a cloud monitoring service. It offers various tools for technical use cases — including infrastructure and network monitoring, log management, database monitoring, and more. It also has a digital experience analytics suite with features like session replay and error tracking.

5. Dynatrace

• Pricing: Varies depending on the capabilities you need. For example, the real user monitoring suite starts at $2.25 per 1,000 user sessions. 

Similar to Datadog, Dynatrace is an observability, security, and digital experience platform built mainly for technical teams. It brings together solutions for six main use cases:

• Applications and microservices
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application security
• Business analytics
• Digital experience
• Automation

6. Sentry

• Pricing: Starts at $29/month for basic code and error monitoring features 

Sentry is an application performance monitoring and error tracking software. It’s compatible with a wide range of frameworks, languages, and platforms. They recently introduced a session replay feature, although you can also integrate it with Smartlook to get the best out of both worlds.

7. Glassbox

• Pricing: Available upon request

Glassbox is a digital customer experience analytics platform. It’s available for both websites and mobile apps and it comes with features like session replay, funnel analysis, heatmaps, error and struggle analysis, and feedback widgets. Like FullStory, Glassbox is also a more enterprise-oriented platform, so it doesn’t have transparent pricing.

Capture, analyze, and improve your user’s experience with Smartlook

You can see how Smartlook can benefit your business by booking a free live demo with our team.

Our tool can be used on all kinds of websites, including those built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify. Implementing Smartlook on a site is as easy as pasting a code snippet (directly or via Google Tag Manager). 

Smartlook also has SDKs for many mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines — including iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter. We have detailed documentation to guide you through the implementation — but if you get stuck or have any questions, our Support team is ready and waiting.

Lastly, Smartlook has integrations with tons of different solutions, including conversion rate optimization and A/B testing platforms (like Optimizely), web analytics software (like Google Analytics), and other popular SaaS tools (like Jira and Slack).

Try Smartlook’s heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels today with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Vojtěch Šibor

is a Product Marketing Manager at Smartlook. Vojtech is a marketer with product blood running through his veins. He always knows about all the new features and what's coming up. Sometimes he talks about brand stuff and makes sure that the communication is consistent.

The post 7 best LogRocket competitors for product, marketing & dev teams appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

While they can seem equivalent at first glance, their feature sets don’t overlap completely. As a result, each one can provide different insights and is suited for different types of companies and teams.

In this article, we’ll discuss how Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Smartlook work in detail, with a focus on their unique features, overlaps, and key use cases.

Here’s everything we’ll cover below:

• At a glance: Hotjar vs Lucky Orange vs Smartlook
• Lucky Orange vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Unique capabilities 
• Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Smartlook’s overlapping features 
• Lucky Orange vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Free tiers and pricing comparison

Smartlook captures every user interaction on your website or mobile app and helps you improve your conversion rate, revenue, and retention. Book a demo with our team or try Smartlook for free with a full-featured 30-day trial (no credit card required). 

At a Glance: Hotjar vs Lucky Orange vs Smartlook

Here’s a brief overview of all three tools: 

For marketers at smaller companies who only need to get insights into the performance of a website or web app, any of the three tools could be a good fit. However, larger companies who need a more stable solution, one that supports mobile apps, or one that can be used by more teams within the company, should pay close attention to the differences between each tool. 

Supported platforms and technologies

• Lucky Orange — websites and web apps including ones built with CMSs like Shopify, WordPress, and Wix.
• Hotjar — websites and web apps including ones built with CMSs like Shopify, WordPress, and Wix.
• Smartlook — websites, web apps, and mobile apps. Smartlook supports many web and mobile app technologies, including WordPress, Shopify, Wix, iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, and more.

Overlapping features

• Session recordings, which allow you to watch users’ exact experience on your site or app.
• Heatmaps, whichgive you an overview of a typical user’s behavior on a page or app screen.
• Events, which are user actions that you can track over time, like page visits, button clicks, or text inputs.
• Funnels, whichlet you analyze how users navigate flows like checkouts, onboarding tutorials, and newsletter signups.

Unique capabilities

• Lucky Orange — live chat, form analytics, and pop-up announcements.
• Hotjar — extensive suite of tools for gathering user feedback and 365 days of data collection.
• Smartlook — broad platform support, cross-platform analytics, and unique features for product, customer support, and development teams like Crash Reports and DevTools.

Who can use it

• Lucky Orange is suitable for marketers, UX professionals, and to a certain extent, customer support reps.
• Hotjar is suitable for marketers, UX professionals, and product managers.
• Smartlook is a versatile solution for marketers, UX professionals, product managers, customer support teams, developers, and quality assurance (QA) teams. 

Pricing

• Lucky Orange offers a free plan and five paid plans, starting at $18/month. 
• Hotjar has different pricing plans depending on the tools you want to use. Its heatmap and session recording tool starts at $39/month, the survey tool starts at $59/month, and the user interview tool starts at $90/month. 
• Smartlook has a Free Plan, a paid Pro Plan (starting at $55/month), and a fully tailored Enterprise Plan. 

Note: If you want to compare Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Smartlook to other popular analytics tools, check out:

• 15 best web analytics tools (including Crazy Egg, Matomo, and more).
• 8 best free website analytics tools and complementary digital marketing solutions (including Clarity, HubSpot, and more). 

Lucky Orange vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Unique capabilities

In this section, we’ll discuss each tool’s differentiators compared to the other two and how that affects the types of businesses and teams that can use it.

Lucky Orange’s differentiators: Live chat, form analytics, and announcement pop-ups

Lucky Orange offers three features that Hotjar and Smartlook don’t:

1. Live chat, which lets you talk to visitors in real-time, send saved replies, and set up auto-away updates. You can also send post-chat surveys to gauge how visitors feel about each interaction.

2. Form analytics, which lets you analyze which form fields are getting abandoned by visitors most often. You can do something similar in Hotjar and Smartlook, but you have to set up events, which is more time-consuming.

3. Announcement pop-ups, which lets you place promo messages or news alerts at different stages of the customer journey.

It’s also worth mentioning that Lucky Orange has a Visitor Profiles feature for tracking all interactions individual users have with your site. While this can be considered a unique functionality, Hotjar and Smartlook both have Identification APIs that let you do the same thing with a slightly different setup.

Overall, Lucky Orange’s feature set is well-suited for small websites, especially in the e-commerce industry. 

Marketers and UX professionals can use it to analyze user behavior and find conversion rate optimization opportunities. Customer support reps can use the live chat features to engage visitors in real-time.

Hotjar’s differentiators: Advanced user feedback features and long data history

Compared to Lucky Orange and Smartlook, Hotjar’s biggest advantage is its extensive suite of user feedback tools. 

Although Lucky Orange also offers surveys, Hotjar has more ways to gather valuable feedback from customers.

For example, its Ask tool can help you run different types of surveys (open-ended questions, NPS, etc.) on your site. You can also send these surveys via external links or place pop-up widgets on specific website elements.

Hotjar Engage — the newest addition to the Hotjar platform — lets you perform user interviews either one-on-one or with multiple moderators. These can provide different types of insights compared to surveys or feedback widgets.

Hotjar also has the longest data retention among the three tools at 365 days for all plans.

In terms of companies and teams, Hotjar’s multiple products and specialized behavioral analytics features are a good fit for small, mid-sized, and enterprise websites and SaaS businesses (except for companies developing mobile apps, because Hotjar only works on web products).

Marketers and UX designers can use Hotjar to analyze user behavior, interview customers, and get their feedback in real-time. Product teams can watch how users navigate their web app, find points of friction, and also do user interviews.

Smartlook’s differentiators: Mobile app analytics, cross-platform analytics, and support for more use cases

Smartlook is available for both websites and native mobile apps, unlike Lucky Orange and Hotjar, which can’t be used on mobile apps. 

At the time of this writing, Smartlook has mobile SDKs for Android, iOS, Harmony OS, React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, and Unity.

Besides the ability to track user behavior on websites and mobile apps separately, Smartlook also lets you monitor users as they move between platforms.

This capability is called cross-platform analytics and is essential for teams that have a website and mobile app and want to get an accurate picture of the customer journey.

Additionally, Smartlook has unique features for more technical teams and use cases like:

• Crash Reports, which show you exactly where a crash occurred, including which user interaction preceded it.
• DevTools, which gives you the technical data necessary to understand what’s happening in your visitor’s browsers, including network activity, JavaScript errors, console logs, and more.

Smartlook’s versatile features allow all kinds of organizations to use it — from small and mid-sized businesses with a single site or app to enterprise companies that have websites, web apps, and native mobile apps.

Additionally, many different teams can utilize Smartlook for their day-to-day work. For example:

• Marketing teams can analyze which sources drove users to the site, watch their interactions, and uncover ways to boost conversions.
• User experience (UX) teams can watch the entire customer experience, from the moment users open the site or app to the moment they close it.
• Product teams can use session recordings to find usability issues and back up their suggestions for improving the product experience. They can also collect all user interactions with a single code snippet, which drastically simplifies the product analytics process.
• Customer support teams can watch session recordings of users who reported issues with the site or app. This makes it much easier to understand how issues occurred, compared to guessing or asking users to explain what happened.
• Development and QA teams can use session recordings to see exactly how bugs occurred. This, alongside the data sent in the background, drastically simplifies debugging, and in some cases, lets developers skip reproduction altogether. Technical teams can also use Smartlook’s Crash Reports to quickly see all app crashes, how many users they affected, and which app version they occurred in.

Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Smartlook’s overlapping features

As we said, Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Smartlook have some overlapping features. Since they’re very similar, we’ll cover them briefly, call out any differences in how they work, and link to detailed resources if you want to learn more.

#1. Session recordings

Session recordings (sometimes called user recordings or visitor recordings) capture everything users do on your site and allow you to watch their exact experience. 

This makes them a powerful tool for analyzing user behavior, finding points of friction, debugging, and more.

Additionally, session recordings also record valuable quantitative user data, as shown in the Smartlook session recording below.

Detailed recordings show how a user navigates an onboarding tutorial. Plus, there’s also information about the user’s device and location, as well as the events they triggered (below the session replay video).

While this feature works the same way in all three tools, it’s worth noting that some Lucky Orange users report bugs when trying to watch user sessions.

For more details, check out our guide: How to record website visitors: Practical tips, tools & examples

#2. Heatmaps

Heatmaps give you an overview of a typical user’s behavior on a web page or screen. All three tools support three types of heatmaps — click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (in the middle), and scroll maps (on the right). 

• Click maps let you see which links and call-to-action (CTA) buttons users interact with.
• Move maps help you understand which elements or areas attract visitors’ attention.
• Scroll maps show you how far down a page visitors scroll.

For a practical introduction to heatmaps or information about other heatmap tools, check out our articles:

• How to read a heatmap and get actionable UX insights
• 9 best heatmap software tools for websites and mobile apps 

#3. Events

Events are user actions that you can track over time, like page visits, button clicks, or text inputs. 

In general, event tracking is an essential analytics capability as it lets teams quantify user behavior and monitor business-critical interactions.

All three tools can track events, although neither Lucky Orange nor Hotjar list this as one of their main functionalities. 

Their event tracking setup is also quite different. 

Lucky Orange and Smartlook have a simple setup, as you don’t have to write any code to monitor most user actions. Instead, you can choose which events to track by clicking on your site’s UI, as shown below.

Conversely, Hotjar relies on manual event tracking. 

This means you need to write JavaScript code or use Hotjar’s API to import the events you’re tracking in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or Segment. Either way, tracking events in Hotjar requires more manual work and in most cases, coding skills.

#4. Funnels

Funnels let you analyze how users navigate important flows, like checkouts, onboarding tutorials, and newsletter signups. 

All three tools can create different kinds of funnels, calculate their conversion rates, and show you where users drop off.

For example, the screenshot below shows a three-step checkout funnel in Smartlook.

Because all three tools also have session recordings, you can jump into the sessions of users who dropped off between specific steps. This is a much easier way to find points of friction in your flows, as opposed to sifting through all session recordings. 

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Hotjar and Lucky Orange’s conversion funnels have some drawbacks:

• Hotjar’s funnels are only available on the most expensive plan, while Smartlook and Lucky Orange offer this feature even with their free plans.
• Lucky Orange doesn’t use a traditional funnel visualization (as you can see in the screenshot below), which makes its funnels less intuitive and harder to analyze.

For more practical details on the topic, check out our guide: How to improve conversions, retention & UX with funnel analysis

Lucky Orange vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Free tiers and pricing comparison

In this final section, we’ll wrap up our comparison by discussing all three tools’ paid plans, free versions, and free trials.

Lucky Orange’s free tier and pricing plans

Lucky Orange offers a free plan, four pre-made paid plans, and an option to build a custom plan for enterprise companies.

• Free Plan: For websites with up to 500 pageviews/month.
• Build Plan: For websites with up to 10K pageviews/month.
• Grow Plan: For websites with up to 40K pageviews/month.
• Expand Plan: For websites with up to 100K pageviews/month.
• Scale Plan: For websites with up to 300K pageviews/month.

These plans have either 30 or 60 days of data storage for session recordings and heatmaps and 365 days for surveys, chat logs, and events. Additionally, all paid plans start with a seven-day free trial.

While cost-effective, it’s worth noting that Lucky Orange’s plans are based on pageviews, not sessions (like Hotjar and Smartlook’s which are based on sessions). As a result, some reviewers report that they reached their plan’s limits and had to update very quickly.

Hotjar’s free tier and pricing plans

Hotjar has different pricing plans for each of its products.

• Observe, the session recording and heatmap tool, starts at $39/month for websites with up to 100 daily user sessions.
• Ask, the survey and feedback widgets tool, starts at $59/month for up to 250 monthly responses.
• Engage, the user interview tool, starts at $90/month for up to five monthly user interviews with one observer. 

This pricing structure is still relatively new, with some user reviews saying that the unbundling of the Observe and Ask products doesn’t make sense for product teams:

Besides that, all three tools have a free plan that can be used without a time limit, as well as an option for building custom plans. 

Lastly, Hotjar stores session recording, heatmap, event, and user feedback data for 365 days on all plans.

Smartlook’s free tier and pricing plans

Smartlook offers a Free Plan for small businesses, a paid Pro Plan, and a fully tailored Enterprise plan for large companies.

The Free Plan is for websites and mobile apps with up to 3,000 monthly user sessions and has Smartlook’s four core features — heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels. This plan can be used without a credit card or time constraint.

The Pro Plan is for websites and mobile apps with up to 5,000 user sessions and starts at $55/month. However, you can build a custom pro plan by adjusting the number of sessions yourself. This plan offers more events, funnels, heatmaps, and premium integrations.

Additionally, all Smartlook accounts start with a full-featured, 30-day free trial that doesn’t require a credit card.

Smartlook stores all captured data for either 30 or 90 days — but you can use our Session Vault to keep session recordings with valuable insights longer.

Analyze and improve your site or app’s UX, conversions, and revenue with Smartlook

Smartlook captures everything your website visitors or mobile app users do with a single code snippet. 

Our platform combines the power of session recordings, heatmaps, events, funnels, crash reports, and other key analytics features to help you track what users do, uncover why they do it, and improve their experience.

Smartlook also integrates with A/B testing platforms (like Optimizely), analytics tools (Google Analytics), survey tools (like Survicate), and other popular SaaS solutions (like Intercom, Jira, and Slack).

If you want a detailed presentation of Smartlook that’s tailored to your business, book a free demo with our team. We’ve found that customers who go through the demo have a 70% faster onboarding time and leave positive feedback 99% of the time. 

Or, if you want to give Smartlook a go yourself, start a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Vojtěch Šibor

is a Product Marketing Manager at Smartlook. Vojtech is a marketer with product blood running through his veins. He always knows about all the new features and what's coming up. Sometimes he talks about brand stuff and makes sure that the communication is consistent.

The post Lucky Orange vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: In-Depth Comparison (2023) appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

They’re easy to create and analyze, while also providing useful insights into where users click, scroll, and move their cursors. Their simplicity and versatility make them a popular choice for digital marketers, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts, and product managers.

But despite their popularity, there are still several misconceptions about heatmaps. For example, many teams don’t consider the fact that large website changes shouldn’t be made based on heatmaps alone (due to their inherent limitations).

In this guide, you’ll learn how to create and use different types of heatmaps, while overcoming the most common pitfalls. 

Here’s everything we’ll cover below:

• How heat mapping works
• The 3 main types of heatmaps and how to use each one (with real-life examples)
• Heatmaps’ biggest limitations and how to overcome them

Before we dive in, note that we’ll be using Smartlook — our behavioral analytics platform — to show examples of heat mapping in action.

You can try Smartlook today with our full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. Our tool captures every user interaction on your website or mobile app and lets you create heatmaps, define events, build funnels, and watch session recordings. 

How heat mapping works

Heat mapping is a data visualization technique for representing numerical data in different colors and hues. The resulting heatmaps are much more user-friendly than the raw, complex data sets because they make it easy to understand which values are high or low compared to each other.

The heat mapping process is very versatile, which is why it can be applied in various use cases — from regular data analysis to medical research, financial modeling, weather analysis, population density monitoring, website and mobile app analytics, and more.

In this article, we’re focusing on website and mobile app analytics, so let’s start with a website heatmap example.

This particular heatmap shows what percentage of visitors reach each part of the page. Or in other words, visitors’ scrolling activity is the numerical data behind this color-coded representation.

The top part is bright red because that’s the area all visitors see immediately after landing on the page. Since visitors gradually drop off further down the page, the heatmap’s colors change from warmer to colder ones — from red and yellow to green, blue, and finally gray (which is typically the footer of a web page).

This visual representation is what makes heatmaps really intuitive and easy to interpret, which is why they’re so popular for tracking user behavior.

For example, the heatmap below contains colored areas, with bright red spots in the middle. Even if you haven’t seen a heatmap below, you can probably guess that the red spots represent more activity compared to the colder colors.

There are plenty of heatmap software tools out there that can help you generate similar heatmaps for your website or mobile app. 

While each tool has slight differences, the process of creating a heatmap typically follows these steps:

1. You set up the tool on your site or app by installing a code snippet.
2. The tool either starts collecting user behavior data automatically or asks you to manually pick which page or app screen you’d like it to track. For instance, we’ve designed Smartlook to collect all user interactions on your site or app by default. This ensures you aren’t missing important behavioral data or wasting time manually setting up data collection.
3. You tell the tool which page or app screen you want to generate a heatmap for. If the behavior data has already been collected, your heatmap will be generated instantly. If not, you’ll have to wait for a few days or weeks to capture enough data. This is also why automatic data collection makes the heat mapping process much easier.

The 3 main types of heatmaps and how to use each one (with real-life examples)

The term heatmap can actually refer to different types of heatmaps for analyzing user behavior. In fact, most heat mapping tools offer click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (middle), and scroll maps (right).

In this section, we’ll show you how to make the most out of each one. But before we dive in, there are three best practices you need to consider, regardless of the type of heatmap you’re working with:

#1. Wait for at least 1000 views.

Heatmaps must gather 1,000 or more views before being reliable for behavior analysis. Below that level, it’s easy to make incorrect conclusions due to insufficient data. In general, the more information each heatmap collects, the more accurately it reflects the user experience.

#2. Filter your heatmap data.

Different types of users interact with your site or app in different ways. If you don’t filter your heatmap data, you risk making changes based on false assumptions about your user base. For example, you may not consider that desktop and mobile visitors see totally different elements above the fold. With Smartlook, you can filter heatmaps by users’ devices, locations, referrers, UTM tags, and much more. 

#3. Don’t make large changes based on heatmaps alone.

While heatmaps are a great starting point for analyzing user behavior, they can’t tell you why users do what they do or track behavior across different pages. That’s why you should make large website changes only after confirming your analysis with other analytics methods, as we’ll explore later.

Click maps

Click maps show you where users click (on desktop) or tap (on mobile devices). For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook click map for a web page.

The colored areas are where most clicks on the page occurred, with the red zones visualizing where most clicks were concentrated. You can also hover over any area and see the number of clicks in it.

Click maps are useful for:

• Understanding which call-to-action (CTA) elements users interact with. For instance, if you’re not sure whether visitors engage with your site’s “Free Trial” or “Book a demo” buttons, you can use a click map to quickly compare clicks on both buttons.
• Finding non-clickable elements that users are trying to click. These repeated clicks on non-interactive elements (called rage clicks) indicate confusion and frustration.

Move maps

Move maps show you where users move their cursors. Again, the bright red spots mark the areas with the most movement activity. 

Tracking mouse movements with these heatmaps can help you:

• Understand which parts of a landing page attract visitors’ attention. Studies have shown a correlation between mouse movements and eye gaze. That’s why many companies use mouse tracking as a cost-effective substitute to the more expensive eye tracking. 
• Find areas that distract or confuse visitors. If a move map shows frantic cursor activity in an area, it may be a sign that users are getting distracted or don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

Scroll maps

Scroll maps show what percentage of visitors reach each part of your page, as you can see below.

Scroll maps make it easier to determine if certain elements are placed correctly by:

• Showing you which part of a page most visitors see without scrolling (this is also called “above the fold”, borrowing a term from the newspaper industry). Since nearly all page visitors see the elements above the average fold, that’s the most valuable real estate on any given page. Make sure to put your essential value propositions, CTAs, and offers there.
• Showing you what percentage of visitors reach each part of a page. As you go further down a page, the number of visitors gradually decreases. Scroll maps show you exactly what percentage of visitors remains at each point, so you can decide where to place elements that don’t qualify for above the fold placement.

Now that you know how heatmaps work, let’s look at two examples of companies using them to solve real issues.

How Sewio improved their clickthrough rate by 276% with scroll maps and click maps

Sewio manufactures and sells real-time locating systems. The company’s marketing team wanted to learn more about how people interacted with their site’s homepage, so they set up Smartlook and started analyzing heatmaps.

Their scroll maps and clicks maps revealed two key issues:

• CTAs that were supposed to be above the fold actually appeared below the fold for many users.
• Almost no one clicked on the buttons that led to client success stories.

Armed with these insights, Sewio’s team was able to redesign the homepage in a way that aligned with the goals they had for their website. 

They moved their primary CTAs above the fold. They also updated the customer success stories section to make it more interesting and enticing for visitors.

Thanks to these changes, Sewio’s new homepage saw:

• A 276% increase in the clickthrough rate of the “Go to store” button.
• Over 3x more clicks on the links to client success stories.
• An increase in average time on page from 4:01 to 4:29.

How Hookle saved 2 weeks of development time with heatmap analysis

Hookle is a social media management app for Android and iOS. They’ve used Smartlook to improve their onboarding, provide better customer support, and verify their hypothesis faster.

Specifically, Hookle’s team relied on Smartlook’s heatmaps to learn how users interacted with the main element of their app — an interactive statistics chart. 

They wanted to understand how people interacted with the chart and find ways to add new elements to it. However, when they looked at the heatmap, they realized that people barely clicked on the chart.

This helped Hookle’s team save two weeks of development time they would’ve spent making the chart more interactive. As a result, they were able to focus their efforts on improving elements that were much more important to the user experience.

Heatmaps’ biggest limitations and how to overcome them

Despite their ease of use and fast insights, heatmaps have two serious limitations:

• Their information is usually obvious and non-actionable. The heatmap hotspots are often where you’d expect, so you don’t get much novel or actionable information. This makes it difficult to come up with ways to improve clickthrough rates, conversions, and other key metrics.
• They can’t track a user’s journey across your site or app. Heatmaps only show aggregate trends about a page or app screen. You can’t use them to analyze how users interact with elements that appear on multiple pages and you can’t put specific interactions, like button clicks or text inputs, in the context of the entire user journey.

That’s why in most cases, conclusions based on heatmaps shouldn’t be the only basis for making website or app changes. Instead, they should be treated as a starting point for understanding behavior and used in combination with the analytics tools we’ll discuss below.

Session recordings: Watch how users navigate your site or app from start to finish

Session recordings capture everything your users do while navigating your site or app — where they click, which pages they visit, which features they use, and so on.

You can use them to watch the journeys of individual users, instead of just focusing on aggregated information for a single page or app screen.

For example, check out the Smartlook session recording below:

The session replay video that takes up most of the screen shows how a user navigates an onboarding tutorial. Besides this ability to observe user behavior in detail, session recordings also capture valuable data about:

• The user’s device, location, and session duration (to the left of the video).
• Each event that was triggered during the session (under the video).

This makes session recordings a very versatile tool that can be used by lots of teams in various use cases. For example:

• Product teams can use them to analyze how users interact with their app and communicate their findings with others.
• Marketing teams can see which features users like and highlight them in their marketing campaigns.
• Customer support teams can see exactly how problems occur, without having to bother users for explanations.
• And much more.

To learn more about session recordings and their benefits, check out:

• Our guide to recording website visitors
• The top 8 session replay & visitor recording tools for fixing UX issues

Events: Track business-critical user actions

Events are user actions that can be tracked over time, like button clicks, text inputs, or page visits.

Event tracking is a crucial part of any web and mobile app analytics toolkit because it lets you:

• Quantify user behavior.
• Monitor crucial interactions, like clicks on your “Add to Cart”, “Book a Demo”, or “Pricing” buttons, successful purchases, and more.
• Understand how copy and design changes affect the occurrence of these business-critical interactions.

Smartlook offers different ways to track events, including selecting from a list or clicking directly on your site or app’s UI, as shown below. 

Smartlook also supports two additional use cases for event tracking: 

#1. Filtering session recordings.

In Smartlook, you can click the “Play” button next to each event to jump into all sessions where it was triggered. This functionality lets you see the full context behind certain events — what users did before and after performing them — to get a more nuanced view of the user journey.

#2. Finding rage clicks and JavaScript errors.

Smartlook automatically tracks rage clicks and JavaScript errors as events, so you can zero in on the sessions of users who experienced these issues. This is especially useful for developers struggling to understand how certain errors occurred.

Funnels: Analyze key user flows

Funnels are sequences of events users go through during multi-step flows, like onboarding tutorials, newsletter signups, or checkouts. 

Building and analyzing funnels shows you:

• How many users entered each flow.
• The flow’s overall conversion rate.
• The drop-offs between each step.

With Smartlook, you can build funnels by simply placing two or more events in the order your users follow. Since the user interaction data is already collected, the funnel visualization will appear instantly, like in the GIF below.

Smartlook also lets you combine funnel analysis with session recordings to see why users drop off. 

For example, the screenshot below shows an e-commerce checkout funnel with a 61.74% conversion rate:

This funnel consists of three events, which you can define in Smartlook without any coding:

• Event 1: Visitors click on the “Buy/upgrade package” button (you can select the button with our no-code event picker).
• Event 2: Visitors click on the “Pay Now” button (again, just use the event picker and select the “Pay Now” button).
• Event 3: Visitors land on the “Thank You” page (use the “Visited URL” standard event and enter the page URL).

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button under each step of the funnel, including the drop-offs. This takes you directly to the recordings of users who dropped off at a certain stage. As a result, you can instantly find session recordings that are guaranteed to show you a point of friction in your flows (as opposed to wasting hours sifting through irrelevant sessions).

In fact, AstroPay (one of our fintech clients) used a similar process to boost the conversion rate of one of their most important flows by 56%.

Try Smartlook’s heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels for free

You can see how Smartlook can benefit your business by booking a free live demo with our team.

Our tool can be used on all kinds of websites, including those built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify. Implementing Smartlook on a site is as easy as pasting a code snippet (directly or via Google Tag Manager). 

Smartlook also has SDKs for many mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines — including iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter. We have detailed documentation to guide you through the implementation — but if you get stuck or have any questions, our Support team is ready and waiting.

Lastly, Smartlook integrates with A/B testing platforms (like Optimizely and Firebase A/B Testing), analytics tools (like Mixpanel and Google Analytics), and other popular SaaS solutions (like Jira and Slack).

Try Smartlook’s heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels today with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post Heat mapping: How to use heat maps for web & mobile analytics appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

A misleading UX, friction points, and poor onboarding all contribute to low user activation rates.

On the bright side, product managers can locate and address all of the friction points that impair user activation in a timely manner. 

Throughout this guide, we’ll delve into 6 tactics that have been proven to boost user activation rates and drive revenue for SaaS products. Moreover, you’ll learn how to measure user activation and act on the data collected.

• What is user activation in SaaS?
• What are the consequences of a low activation rate?
• How do you measure user activation?
• A 6-step approach to boost user activation in SaaS
• Best tools for user activation

Smartlook records user actions and is equipped with session replays to help you unlock opportunities for improvement. Request a free demo or try Smartlook with a full-featured, 30-day trial: no credit card required.

What is user activation in SaaS?

User activation in SaaS refers to the pivotal moment when a new user successfully experiences the core value of your product for the first time. In other words, an activated user is someone who has realized the benefits of your software and, as a result, is more likely to continue using it and become a paying customer.

For example, regarding a project management SaaS, an activated user could refer to someone who has created their first project, added team members, or assigned tasks, thereby experiencing the software’s collaborative capabilities.

What are the consequences of low activation?

Reading about the positive side of measuring user activation is always inspiring. But let’s flip the coin and explore 5 major repercussions of low user activation. This better reflects the reality of product development.

• High churn rate. Users who fail to activate are more likely to abandon your product
• Low customer satisfaction rate. Unsatisfied users who struggle to realize your product’s value will have a lower satisfaction rate, negatively impacting brand reputation and referrals
• Negative marketing ROI. When customers stop using your product before reaching activation milestones, the resources spent acquiring them go to waste
• Decreased customer lifetime value (CLV). Users who don’t fully engage with your product are less likely to convert into paying customers or upgrade to higher-tier plans. This directly affects your revenue stream
• Increased customer acquisition costs (CAC). You’ll need to invest more to acquire new customers to compensate for the ones you’ve lost. As a result, you’ll drive up your customer acquisition costs and potentially strain your budget

“At pgMustard, we measure user activation as a proxy for the user experience. We track how many folks successfully review at least 1, 2, and 5 query plans and review these numbers by weekly cohorts. 

A while back, the number of people submitting at least one query plan (within a week) was as low as 50%. We tried several iterations relating to the improvement of our docs, the error messages we gave, and our welcome emails… but still only managed to get user activation up to about 55%. 

Eventually, after watching new users try and fail multiple times, we bit the bullet and started improving the product to accept badly formatted inputs (the primary cause of issues). This almost instantly took us to around 75%, a number we’ve not managed to improve much since!”

Michael Christofides

Founder at pgMustard

In other words, low activation rates can spell disaster for your SaaS business, resulting in a domino effect of negative consequences. At Smartlook, it’s our mission to equip you with the best tools on the market for maximising user activation.

But first, you’ll need to understand your current user activation rate.

What is the user activation rate?

The user activation rate is a metric that quantifies the percentage of activated users after signing up. It’s a crucial indicator of how well your product delivers value to new users and helps identify areas for improvement in the onboarding process and overall user experience.

What is the formula for calculating the user activation rate?

User Activation Rate = (The number of activated users / Total signups) x 100

For example, if 1,000 users sign up for your SaaS product in a given month, and 300 of them become activated users, your user activation rate is:

(300 Activated Users / 1,000 Total Users) x 100 = 30%

This means that 30% of your users became activated (e.g., experienced the first real value).

What is a good user activation rate? 

For SaaS companies, the average activation rate is 36% (the median is 30%).

How do you measure user activation?

Knowing the formula is not enough. If you find a ratio of new sign-ups, including those who reached the activation point, then you know you’re looking at high-level data. Dig deep to understand how different customer segments adopt your product to make meaningful adjustments.

Step 1. Define activation points

Activation points are specific milestones or actions that indicate a user is deriving value from your product during the onboarding process. These events vary depending on the nature of your SaaS product and its core features. Examples include:

• Collaboration tools: Creating a workspace or team, inviting team members, and engaging in conversation
• CRM software: Importing customer data, creating a sales pipeline, and logging a deal or opportunity
• Social media management: Connecting social media accounts and scheduling the first post

Step 2. Track in-app events and segment customers 

Once you have laid out your activation points, the next step is to set up a product analytical platform to monitor these events. This is important for several reasons:

• By monitoring in-app events, you can get a better understanding of user behavior and identify friction points in the UX and the onboarding process, including what’s causing users to drop-off 
• Segmenting customers enables you to analyze activation rates across different user groups, helping you tailor your strategies to meet the unique needs of each segment

Use Smartlook to assign custom in-app events and analyze the activation rate across segments. Here’s how to do it.

Define key moments in your user onboarding flow and set them as activation events. A set of key moments in the onboarding process could consist of users starting and finishing a product tour (including if they skipped any steps). Smartlook users can create funnels based on specific events around product tours such as start_ProductTour, ProductTour_step1, ProductTour_stepN, and end_ProductTour to quickly monitor drop-off rates between steps (i.e., those that haven’t completed the product tour). 

Once you’ve collected enough data, you can delve into user segmentation to find anomalies in particular segments. Smartlook offers event breakdowns by technologies, location, and event properties. 

Other important user activation metrics to track

In this section, we’ll explore 6 more user activation metrics so you can get a better picture of user behavior to optimize your app. To make things easy, we’ve grouped the following metrics into short-term and long-term objectives.

Short-term user activation objectives

Short-term user activation objectives focus on the initial stages of user engagement within a product. These metrics help evaluate the effectiveness of the onboarding process, the speed at which users realize the value of your product, and the level of early user activity. 

By optimizing short-term objectives, you can quickly address friction points, enhance the user experience, and increase user activation rates.

Onboarding completion rate

This metric measures the percentage of users who complete the entire onboarding process. It helps you identify areas for improvement in the onboarding flow, contributing to higher user activation.

For instance, Vertigo Games keeps a close eye on the onboarding process to quickly locate bugs and other issues that prevent new users from completing the onboarding process. The company relies on Smartlook’s screen recordings and funnel analytics to spot drop-offs, including the reasons behind them. These features allow Vertigo Games to save 10-12 hours of development time.

Onboarding Completion Rate = (The number of users completing onboarding / Total signups) x 100

Time-to-value (TTV)

TTV refers to how much time it takes for a new user to realize your product’s core value. By reducing TTV, you can accelerate user activation and improve user satisfaction.

TTV = Time between user signup and reaching activation milestone.

“At Practice, we measure activation to understand two important points:

1. How quickly a user gets to value

2. If and where there are roadblocks that prevent them from using the product

Within our product, we track the time to value in certain product loops. For example, how long it takes a customer to invite a client or set up their profile. We use tools to easily watch session replays and create funnels to track objectives toward a certain product loop.”

Jeremy Ross

Growth Lead at Practice

Active users

This metric refers to the number of users who actively engage with your product within a specific time frame. Monitoring active users can help you gauge the overall effectiveness of the user activation process.

Active Users = The number of users engaging with an app over a specific time period.

Long-term user activation objectives

Long-term user activation objectives contribute to sustained user engagement and the broader adoption of your product’s features over time. Use insights to inform your product roadmap and refine marketing strategies to encourage ongoing user activation, improve retention, and maximize CLV.

Feature adoption rate 

This is the percentage of users who adopt new product features. Typically, it’s measured across all users to understand whether a feature rollout is successful. But this metric can also point out problems in the onboarding process when measured across users who reach the “aha” moment or activation milestones. 

For example, you can tell if some features are being abandoned by the signup ratio. To drive feature discovery, consider adding some additional steps to your product walkthrough.

Feature Adoption Rate = (The number of users adopting a feature / total number of users (or within a specific user segment)) x 100

StoragePug collects feature adoption insights with Smartlook’s funnel analytics and session replays. These insights validate the feature adoption rate and tell you if a new feature is stable and ready to be promoted to the entire user database.

Product adoption rate

This refers to the percentage of customers who regularly use your product’s core features. Monitoring this metric can help you identify trends and opportunities to improve user activation over time.

Product Adoption Rate = (The number of new active users / Total signups) x 100

User churn rate

This represents the percentage of users who drop off (stop using) your product within a specific time period. To calculate this, you can measure the overall churn rate or examine segments to locate specific friction points.

User Churn Rate = (The number of churned users / Total users at the beginning of a time period) x 100

Analyze your key metrics often to refine and improve user activation tactics. With that, let’s explore 6 proven user activation techniques.

A 6-step approach to boost user activation in SaaS

Ready to drive user activation rates through the roof? Let’s explore six powerful tactics, complete with real-life examples. We recommend employing them one-by-one for maximum results.

1. Use in-app and website heatmaps to identify friction points

The first step toward increasing user activation is to pair in-app and website heatmaps to locate friction points at the beginning of the user journey. Heatmaps allow you to visualize user interactions, such as clicks, taps, hovers, and scrolls. Warm and cold zones show how users navigate your product and website, including where they encounter difficulties.

Smartlook’s in-app and website heatmaps help you uncover areas where users are struggling or dropping off. By analyzing this data, you can pinpoint issues such as confusing navigation, non-intuitive design elements, and poorly placed CTAs.

Case in point: Sewio incorporated Smartlook’s heatmaps to declutter its home page and increased its CTR by 276%.

“With the insights from Smartlook, we’ve achieved our goal of increasing the visibility of our e-shop and customer references. This has helped increase the overall business efficiency of our homepage.”

Petr Passinger

CMO at Sewio

Once you’ve taken care of all the technical issues, the next step is to spend some time creating an outstanding user onboarding experience.

2. Use welcome screens to personalize onboarding

Picture this: a new user stumbles upon your SaaS product and can’t wait to explore its features. But they’re greeted with a generic, one-size-fits-all onboarding experience — not the warmest of welcomes.

Welcome screens in the sign-up flow are your chance to roll out the red carpet for new users, making them feel valued and understood from the get-go. 

Ask users about their jobs to be done, their industry, and their roles. Use this information to customize their onboarding experience. With tailored content and guidance, users will become more engaged.

For example, Lemlist collects your goals and then explores whether you’ve worked with the tool before. If you’re a first-time user, you’ll be taken on an interactive product tour.

Another great example of a welcome screen is by Later. It’s equipped with a social media scheduling platform that studies new signups by asking them questions, including:

• Their field
• Social media marketing goals
• The tasks they want to resolve 
• How they heard about Later

Not only can you use this customer data to personalize the onboarding flow, but you can also use it to determine your top-performing marketing channels.

“In the sign-up flow, we provide users with a mini survey asking them why they joined Reply (JTBDs). Based on this info, we show them a different set of pop-ups that showcase the key values of a product tailored to their needs. With that, we try to push them to their “Aha” moment as quickly as possible.”

Eugene Nechvoloda

Product Manager at Reply.io

3. Implement interactive walkthroughs to guide users to the activation point

Interactive walkthroughs consist of step-by-step, in-app guidance that helps users explore your product’s features by completing actions themselves. They beat passive product tours when it comes to user involvement and shortening time to value.

The third step is to couple interactive walkthroughs with welcome screens to build a highly-personalized and cohesive user experience. Do this, and your user activation rates will soar.

For instance, Lemlist engages signups with cold email campaign creation guidance after they complete a microsurvey on the welcome screen.

Platforms like WhatFix or Appcues allow you to build interactive product walkthroughs and show how different customer segments adopt your product. 

4. Use NPS and CSAT surveys to uncover customer pain points

Dig deeper to find out what users like/dislike. Use NPS (Net Promoter Scores) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) surveys to get a feel of user sentiment and uncover areas for improvement.

NPS surveys measure the likelihood of users recommending your product to others, while CSAT surveys assess their overall satisfaction. By collecting feedback through these surveys during the onboarding stage, you can identify and troubleshoot the issues that are preventing users from becoming fully activated.

To implement in-app NPS and CSAT surveys, consider using a tool like Survicate, which offers an easy way to trigger surveys based on specific events and user actions. To capture the most valuable insights, time your surveys strategically. For example, you may wish to trigger an NPS survey after a user has completed an activation milestone or launch a CSAT survey after they’ve interacted with a specific feature.

“Use session recordings to see what a user did prior to/after submitting a satisfaction survey (to better learn what made them happy/unhappy). This can be done in connection with our Survicate integration.”

Renata Ekine

Head of Demand Generation at Smartlook

5. Watch session recordings to understand how users interact with your app

Imagine being able to see your product through your users’ eyes, witnessing firsthand how they navigate your app and where they stumble. With Smartlook’s advanced session recordings, you can do just that.

We recently released a free tool designed to help users find and fix their CRM data challenges. As part of the process of building the app, we had a “soft launch” followed by extensive testing with both live and recorded sessions. 

By watching recordings, we found that users struggled to understand their results in CRM Health Grader. Users were presented with a detailed report of their sales data, but without someone on the call to walk them through the results, they were lost. 

The fix? Pulling out the most important bits and presenting them right at the top. We made the change, tested it again, and our users reported a much better experience.

With such analytics, we exposed user concerns early on and were able to course-correct, leading to greatly improved conversion rates. As a byproduct, we were also able to open the tool up to a wider audience.

Sam Hillestad

Senior Product Marketing Manager at SetSail

Session recordings capture every click, swipe, and scroll, offering a detailed, real-time view of how users interact with your app. By watching these recordings, product managers can gain invaluable insights into user behavior and uncover pain points and usability issues.

You can also filter session recordings by event occurrence, location, duration, and technology and skip idle time.

Here are some of the insights you can glean from session recordings:

• Identify confusing UI elements
• Analyze the onboarding flow
• Observe feature adoption
• Discover user preferences

The StoragePug Product team uses session replays to see how customers adopt new features and locate friction points and unexpected user paths. They also utilize session recordings to analyze and improve product UI.

6. Re-engage inactive users with email marketing

Even with the best onboarding experience, some users might still slip through the cracks and become inactive. With email marketing, you can re-engage these dormant users and reignite their interest in your product.

Types of content you may wish to send include: 

• Product updates
• “We miss you!” emails
• Success stories
• Incentives
• Educational content

Here’s what a re-engaging email by WordTune looks like:

Best tools for user activation

To spot drop-offs and see how users behave within your app and website, product managers use a range of product analytics tools. Below, you’ll see the 3 best tools on the market for collecting quantitative and qualitative data and for performing an in-depth user behavior analysis.

1. Smartlook

Smartlook combines qualitative and quantitative analytics about user behavior at different stages throughout the customer journey. The following features are of utmost importance for optimizing user activation rates:

• Use session recordings to see why users don’t activate, including why they leave negative NPS scores
• Heatmaps will help you visualize and quantify UX issues across your app and website
• Incorporate funnel analytics to break down the user activation stage and identify which steps cause friction
• Get the numbers regarding how many users become activated over a given period with the events feature

Book a personal demo and start your free 30-day trial: no credit card required.

2. Survicate

Survicate is a powerful tool for building in-app microsurveys and collecting quantitative and qualitative user feedback. Trigger surveys by event occurrence, hovers, clicks, time period, etc. Create follow-up questions to get a sense of why users leave positive and negative scores.

3. Appcues

Appcues includes tools for driving product adoption and user activation. With it, you can create interactive onboarding flows, announce new features with modals, and deliver contextual help with tooltips — all of which are code-free.

Drive user activation rates with Smartlook

In a nutshell, user activation can make-or-break your SaaS product’s success. With Smartlook’s qualitative and quantitative app analytics, you can effortlessly measure, monitor, and optimize your user activation strategies for both short-term and long-term success. 

Don’t let low user activation rates hinder your growth – equip yourself with the right tools and tactics from this guide to create an engaging, user-centric experience that drives product growth. 

Schedule a Smartlook demo and start your free 30-day trial today!

Jenny Romanchuk

Jenny is a freelance writer with 6+ years of experience in product marketing & sales for B2B SaaS. She writes for HubSpot, Smatlook, MarTeach, Weflow, and more. In her spare time, Jenny enjoys hiking and reading The Witcher Saga.

The post The ultimate guide to user activation in SaaS, including how to improve it [+6 Tactics] appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

GA is a web analytics software for uncovering how visitors get to your site, tracking which pages they visit, and analyzing aggregate metrics like bounce rate and time on page.

Mixpanel is a specialized product analytics tool for tracking in-app behaviors, segmenting users, and monitoring metrics like retention, engagement, lifetime value, and churn. These advanced product analytics capabilities are the reason why many teams decide to pay for Mixpanel, instead of just using GA for free.

Due to their differences, Mixpanel and GA are often used as complementary tools, with the former focusing on product analytics and the latter on website analytics.

In this guide, we’ll explore each tool’s setup, workflow, and unique capabilities, as well as the biggest differences between them, so you have a good understanding of their use cases. 

We’ll also discuss how Smartlook — our product analytics and visual user insights platform — can help you overcome Mixpanel and Google Analytics (GA) biggest limitations by combining quantitative data with qualitative insights.

Before getting into the details, here’s a short overview of each tool:

• Mixpanel is a quantitative analytics tool for product teams looking to track how users interact with their app. Mixpanel is great for analyzing key product metrics — like feature usage, engagement, and retention — creating user segments, and monitoring how they use a product. Its setup process provides granular control over every user action you track, but it’s also much more difficult, time-consuming, and reliant on developer assistance than GA or Smartlook.
  
  
• Google Analytics is a quantitative analytics tool primarily used by marketers looking to analyze their campaigns and improve their websites’ conversions. GA can show you which sources drive traffic to your site, how many visits each page gets, and how users navigate important flows, as well as give you key stats and metrics about your visitors. Its setup is easier than Mixpanel’s, although it also requires developer assistance for tracking some user actions.
  
  
• Smartlook is our behavioral analytics platform that combines quantitative and qualitative capabilities and can be used by many teams in an organization. You can use Smartlook to analyze user behavior on your website, as well as on your web app or native mobile app. Its session recordings and heatmaps give you a more intuitive, visual way to analyze user behavior, compared to Mixpanel and GA. Smartlook automatically records every user session in your site or app with a single code snippet, making its setup process incredibly easy.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive into more detail about the differences between Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and Smartlook.

Here’s everything we’ll discuss below:

• Mixpanel vs Google Analytics vs Smartlook: Setup, workflow & unique capabilities
• Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and Smartlook: Overlapping features
• Mixpanel vs Google Analytics vs Smartlook: Pricing comparison

Smartlook is the only combined product analytics and visual user insights platform that won’t take your team forever to set up. Book a free demo with our team to learn how Smartlook can benefit your business or try it yourself with a full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. 

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics vs Smartlook: Setup, workflow & unique capabilities 

In this section, we’ll give you a detailed overview of how each tool works, how you can set up it, and what sets it apart from the other two.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that brings together lots of useful features for product teams, including:

• Interactive reports filled with quantitative metrics and KPIs, like daily active users, retention, conversion rates, and more.
  
  
• Segmentation capabilities that help you break down your user base by any property or event.
  
  
• Cohort analysis, which lets you create different user cohorts, visualize the differences in their behaviors and understand how those differences affect conversions, engagement, and retention.

This feature set makes Mixpanel ideal for product teams looking to analyze their user segments, understand how they interact with the product, and find ways to increase engagement and retention. 

While Mixpanel can also be used on websites, its main focus is on product analytics. If you’re only looking to analyze user behavior on your site, GA, Smartlook, or other website analytics tools are likely a better fit.

Mixpanel’s setup and workflow

Mixpanel is a traditional product analytics solution that relies on manual instrumentation. This means you’ll need to:

• Decide which events you want to track in Mixpanel.
• Have a developer to implement the tracking and test if it’s working.
• Wait for enough data to roll in and start analyzing user behavior.

This process gives you granular control over every event and property you collect. However, this comes at the price of being very difficult, time-consuming, and reliant on constant developer assistance (especially compared to Smartlook’s auto-tracking method). 

This is partly why some users mention the setup process and reliance on technical teams as the biggest downsides of working with Mixpanel.

After setup, Mixpanel starts you off with a few pre-made reports out of the box. These reports can be organized into dashboards, like the “Core Company KPIs” dashboard in the screenshot below.

You can create new dashboards and fill them with different metrics and reports, like:

• The Insights Report for analyzing events, cohorts, and user profiles and displaying the data in various chart types (line, bar, pie, etc.).

• The Funnels Report for analyzing how users go through a series of events and where they drop off.

• The Retention Report for analyzing user engagement over a period of time.
  
  
• The Flows Report for identifying the most frequently taken paths to or from any event.

Mixpanel’s biggest differentiators

Mixpanel’s biggest advantages over GA and Smartlook are its versatile and detailed product analytics reports. For example, here are three reports that only Mixpanel offers:

• The Impact Report, which lets you determine the impact of new features by comparing user behavior before and after their release. 
  
  
• The Experiments Report, which analyzes how A/B tests affect key product metrics (although you still need a separate A/B testing tool to actually run experiments).
  
  
• The Signal Report, which finds correlations between different user actions and helps you get a better understanding of the behaviors that drive conversions.

These reports can be very useful for teams looking to guide their decisions with reliable product usage data. However, since they’re more advanced, all three reports are not included in Mixpanel’s free plan; the Impact report is available on the cheaper Pro plan, while the Experiments and Signal reports are only available for enterprise customers.

Lastly, Mixpanel has a unique retroactive enrichment feature for adding historical events to new business data. This can be useful if you forget to set up tracking or just need additional data later on in your analysis.

Google Analytics

GA is the most widely-used web analytics software. As part of Google’s ecosystem, GA was built to help marketers and website owners track attribution — i.e., which campaigns and sources drive traffic to their site. 

While this remains GA’s primary use case, it also provides several useful metrics about:

• Your website’s visitors — their countries, devices, demographics, etc.
• Which pages users visit.
• How long they stay on those pages.
• How frequently they trigger certain events, and more.

This feature set makes GA a common choice for both beginner and advanced marketers looking to analyze their campaigns, understand the type of traffic they bring to the site, and monitor their most important pages. 

GA can also be used on web and mobile apps, but most organizations use it for their website in addition to a separate mobile app analytics tool.

Google Analytics’ setup and workflow

GA’s setup is more straightforward than Mixpanel’s. You just need to create an Analytics account and add a code snippet to your site. 

This can be done via code changes, through Google Tag Manager, or with various extensions and plug-ins (for CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, and Wix). While simpler, the setup should still be handled by a developer familiar with GA’s documentation.

After the setup, your GA dashboards and report will start getting populated. For example, you’ll automatically get real-time data about pageviews, traffic sources, user countries and devices, and much more.

From here, you can change your GA setup by tracking custom events (outside of the automatically tracked ones) and customizing your reports with data that’s relevant to your organization.

You can also click on “Explore” to create custom charts, tables, funnel reports, path explorations, and more.

Google Analytics’ biggest differentiators

GA’s biggest advantage has always been the fact that it’s free. No other analytics tool provides quite as many quantitative analytics capabilities for free.

Another benefit is that GA can also be easily linked with Google Ads and all other tools in Google’s ecosystem. This is a big plus for marketers looking to analyze the results of their campaigns (both paid and organic) in one place.

Smartlook

Smartlook is our combined product analytics and visual user insights platform that brings together four key features:

• Session recordings: Session recordings (or session replay) show you how users navigate your website or app — from the moment they open it to the moment they close it. This makes them a versatile tool that can help you analyze user behavior, provide customer support, debug, make product insights accessible to everyone in your organization, and more.

• Events: Like Mixpanel and GA, Smartlook can also track specific user interactions as events. However, Smartlook automatically indexes every user interaction in your site or app and lets you track events without coding. This removes the most tedious parts of the event tracking process.

• Funnels: Funnels let you analyze important user flows, like onboarding tutorials and checkouts. While Mixpanel and GA both have funnel analysis features, Smartlook also lets you watch the sessions of users who dropped off at a specific stage, so you can see points of friction that are hurting your conversions.

Heatmaps: Heatmaps give you a high-level look at how users typically navigate a page or app screen. Smartlook offers three types of heatmaps — click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (middle), and scroll maps (right). Again, this is something you can’t get with GA or Mixpanel.

Smartlook’s setup and workflow

Smartlook’s setup is super simple — you just need to install one code snippet and our platform automatically starts capturing every user interaction in your product. 

Once the snippet has been added, you can find all sorts of useful data in your dashboard. For instance, the dashboard below shows a site’s top visited pages, users’ devices, browsers, countries, and much more.

You can add or remove any of these tiles, depending on what’s relevant to your business. For example, say you have a mobile game and you want to track how many daily active users (DAU) you have.

You can click on “Add new tile”, go to “Active Users”, choose “Daily” as the interval, and select the data range you want to analyze (seven, 30, or 60 days).

After setup, you can also start exploring Smartlook’s individual features by clicking on the small buttons on the far left. For example, clicking on the play icon will take you to all of your session recordings.

We have more detailed articles on how to use all of Smartlook’s features here:

• Our guide on tracking user activity on websites
• Our guide on setting up mobile app tracking to analyze user behavior

Smartlook’s biggest differentiators

Compared to Mixpanel and GA, Smartlook excels at combining quantitative data (i.e., stats and metrics) with qualitative insights from its session recordings and heatmaps.

This combination lets you track everything your users do, and more importantly, uncover why they do it — so you can improve your conversions, retention, and user experience. 

Additionally, Smartlook’s auto-indexing of all user interactions and no-code event tracking make the setup and maintenance of our platform simple.

Once the code snippet is added, marketers and other non-technical teams can track endless interactions and understand user behavior without needing constant help from developers.

Here are four benefits of Smartlook’s versatile feature set that you can’t get with GA or Mixpanel:

1. Watch exactly how users interact with your site or app. Again, Smartlook’s session recording feature lets you watch how users navigate your product. This is invaluable for marketers, UX professionals, and product teams looking to understand their users’ exact experience. You can also filter your session recordings based on various criteria like date, country, triggered events, funnel stages, and much more.
   
   
2. Track users’ journeys as they move across your site and app. With Smartlook, you don’t have to use separate tools to track users on your site and mobile app. Instead, you can monitor the entire user journey in one place using our cross-platform analytics feature. This gives you a complete, accurate view of the entire customer journey and helps you eliminate data silos by keeping all behavior data in one place.
   
   
3. Allow more teams to benefit from your analytics platform. A big downside to GA and Mixpanel raw stats and metrics is the fact that they require more data analytics skills to interpret. In contrast, anyone can watch a session recording and understand exactly what’s going on. This makes session recordings a powerful tool for many roles, including marketers looking to analyze user behavior, product managers looking to share their findings, support reps looking to quickly understand problems, and much more.
   
   
4. Give a qualitative upgrade to your Mixpanel or GA data. While Smartlook comes with lots of useful quantitative data, you don’t have to use it as a replacement for Mixpanel or GA. In fact, we’ve built integrations for Mixpanel and GA, so you can have the best of both worlds. As a result, Smartlook can enhance your analytics stack by giving access to relevant session recordings right from your Mixpanel or GA dashboard.

Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and Smartlook’s overlapping features

Despite their big differences, Mixpanel, GA, and Smartlook have three key overlapping features: segmentation, event tracking, and funnel analysis.

While these features work differently in each tool, they ultimately provide product and marketing teams with very similar insights. The main difference is how they’re set up, as we’ll discuss below.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of grouping users together based on shared properties between them — like their devices, countries, events they’ve performed, and so on.

This is a key functionality for marketing and product analytics, so Mixpanel, Google Analytics, and Smartlook all offer it.

Mixpanel lets you segment all of its reports and analysis by events and user properties. For example, the screenshot below shows an Insights report for monitoring newly created accounts, broken down by device and platform.

GA lets you create custom segments, while also giving you suggestions for some segments that may be useful for your analysis.

Smartlook’s segmentation works in a similar way to Mixpanel. You can break down each event you’re tracking by standard user properties — for example, country, device, and operating system, or a number of custom event properties (registered or unregistered users, type of subscription, product availability, and so on).

This is done by opening the event you want to break down, clicking on “Set breakdown” and choosing your criteria.

You can save any combination of events and properties as a user segment (e.g., new users from the UK with iOS devices who made an in-app purchase). Once saved, you can monitor this segment within your dashboard.

Finally, you can click on the “Play” button next to any segment to watch how users interact with your website or product.

Event tracking

As we said, events are individual user actions you can track over time. Like segmentation, event tracking is a must when analyzing user behavior, which is why you can find this capability in most product and web analytics tools.

Again, Mixpanel relies on manual event tracking. This means you need to decide which events you want to track and implement the tracking via code changes. The process is difficult and time-consuming but Mixpanel has detailed documentation for developers leading the implementation process.

For a long time, GA also relied mostly on manual event tracking. However, the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) made some improvements in this area by moving to an event-based model and tracking more events automatically. 

You can find your GA events by going to Reports → Engagement → Events.

For more details on this topic, check our guide on how to track events in GA.

Smartlook indexes all user interactions on your site or app and lets you track key events without coding, as we showed above. Additionally, you can track custom events via JavaScript to monitor pretty much all other user interactions.

Smartlook can also detect anomalies in the occurrence of certain events and alert you when they occur. 

For example, say you have an e-commerce store and are tracking clicks on the “Add to Cart” button as events. With Anomaly Alerts, you can quickly get notified when there’s a sudden drop in the occurrence of this event (e.g., due to a bug in your site’s code) and fix the issue before it affects too many users.

Funnel analysis

Funnels are sequences of steps (events) users take to achieve a goal on your site or app. For example, funnels can map out onboarding tutorials, checkout flows, or any other sequence that leads to users completing a goal.

Mixpanel’s funnels can be built by selecting different steps and placing them in the order you believe users follow.

The same goes for GA — just click on “Explore”, go to “Funnel exploration”, and start building your funnels.

In Smartlook, you can also create a funnel by placing two or more events in the order you believe your users follow. For example, the screenshot below shows a visualization of a 3-step checkout funnel, with a 61.74% overall conversion rate.

Besides being able to see where users drop off in this flow, you can also watch their session recordings to find out why. This capability is vital for finding and eliminating points of friction that hurt your conversions.

For example, AstroPay — a fintech SaaS company and Smartlook customer — used this capability to improve the conversion rate of one of its key flows by 56%.

The ability to combine funnel analysis with session recordings is a massive benefit over Mixpanel or GA’s quantitative data. Without being able to watch users who drop off from your funnels, it often takes months of testing to understand why drop-offs occur and improve your conversions.

Mixpanel vs Google Analytics vs Smartlook: Pricing comparison

Pricing is the last big differentiator between Mixpanel, GA, and Smartlook.

Before diving into the details, it’s worth noting that GA is essentially free for the vast majority of its users. There is a paid version called Google Analytics 360 but it’s only for enterprise businesses, so we won’t focus on it below. Instead, we’ll only compare Mixpanel and Smartlook’s pricing.

Mixpanel’s pricing

Mixpanel offers three plans:

1. Free, for up to 20 million monthly events. This plan doesn’t include access to Mixpanel’s biggest differentiators, like its Impact and Signal reports.
   
   
2. Growth, starting at $20/month. This plan is customizable depending on the number of events you want to track. For example, tracking one million monthly events would cost you $116/month if you pay monthly or $996/year if you pay annually.
   
   
3. Enterprise, starting at $1,667/month. This plan includes everything in Growth and also adds Signal reports, granular access and data controls, priority support, and other advanced features.

It’s also worth noting that Mixpanel upsells two features as add-ons — Data Pipelines (20% of base plan) and Group Analytics (40% of base plan). 

Data Pipelines allows teams to easily export information from Mixpanel to data warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake. Group Analytics lets product teams track behaviors and metrics like usage and retention at the account or company level.

Smartlook’s pricing

Unlike Mixpanel, Smartlook’s pricing is based on monthly user sessions, not tracked events. This means you don’t have to guess or calculate how many events you’ll need to track before building the best plan for you.

Smartlook offers three flexible plans for companies of all sizes — from startups to mid-sized and enterprise businesses.

1. Free, for websites and apps with up to 3,000 monthly sessions. This free version includes Smartlook’s four core features — session recordings, heatmaps, events, and funnels — and doesn’t have a time constraint.
   
   
2. Pro, starting at $55/month for 5,000 monthly sessions. Besides the higher session limit, this plan offers a longer data history, more events, funnels, and heatmaps, and additional integrations with tools like Slack, Jira, and Zendesk. You can also build a custom Pro plan by changing the number of monthly sessions yourself.
   
   
3. Enterprise, which is fully tailored to your needs. This plan is for websites and apps with over 50,000 monthly user sessions and is created by our team for each individual customer.

All Smartlook accounts start with a full-featured, 30-day free trial — no credit card required.

Make the most out of your analytics tech stack with Smartlook

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

If you’re already using GA or Mixpanel, integrating Smartlook can give you the necessary context to understand user behavior. 

Alternatively, many teams find that Smartlook provides all the quantitative analytics capabilities they need. At the same time, the qualitative insights from session recordings and heatmaps empower more of their team members to understand users’ behavior.

If you want a more in-depth presentation of Smartlook that’s tailored to your business (without having your team set it up), schedule a live demo with our team.

To give Smartlook a go yourself, sign up for a full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required.

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post Mixpanel vs Google Analytics: Features, use cases & limitations appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

They have a few big similarities in their workflows and features:

• They’re simple to implement and use. You can quickly set up all three tools by installing one code snippet on your site. After that, you can immediately start collecting user behavior data.
  
  
• They can show you exactly how visitors navigate your site. All three tools use session recordings (sometimes called user recordings) to capture everything visitors do on your site, from the moment they land on it, to the moment they close it. If you haven’t used session recordings before, check out our guide on how to record website visitors.
  
  
• They allow you to analyze the typical user experience on a page with heatmaps. Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Smartlook all support the most important types of heatmaps — click maps (showing where users click), scroll maps (showing how far visitors scroll), and move maps (showing where visitors move their mouse). If you haven’t used heatmaps before, check out our article on the 9 best heatmap software tools.
  
  
• They automatically detect rage clicks and JavaScript errors. This capability helps you find bugs and elements that frustrate visitors and hurt your site’s usability and conversions.

Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Smartlook all do a great job of delivering these fundamental website analytics capabilities. 

If you’re only looking for ease of use, high-level traffic metrics (like bounce rate), and basic web analytics features, choosing between the three tools is a matter of price and personal preference.

However, many marketers, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts, and product professionals are finding that these features alone don’t provide the insights they need to understand users and improve conversions.

This is where the differences between Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Smartlook are so critical since each tool has its own advanced features and differentiators. 

In this article, we’ll go over how Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Smartlook stack up against each other and discuss each tool’s use cases. We’ll also compare their pricing plans and free offerings.

Before we dive into the details, here’s a quick overview of the most important points.

Key features and use cases:

• Crazy Egg offers heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, traffic analysis, error tracking, and surveys. This feature set is mostly focused on qualitative analytics, making it a good choice for marketers and CRO experts looking to test copy and design changes on specific website pages.
  
  
• Hotjar offers heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, feedback widgets, and user interviews. Like Crazy Egg, Hotjar is also mostly focused on qualitative analytics. However, its features are better suited for marketers, user experience (UX) professionals, and product teams looking to understand their audience and improve their experience.
  
  
• Smartlook combines heatmaps,session recordings, events, funnels, crash reports, and behavior flows. This suite of quantitative and qualitative analytics capabilities lets companies track everything users do while understanding why they do it. Smartlook is also available for mobile apps, whereas Crazy Egg and Hotjar aren’t. This versatility makes Smartlook a great choice for a wider variety of teams and use cases, including marketers trying to improve conversions, product managers wanting to analyze product usage, UX researchers looking to see how users interact with an app, developers struggling to debug, and more.

Pricing:

• Crazy Egg offers four pricing plans, starting at $29/month. Its plans are based on the number of monthly pageviews and are not built to record all user sessions on your site automatically. All plans are billed annually and start with a 30-day free trial. There’s no free forever plan.
  
  
• Hotjar has different pricing plans, depending on the tools you want to use. Its heatmap and session recording tool starts at $39/month, the survey tool starts at $59/month, and the user interview tool starts at $90/month. All three have a free forever plan with limited sessions or survey responses.
  
  
• Smartlook has one customizable paid plan starting at $55/month. All Smartlook accounts start with a full-featured, 30-day free trial. There’s also a free forever plan that you can use without a credit card or time constraint.

Next, we’ll look at the differences and overlaps between the three tools in more detail.

Here’s everything we’ll cover below:

• Crazy Egg vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Each tool’s strengths and weaknesses
• Crazy Egg vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Pricing comparison

Smartlook captures every user interaction on your website or mobile app and helps you improve your conversion rate, revenue, and retention. Book a demo with our team to see how Smartlook can benefit your business or try it for free with our full-featured 30-day trial (no credit card required). 

Crazy Egg vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Each tool’s strengths and weaknesses 

In this section, we’ll discuss how each tool excels over the other two, so you get a better idea of their key differences and use cases.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a behavior analytics tool for websites that combines six main features:

1. Heatmaps
2. Session recordings
3. A/B testing
4. Traffic analysis
5. Error tracking
6. Surveys

This feature set is mostly suited toward marketers and CRO experts, as it allows them to analyze how users interact with specific web pages, test different copy and design variations, and gather feedback from them.

Unique capabilities: Native A/B Testing

Crazy Egg’s biggest advantage over Hotjar and Smartlook is its built-in A/B testing feature. 

This feature is easy to set up — you only need to install one code snippet, select which elements on the page you want to test, and add the copy and design ideas you’re trying to test. Then, you can see which variant brings in more conversions and continue to iterate by testing new ideas.

This is all done through a visual editor, so anyone can easily set up an A/B test without needing help from developers and other technical teams.

Source: Crazy Egg

It’s worth noting that while Crazy Egg’s A/B testing feature sets it apart from Hotjar and Smartlook, it’s not typically considered to be among the best A/B testing tools on the market. For more details, check out our article on the top 10 A/B testing tools for websites and mobile apps.

Weaknesses: Manual event tracking, session sampling, and a low number of native integrations

Crazy Egg’s biggest drawbacks are its manual event tracking process and session sampling approach.

Events are individual actions users take on your site, like button clicks or text inputs. Tracking them lets you quantify user behavior and filter your session recordings based on actions that took place in them (for example, if you want to watch sessions of users who made a purchase on your e-commerce store).

In order to track events with Crazy Egg, you need to write custom JavaScript code. As a result, you’ll need constant developer assistance to monitor even simple actions like button clicks.

Crazy Egg uses sampling when recording user sessions. This means it doesn’t capture all sessions on your site. Instead, it only records a percentage of them with the goal of giving you a good understanding of how people typically navigate certain pages.

However, sampling runs the risk of missing key insights. For example, say 10% of users on your checkout page experience an issue that prevents them from completing their purchase. If their sessions are not captured due to sampling, you won’t be able to see and fix the problem quickly.

These limitations make Crazy Egg a better choice for marketers and CRO experts who want to improve the conversion rates on a certain page, as opposed to analyzing their entire website traffic or tracking in-product behaviors.

Finally, Crazy Egg supports a very small number of integrations with third-party tools. 

At the time of this writing, Crazy Egg only integrates with 7 website builders and CMSs (like Wix, WordPress, and Magento), Google Tag Manager, and Segment. If you want to integrate it with the other tools you use, you’ll need an app like Zapier.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a session recording, heatmap, and user feedback solution that combines three different products:

• Observe, which includes features like session recordings and heatmaps.
  
• Ask, which includes surveys and feedback widgets.
  
• Engage, which is a tool for performing user interviews.

Compared to Crazy Egg, Hotjar is a more comprehensive solution that’s used by digital marketers, UX professionals, and product teams who want to survey their customers, analyze how they interact with a site or product, and improve their UX and conversions.

Unique capabilities: Comprehensive user feedback suite

Hotjar’s biggest strength is its suite of tools for direct user feedback. 

First, its Ask tool has features for running different types of surveys (open-ended questions, NPS, etc.). You can show these surveys on your site, send them via an external link, or place pop-up widgets on specific elements.

Source: Hotjar

Second, Hotjar Engage lets you perform user interviews, which can give you different types of insights into users’ behaviors and preferences. This capability was added after Hotjar’s recent acquisition of PingPong.

While Crazy Egg has some of these features (like surveys), it can’t match Hotjar’s versatility when it comes to collecting user feedback.

Weaknesses: Manual event tracking and a low number of native integrations

Similar to Crazy Egg, Hotjar also relies on manual event tracking. 

While it does offer more flexibility — you can track events in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or Segment and send them to Hotjar — the process still usually requires writing code and using Hotjar’s Events API. Again, this makes it difficult to monitor business-critical user interactions.

Additionally, Hotjar doesn’t have many native integrations. Outside of CMSs and tools like HubSpot and Segment, the vast majority of integrations have to be set up via Zapier or another third-party tool.

Smartlook 

Smartlook is a combined product analytics and visual user insights platform. Like Crazy Egg and Hotjar, Smartlook brings together key quantitative and qualitative analytics features like:

• Session recordings
• Heatmaps
• Events
• Conversion Funnels
• Crash Reports
• And more

Smartlook can also be used on websites and native mobile apps, unlike Hotjar and Crazy Egg, which aren’t available for mobile apps. 

This broad platform support, alongside Smartlook’s automatic event tracking, makes it a great choice for different roles inside an organization, including marketers, UX designers and researchers, product managers, customer support reps, and developers.

Further reading on this topic:

• 7 best UX analytics tools for user research
  
  
• How to find funnel drop-offs fast and stop losing conversions
  
  
• A practical guide to product analytics: Examples, tools, and more
  
  
• 6 Crashlytics alternatives for reproducing & fixing mobile app crashes

Unique capabilities: Automatic event tracking, cross-platform analytics, and extensive integrations

Unlike Crazy Egg and Hotjar, Smartlook automatically indexes every user interaction on your website, including pageviews, button clicks, and text inputs. 

As a result, you don’t need to write code or use a third-party tool like Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager to track events.

All you need to do is select which interactions appear in your dashboard as events — a process we call “defining an event”. 

For example, you can define events by simply clicking on your site’s UI (shown in the screenshot below) or by selecting from a list of pre-made standard events.

Tracking specific events lets marketers and product teams answer key questions like:

• Which navigation links do users click the most?
• How often do visitors click on the “Add to Cart” button?
• How many times was each call-to-action (CTA) on our landing page clicked during a marketing campaign?

Once you’ve started tracking events, you can click on the “Play” button under their names to filter all session recordings where they take place.

This lets you see what users did before and after triggering each event, so you understand the full context of their actions.

Besides automatic event tracking, Smartlook is also more versatile than Crazy Egg and Hotjar as it can help you analyze user behavior on:

• Websites and web apps, including those built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.
  
  
• Mobile apps built with popular native mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines, including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity, and more.

Additionally, Smartlook can track users as they move across web browsers and native mobile apps — a process called cross-platform analytics. This capability allows marketers and product teams who have a website and native mobile app to get an accurate view of the entire customer journey in one place.

Finally, Smartlook has integrations for over 50 widely-used SaaS tools and platforms like Slack, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, Optimizely, Sentry, Segment, and more. This lets different teams throughout an organization integrate Smartlook into their workflows and benefit from its insights.

Weaknesses: No native user feedback or A/B testing features

Compared to Hotjar and Crazy Egg, Smartlook lacks native user feedback and A/B testing features. 

We know these capabilities are important for marketers, product teams, and UX professionals, so we’ve built integrations with leaders in these categories including:

• Survicate (for user feedback)
• Optimizely (for experimentation and A/B testing)
• Firebase A/B Testing (for A/B testing on native mobile apps)
• And more

Crazy Egg vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Pricing comparison

Now that you know the main differences between Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Smartlook, let’s round out the comparison by looking at each tool’s free offerings and paid plans.

Crazy Egg’s Pricing

Crazy Egg offers four pre-made plans — Basic, Standard, Plus, and Pro.

1. The Basic Plan is $29/month for websites with up to 30,000 monthly pageviews.
   
   
2. The Standard Plan is $49/month for websites with up to 75,000 monthly pageviews.
   
   
3. The Plus Plan is $99/month for websites with up to 150,000 monthly pageviews.
   
   
4. The Pro Plan is $249/month for websites with up to 500,000 monthly pageviews.

All of these plans start with a 30-day free trial and come with Crazy Egg’s main features like session recordings, confetti heatmaps, A/B testing, and surveys. However, Crazy Egg doesn’t have a free version and doesn’t offer monthly billing, so all plans are billed annually.

Hotjar’s Pricing

Hotjar’s pricing is more complex than Crazy Egg and Smartlook, as it differs depending on the tools you want to use.

• The session recording and heatmap tool (Observe) starts at $39/month for websites with up to 100 daily user sessions.
  
  
• The survey and real-time feedback tool (Ask) start at $59/month for up to 250 monthly responses.
  
  
• The user interview tool (Engage), starts at $90/month for up to five monthly user interviews with one observer. At the time of this writing, Engage is still in beta, so its pricing may change upon the final release.

All three of these tools have a free plan that can be used without a time limit. You can also build custom plans for each tool by changing how many daily user sessions or monthly responses you want to capture.

Smartlook’s Pricing

Smartlook has a Free Plan, a customizable paid Pro Plan, and a fully tailored Enterprise plan for large businesses.

The Free Plan can be used without a credit card or time constraint. It records up to 3,000 monthly sessions on your website or mobile app and comes with Smartlook’s core features — heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels.

The Pro Plan starts at $55/month and captures 5,000 monthly user sessions. In addition to the extra sessions, this plan has more events, funnels, and heatmaps. It also lets you integrate with additional tools like Mixpanel, Zendesk, and Jira.

You can also customize the session limit to fit your needs. For example, the screenshot below shows how you can build a Pro Plan for 10,000 monthly sessions.

Finally, all Smartlook accounts start with a 30-day free trial that includes all premium features.

Boost the UX, conversions, and revenue of your website or mobile app with Smartlook

Smartlook captures everything your website visitors or mobile app users do with a single code snippet. Our platform combines the power of quantitative and qualitative analytics, so you can track what users do, uncover why they do it, and improve their experience.

To get a detailed presentation of how Smartlook can help your business (without having your dev team set it up), book a free demo with our team. We’ve found that customers who go through the demo have a 70% faster onboarding time and leave positive feedback 99% of the time. 

If you want to give Smartlook a go yourself, start a full-featured, 10-day trial (no credit card required).

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post Crazy Egg vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Key Differences & Pricing appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

While both can help you analyze user behavior on your website, they do so in very different ways. In fact, many organizations use them together to get a complete picture of their site’s performance.

In this article, we’re going to break down the differences between GA and Hotjar and discuss what insights you can get with each tool.

We’ll also explore situations where Smartlook — our combined product analytics and visual user insights platform — can be a great addition or alternative to both GA and Hotjar.

Before we dive into the details, let’s quickly cover the key differences between GA, Hotjar, and Smartlook:

• GA is a free quantitative analytics tool that provides detailed stats and metrics about your website’s traffic. GA’s reports are useful for understanding who your users are (their devices, countries, gender, etc.), which sources drove them to your site, and which pages they visit. However, due to the lack of qualitative data, GA can’t tell you why users do what they do or what issues they’re facing.
• Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool with a focus on qualitative analytics. Hotjar’s session recordings (also called session replay or visitor recordings), surveys, and feedback widgets let you watch the journeys of individual users and ask them questions. This makes Hotjar a popular complementary tool for teams looking to go beyond GA’s raw numbers. In fact, Hotjar usually must be used in combination with a traditional analytics tool like GA, due to its limited quantitative capabilities.
• Smartlook combines both quantitative and qualitative analytics so you can track what your visitors do and uncover why they do it. Smartlook gives you a high-level overview of your site’s traffic (users’ devices, countries, browsers, etc.), lets you monitor key user actions and flows, and helps you drill down into the journeys of individual visitors via session recordings. Smartlook is also available for websites and native mobile apps, while GA and Hotjar can only be used on websites.

In the next sections, we’ll explore GA, Hotjar, and Smartlook in more detail, so you can get a better idea of what you can do with each tool.

Smartlook captures every user interaction on your website or mobile app and lets you watch session recordings, define events, build funnels, create heatmaps, and much more. Try it for free with our full-featured 30-day trial (no credit card required) or book a demo with our team to see how Smartlook can benefit your business specifically. 

The differences in how Google Analytics and Hotjar work (& how Smartlook combines the best of both worlds)

GA and Hotjar have a similar setup — you create an account and install a JavaScript code snippet (with a few more miscellaneous steps in GA). After that, they start collecting data about your website’s visitors.

However, the types of data they gather are very different.

GA focuses on aggregate, anonymized, quantitative data about your site’s visitors. 

This data is ideal for understanding who your visitors are, how they got to your site, and which pages they visit. GA organizes some of these data points into dashboards and reports. However, you can also use GA’s customization capabilities to segment your reports, visualize data in different ways, build funnels, and much more.

Hotjar is primarily a qualitative analytics tool. 

Instead of providing detailed reports and tools for analyzing numerical data, Hotjar relies on session recordings (shown in the screenshot below), heatmaps, and surveys to gather qualitative data. This helps you get a more nuanced view of your customers’ experience compared to GA.

Now, Hotjar does collect some basic stats and metrics about websites, such as the most visited pages, bounce rates, and average session duration. However, these can’t match GA’s breadth and depth of quantitative capabilities. 

For example, Hotjar doesn’t have a funnel analysis feature, so you can’t use it to monitor how users navigate important flows such as checkouts or onboarding tutorials. These limitations often force teams to look for alternatives to Hotjar or use it only as a complementary tool in their analytics stack.

As you can see, GA and Hotjar are fundamentally different, which is why they’re often used together. GA provides information about who your visitors are and what they do, while Hotjar tries to capture the “why” behind their actions — why they bounce from certain pages, why they don’t convert, etc.

Due to their limitations, neither one alone can give you the full story behind your users’ experience. This is where Smartlook comes in.

Smartlook is our product analytics and visual user insights platform that combines four key quantitative and qualitative analytics features:

1. Session recordings. Similar to Hotjar, Smartlook captures every user session on your website or mobile app by default. You can watch how individual users navigate your site or app, which is invaluable for fixing bugs faster, uncovering why users do what they do, and much more.

For more information, refer to our guide: How to record website visitors: Practical tips, tools & examples

2. Events. Smartlook automatically indexes every user interaction, including pageviews, button clicks, and text inputs. This functionality lets you track key actions as events without coding or needing a third-party tool, as we’ll discuss in the next section. 

3. Funnels. Funnels allow you to analyze how users navigate important flows (like checkouts) and calculate conversion rates. Since Smartlook also has session recordings, you can zero in on the sessions of users who dropped off between specific steps and see what’s hurting your conversions. 

4. Heatmaps. Heatmaps show you an overview of a typical user’s behavior on a page or screen. Smartlook supports the three main types of heatmaps that Hotjar also offers — click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (middle), and scroll maps (right).

For a practical introduction to heatmaps, refer to our guide: How to read a heatmap and get actionable UX insights

In short, Smartlook combines quantitative and qualitative analytics capabilities, so you can:

• Track important stats and metrics, like your users’ devices, countries, the pages they visit, the actions they take on your site, the conversion rates for certain flows, and more.
• Automatically record the journeys of all individual users.
• Find out why they do what they do.

In the next sections, we’ll look at three use cases where Smartlook can collect crucial quantitative data (like GA), while also providing key qualitative insights (like Hotjar).

Use case #1: Track events without coding or using a third-party tool

Tracking specific actions (i.e., events) lets you quantify user behavior and answer important questions like:

• Which navigation links do users click the most?
• How often do visitors click on the “Add to Cart” button?
• How many times was each call-to-action (CTA) on the homepage clicked during a marketing campaign?

Hotjar and GA both have event tracking capabilities, but those come with a few issues:

• The event tracking setup in GA often requires programming skills or the use of an extra tool — Google Tag Manager (GTM) — that has its own setup and learning curve.
• With Hotjar, you either have to write custom JavaScript code to track events or send the events you’re already tracking in GA, GTM, or Segment. Again, this makes the process more time-consuming and reliant on developer assistance.

In contrast, Smartlook removes the most tedious parts of the event tracking setup by:

• Indexing user interactions automatically (via its always-on session recordings).
• Letting you track events retroactively without coding.

This means you don’t need to write any code or use a third-party tool like GTM. 

Instead, you only have to select which interactions appear in your dashboard as events — a process we call “defining an event”. For example, you can define events by simply clicking on your site’s UI, as shown in the screenshot below:

Because the interaction data is already collected, you can see the number of clicks just by hovering over each element.

You can also combine Smartlook’s event tracking with session recordings. 

For example, the screenshot below shows two click events. The little “Play” button under each one takes you straight to all sessions where it occurred.

This capability lets you watch the full context behind certain events, i.e., what users did before and after triggering them. 

Plus, it’s a much faster way to find relevant sessions than watching hours of random videos. Smartlook also starts the session replay video five seconds before the event takes place, so you don’t have to sit through the entire session.

Use case #2: Analyze how users navigate your most important flows and find out why they don’t convert

One of the most important uses for events is building funnels. Funnels are sequences of steps (i.e., events) users take to complete a goal, like:

• Buying a product.
• Signing up for your newsletter.
• Completing an onboarding tutorial, and so on.

Hotjar retired their Forms and Funnels feature back in 2020. This actually prompted StoragePug to switch to Smartlook.

“We resigned from Hotjar because they removed funnel analysis, and we couldn’t see where people were leaving the page. It was crucial for us to see the exact moment that the person is leaving and watch the session recording of it. Also, the heatmaps stopped appearing properly on our websites, the hot spots were not in the right places (i.e. next to the button rather than on the button).”

Ana Batista

Director of Design at StoragePug

GA still has a funnel exploration tool, but due to its lack of qualitative insights, you can only use it to see where users drop off, not why. This makes it very difficult to find and fix the issues that are hurting your conversions. 

For example, the conversion funnel from GA shown below tells you that 23% of the users who added an item to their cart completed their purchase.

If you wanted to see why the other 77% didn’t convert, you’d need another tool. You can use Hotjar to filter the recordings of all users who viewed a product or added an item to their cart. However, that still leaves you with lots of unnecessary recordings, because you can’t filter only the sessions of users who dropped off.

You can avoid this problem by combining Smartlook’s funnel analysis capabilities with its session recordings. 

First, you can build any funnel by simply placing events in the order you believe your users follow. For example, an e-commerce store may want to monitor the checkout process with a funnel, as shown in the screenshot below:

This three-step funnel can be built without any coding:

• Step (Event) 1: Users click on the button for buying a package. (You can select the button with our no-code event picker.)
• Step (Event) 2: They click on “Pay now” (Again, use the no-code event picker.)
• Step (Event) 3: They arrive on the “Thank you” page (Use the “Visited URL” standard event and enter the page URL.)

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button under each step, including the drop-offs. This lets you narrow down hundreds or thousands of sessions to a few guaranteed to show a point of friction in your checkout.

In fact, AstroPay — a fintech company and Smartlook customer — used this exact combination of features to improve conversions for one of their key flows by 56%.

Use case #3: Help different teams gather crucial behavioral insights 

Smartlook’s combination of session recordings and no-code event tracking opens tons of opportunities for different teams. 

For example:

• Marketing teams can analyze the effectiveness of copy and design changes without needing constant developer assistance. Let’s say your marketing team tries to boost conversions by changing a landing page’s above-the-fold copy and button placement. With Smartlook, they can set up an event to track each click on the CTA and understand how their changes affect user behavior. 
• User experience (UX) teams can filter session recordings based on a specific event and see what users do before and after triggering it. They can also watch the entire customer journey, from the moment users open your site or app to the moment they close it.
• Product teams can automatically collect all user interactions in the product with a single snippet, which makes the product analytics process much easier. They can also use session recordings to show UX issues and back up their suggestions for improving the product experience, instead of relying only on hard-to-understand dashboards with quantitative data. 
• Customer support teams can watch session recordings to easily understand problems reported by users. They can use our Identify API to locate sessions using an identifier, such as the user’s email or username. As a result, when an identified user reports a bug, the support team can see exactly what went wrong, without guessing or nagging the user for an explanation.
• Development teams can watch session recordings to see the exact situations in which bugs occurred, which drastically simplifies bug reproduction. Developers can often skip reproduction altogether by using the session recordings plus the data sent in the background (available by clicking on the “DevTools” button).

Google Analytics vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Each tool’s unique capabilities

GA, Hotjar, and Smartlook all bring unique capabilities to the table. In this section, we’re going to explore how each tool stands out from the other two and how that impacts the type of insights you can get.

Google Analytics: Free tool with advanced quantitative analytics features

It’s no secret that GA has an insurmountable advantage over most website analytics tools — it’s completely free. 

GA also automatically collects lots of useful data about your website’s visitors and organizes it into convenient reports. For example, the Acquisition report gives you an in-depth view of your visitors, with a focus on how they got to your site.

This information can be valuable for marketing teams when planning campaigns and analyzing results. The same goes for the Engagement, Monetization, and Retention reports — they can be super useful, provided you take the time to learn how they work.

Put simply, GA’s quantitative analytics capabilities are unmatched by both Hotjar and Smartlook (as well as many other analytics software tools). This, alongside its native integration with Google Ads and the fact that it’s free, makes GA the default option for website analytics. 

It’s also worth noting that in July 2023, all GA users will automatically be required to use a new version (GA4) as the older one (Universal Analytics) will stop processing data. However, this transition has so far been rocky. 

GA4’s new UI and features have further increased its already steep learning curve. Plus, there are complaints about GA4’s limited data visualization capabilities and missing reports. This has caused lots of organizations to look for an alternative to GA.

Hotjar: Surveys, feedback widgets, and user interviews

Compared to GA and Smartlook, Hotjar’s biggest advantage is in collecting user feedback. Hotjar actually has two separate products for this:

• Ask, which lets you create surveys with different question types or use real-time feedback widgets. For example, you can create a pop-up to ask users how they feel about the experience on a certain website page. Or, you can build more elaborate surveys with open-ended questions to gather more details.

• Engage, which helps you interview users and automates admin tasks like interview recruitment and scheduling. This tool, which is still in beta, became a part of Hotjar’s stack after their acquisition of PingPong — a user testing and interview platform.

Hotjar’s ability to gather feedback through surveys, widgets, or interviews can surface useful insights for product, marketing, and UX teams.

Smartlook: A combination of quantitative analytics and qualitative insights, extensive integrations, and mobile app compatibility

With Smartlook, you’re not choosing between quantitative and qualitative analytics. Instead, you get both in one convenient place, so you can:

• Save time and effort from constantly switching between different tools.
• Track specific user actions and build event-based funnels without coding.
• Monitor aggregate stats and metrics or zero in on the sessions of individual users. For example, say you build a funnel to monitor your checkout process and notice that its conversion rate drops significantly in one day. You can quickly jump into the sessions of users who dropped off during that day to see the reason (e.g., a broken checkout button or another technical issue).

If you’re curious, you can learn more about Smartlook’s key features in these resources:

• Our guide to tracking user activity on websites.
• Our article on implementing mobile app tracking and analyzing user behavior.

Smartlook can also be used on websites and native mobile apps, unlike GA and Hotjar, which can’t be used on mobile apps. 

Our platform is currently compatible with Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, and Unity apps. We even support cross-platform analytics — the process of tracking the behavior of users as they move between website browsers and native mobile apps.

Lastly, Smartlook’s extensive integrations let you easily incorporate it into your workflow. Here are three of our most popular integrations for digital marketers, product managers, and UX professionals:

1. Google Analytics: GA is a powerful and free tool, so we’re not trying to discourage anyone from using it. In fact, this integration helps you take full advantage of both GA and Smartlook’s strengths. You can use GA to analyze your website’s traffic, then play the relevant Smartlook session recordings right from your GA dashboard.
2. Survicate: Survicate is a user feedback product, similar to Hotjar’s Ask tool, but with more versatile capabilities. With this integration, you can jump straight into the Smartlook session recordings of users who gave a specific answer to a survey question. For example, you can watch the sessions of all users who answered “No” to a question like “Was your checkout experience good?” to see what went wrong.
3. Optimizely: Optimizely is a powerful experimentation platform. By integrating Optimizely with Smartlook, you can watch how users interact with each variant you’re testing. As we explained in our article on the top 10 A/B testing tools, this is crucial for validating the accuracy of your tests.

Google Analytics vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Pricing comparison

As we said, GA is a free tool. However, there’s an enterprise version that costs $150,000/year for Universal Analytics (the old GA) and around $50,000 for GA4 (the new GA). You can read more about this enterprise analytics platform and its pricing in this article.

This premium version is only for enterprises and the vast majority of GA users rely on the free version instead. That’s why we’ll focus our pricing comparison only on Hotjar and Smartlook.

Hotjar’s pricing 

Hotjar offers different pricing plans, depending on the tools you want to use.

• Observe, the session recording and heatmap tool, starts at $39/month for websites with up to 100 daily user sessions (or around 3,000 sessions/month).
• Ask, the survey and real-time feedback tool, starts at $59/month for up to 250 monthly responses.
• Engage, the user interview tool, starts at $90/month for up to five monthly user interviews with one observer. Again, note that this tool is still in beta, so its features and pricing may change.

Each of these tools has a free plan that you can use without a time limit. For example, the Observe product’s free plan lets you capture up to 35 daily user sessions (or around 1,000 sessions/month). 

Additionally, you can build a custom plan, depending on how many daily sessions (for Observe) or monthly responses (for Ask) you need.

Smartlook’s pricing 

Smartlook takes a simpler approach to pricing than Hotjar, with a free plan, one preset paid plan, and an option to build a fully tailored enterprise plan.

The Free Plan (available without a time limit or credit card) captures up to 3,000 monthly sessions on your website or mobile app. It comes with all of Smartlook’s core features — heatmaps, session recordings, events, and funnels — and supports integrations with tools like GA, Slack, and Salesforce.

The Pro Plan starts at $55/month and captures 5,000 monthly user sessions. You can also customize it to your needs by selecting a different session limit.

Besides recording more sessions, this plan offers additional heatmaps, events, funnels, more integrations with tools like Mixpanel and Jira, and advanced features like our DevTools and Session Vault. 

Improve your website or mobile app’s UX, conversions, and revenue with Smartlook

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

If you already use Google Analytics, you can easily integrate Smartlook and get the context needed to understand your users’ behavior. 

Many teams also find that Smartlook comes with the quantitative analytics features they were missing in Hotjar, while the session recordings and heatmaps provide the qualitative insights that GA lacks.

If you want to see how Smartlook can benefit your business, schedule a 1-on-1 demo with our team. We’ll give you a detailed presentation of our platform that’s tailored to your use cases and business needs.

Lastly, you can try Smartlook yourself with a free full-featured 30-day trial (no credit card required). 

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post Google Analytics vs Hotjar vs Smartlook: Which one do you need? appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

The goal of this process is to get a clear, detailed view of your users’ actual experience, so you can improve your app’s UX, retention, and revenue by:

• Boosting user engagement.
• Finding and removing points of friction.
• Optimizing each part of the user journey.

However, achieving this goal requires more than just tracking metrics like active users, retention, or churn. 

While these metrics do a good job of indicating your app’s performance at a high level, the app experience analytics process is about diving deeper into individual user journeys and gathering subjective insights about users’ wants, needs, and pain points. This process requires the collection of a lot more (and different types of) usage data.

This article will guide you through everything you need to know about app experience analytics, including the features and capabilities you need to collect and analyze usage data. 

Here’s what we’ll cover below:

• How does app experience analytics work?
• 5 essential features of an app experience analytics tool

1. Session recordings: Watch how users interact with your app
2. Heatmaps: See the typical user behavior on an app screen
3. Events: Monitor business-critical user actions
4. Funnels: Analyze how users navigate key flows
5. Crash reports: Understand when and why app crashes occur

Smartlook can help you analyze and improve your app’s UX, conversions, retention, and revenue. Book a free demo with our team to see how Smartlook can benefit your business or try it yourself with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

How does app experience analytics work?

App experience analytics (sometimes called digital experience analytics) is a multi-step process that relies on accurate product usage data. This data shows you how end users interact with your app — where they click, which features they use, how they navigate the onboarding flow, and so on.

The more of this data you collect, the better you can understand your users’ experience (provided you know how to analyze it). 

However, the volume of data isn’t the only relevant factor. You also need to collect two different types of data to get an accurate representation of users’ journeys and experiences:

1. Quantitative data, which is a numerical measurement of what’s happening in your app. You can use it to quantify user behavior and answer questions like:

• How often do users from this segment log into the app?
• What’s the conversion rate for our checkout?
• How many subscriptions did we sell in Q3?

This data is usually displayed in charts, reports, and dashboards, like the Smartlook dashboard shown below:

2. Qualitative data, which is rich in context and detail about the behaviors, pain points, and needs of individual users. 

This makes it ideal for understanding why users do what they do, e.g., why they purchased a specific product or why they don’t convert after adding an item to their cart. 

Qualitative data is usually collected via session recordings (shown below) and surveys.

Today, there are tons of product analytics tools that can help you gather and analyze both types of app experience data. 

Modern solutions like Smartlook make the process simple by automatically recording all user sessions and interactions in your app. This auto-capture method prevents you from having to accurately predict each interaction you’ll need to track in advance because all the interaction data is collected by default.

More traditional analytics solutions like Amplitude and Mixpanel rely on a manual event tracking setup. This means you need to define which user interactions (events) you want to track and set up the tracking for each one individually.

Both methods can help you gather the app usage data you need, but the manual method requires more time, effort, and technical skills compared to auto-capturing. 

We’ve discussed this in more detail in our product analytics guide.

5 essential features of an app experience analytics tool

In this section, we’ll show you five essential capabilities that you need for the app experience analytics process. We’ll also use real-life examples to demonstrate how each one can benefit various teams inside your organization.

Note: We’ll be using Smartlook— our product analytics and visual user insights platform — to demonstrate how these tools work. However, if you’re interested in learning about other solutions, check out our article on the top free and paid mobile app analytics tools.

#1. Session recordings: Watch how users interact with your app

Session recordings (also called session replays or session playback) are visual representations of users’ sessions in your app. They show you everything a user does during their session — which features they use, which app screens they open, where they get confused, and so on.

For example, check out the screenshot below:

On the right, there’s the actual session replay video of a user navigating a checkout flow. On the left, you can see useful details like the user’s device, location, and other sessions. Finally, there’s a timeline containing all user actions under the session recording.

Here’s how session recordings, along with the additional data they capture, can be helpful for different teams:

• Product teams canuse session recordings to show others exactly what’s going on with the product and communicate their findings, vision, and strategy. This is a huge improvement over traditional dashboards filled with stats, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) which aren’t intuitive for most people. 
• Marketers can watch how customers use the product, instead of focusing only on what brought them to it (i.e., attribution). This can give them ideas for which features and benefits to highlight in their campaigns.
• UX designers and researchers can see how users interact with the app in the wild, instead of relying solely on interviews, usability testing, and surveys for user research.
• Customer support teams can watch how bugs and other issues occurred, instead of relying on users’ explanations (which are often inaccurate). Hookle’s support team even uses session recordings to provide proactive customer service when they see users struggling. 

CricHeroes — the largest network for cricket players in the world — is a great example of a company that uses session recordings to improve user engagement and retention rates.

For example, they used session recordings to uncover new points along the customer journey where users were likely to contact other users. They added extra nudges at these points, which resulted in an 11% increase in the number of messages sent by users.

They also use session recordings for a host of other tasks, such as analyzing how users navigate certain screens or uncovering where they get stuck.

“With Smartlook, we can check and analyze data regarding different user segments for different features. This allows us to better predict the types of changes we can make with our current app features, including new features we can introduce to help achieve the metrics we have set for user engagement. When viewing recordings, I can see exactly how much time a user is spending on each step, where they click on a particular screen, where they’re not filling out details, and where they get stuck.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHereos

For more details on their approach and results, check out our CricHeroes case study.

#2. Heatmaps: See the typical user behavior on an app screen

Heatmaps show you how most users navigate a page or app screen, including where they click, how far down they scroll, and where they move their cursor. 

Smartlook, like most other heatmap software tools, supports three types of heatmaps: click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (middle), and scroll maps (right).

• Click maps show where users click (or tap on mobile) and how often they interact with call-to-action (CTA) elements. 
• Move maps show where users move their cursors while navigating a page. 
• Scroll maps show what percentage of users reach each part of a page. 

Because they’re so easy to create and read, heatmaps are a great starting point for analyzing user behavior. For example, you can use a scroll map to quickly see which elements on a screen most users see without scrolling. This can help you determine if you should move important buttons or copy higher up so that more people see them.

Sewio actually used heatmaps to find a few key issues on their homepage:

1. The buttons in the hero section were actually below the fold for some visitors.
2. Almost no one clicked on the client logos that led to customer success stories.
3. There was a big visitor drop-off in one section on the page, indicating that people didn’t find it useful or interesting.

Once they implemented changes based on these findings, Sewio’s team saw a 276% boost in clickthrough rate for their “Go to store” button and a 3x increase in clicks to their customer success stories.

Learn more about heatmaps in our guide: How to read a heatmap and get actionable UX insights

#3. Events: Monitor business-critical user actions

Events are user actions like button clicks, text inputs, or pageviews. 

Tracking these events lets you quantify user behavior and monitor the occurrence of business-critical interactions. For example, you can use events to see:

• How many clicks each feature button gets.
• How often people tap on the “Add to cart” button.
• Which buttons on your app’s homescreen people tap on most often.

With Smartlook, you can track many events without any coding, since the user interaction data is collected automatically. All you have to do is decide which interactions appear as events in your dashboard — a process called “defining an event.” 

We’ve created three ways to define events without coding:

1. Use our no-code event picker. This method lets you define an event by clicking on elements in your app’s UI. 

2. Choose from a template list of standard events, including clicked on URL, clicked on text, typed text, clicked-on CSS selector (allowing you to select any element on the page).

3. Define an event from a recording. Oftentimes, you may notice an action you’d like to track while watching a recording. You can pause the recording, click on the “Session events” tab, and easily turn that action into an event.

You can also define custom events via JavaScript to track pretty much any other activities in your app.

Additionally, Smartlook lets you combine the power of event tracking and session recordings. For example, the screenshot below shows two events being tracked on the same screen.

You can click the “Play” button under each event to jump straight into all the sessions where it was triggered. This lets you watch the full context behind each event, i.e., what users did before and after triggering it.

Disivo — an app that automates product pricing for e-commerce stores — uses events to understand how users interact with their product and where they struggle. They also combine events and session recordings to:

• Quickly find the relevant session recordings with event-based filters.
• Jump straight into the part of each session where certain events were triggered.

“When I think about how much of developers’ time I am saving with Smartlook, I am easily around 300-400% ROI. And that’s just for the devs. Once your support team starts using Smartlook, the ROI goes up even more.”

Petr Bláha

Founder and CEO of Disivo

#4. Funnels: Analyze how users navigate key flows

Most applications have a few critical flows — sequences of steps that users take to complete a goal — that are closely tied to revenue. Analyzing how users navigate through these flows is essential to understanding their experience and improving the app’s performance.

This is where funnel analysis comes in.

Funnel analysis is the process of mapping out these flows, so you can see how many users complete each step and where they get stuck.

With Smartlook, you can create all kinds of funnels by simply placing two or more events in the order you believe your users follow. The funnel visualization will then appear instantly, as shown in the GIF below.

For example, you can map each step of your onboarding sequence to an event and build an onboarding funnel. This will show you points of friction in your onboarding, which may be hurting your activation and retention rates.

Or, you can map out your checkout process and see which steps cause users to abandon it. For instance, the checkout funnel below has a conversion rate of 61.74%, with most drop-offs (26.14%) coming between Steps 1 and 2.

You can build this funnel with three events, without any coding:

• Event 1: Users click on “Add to cart” (select the button with our no-code event picker to define the event).
• Event 2: Users click on the “Pay Now” button (again, select that button with the no-code event picker).
• Event 3: Users land on the “Thank you” page (use the “Visited URL” standard event and enter the page URL).

And because Smartlook also offers session recordings, you can watch the sessions of users who dropped off at a specific stage by clicking on the “Play” button. 

In the example above, you can watch the drop-offs between Steps 1 and Step 2 (26.14% of all users), as well as between Step 2 and Step 3 (16.41% of all users) to see why drop-offs happen and increase conversions.

AstroPay — a fintech payment app — actually used this process to improve the conversion rate of one of their most important funnels. 

They mapped out the funnel and then they jumped into the session recordings of users who dropped off. The sessions revealed obvious points of friction, which AstroPay’s team was able to quickly fix, leading to a 56% boost in conversions.

“Smartlook is very helpful in understanding why some users are unable to complete certain flows, as we can see exactly what steps they followed, as well as where they see errors or decide to abandon the flow.”

Karen Bauer

Product Manager at AstroPay

Check out our AstroPay case study for more details on their challenges and the impact of working with reliable product usage data. 

#5. Crash reports: Understand when and why app crashes occur

It’s essential to know when and why crashes happen, so you can find their root cause before they affect too many of your app’s users. Tools with crash reporting capabilities help you do that. 

For example, Smartlook’s Crash Reports (available for Android apps) give you a list of all app crashes, grouped together by the first three lines of the stack trace. 

You can also see how many users experienced a crash, as well as which versions of your app the crash occurred in.

From here, you can dig deeper by clicking on each crash fragment, analyzing the entire stack trace, and seeing the user’s platform, device, date, and country.

This information is useful, but usually not enough for developers and quality assurance (QA) professionals to diagnose the problem.

That’s why with Smartlook, you can click on the “Play session” button above the stack trace to watch all sessions where a certain crash happened.

As a result, devs and QAs can see exactly what led up to the crash, instead of guessing or trying to reproduce the issue via trial and error. This makes debugging much easier and lets your team fix crashes that they otherwise couldn’t have.

Vertigo Games — a game development studio — is a perfect example of the power of being able to see how issues occur. In the early stages of developing their Critical Strike game, their product and dev teams lacked essential information about:

• The paths and user actions that led to crashes and other bugs.
• The number of new users who completed the onboarding guide.
• How players completed the game’s missions compared to the initial design.

These blindspots made their development process very time-consuming and inefficient, which is why they turned to Smartlook. Having session recordings that show the actual customer experience transformed Vertigo Games’ process of finding and fixing problems.

“Before Smartlook, we couldn’t find the reasons for the drops occurring in various parts of the funnels in our game. In order to find a solution when we had a high drop rate, we were trying to experience it ourselves and to determine the source of the error in the specified place, which caused a great waste of time.”

Sinem Bulut Selduz

Game Analyst at Vertigo Games

Start collecting and analyzing app experience data with Smartlook today

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

Our platform can be used on:

• Mobile applications built with many popular platforms and frameworks. Our mobile SDK is currently compatible with Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, and Unity apps.
• Websites and web apps, including ones built with popular CMS like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.

Smartlook also has integrations with A/B testing platforms, like Google Optimize and Optimizely, traditional web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and other widely-used SaaS tools, like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, and many more.

If you want to see Smartlook in action before you set it up on your app, you can book a free 1-on-1 demo here. Оur team will give you a detailed Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business at a convenient time for you.

You can also try Smartlook yourself with a free 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post How to build better products with app experience analytics appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

They have an identical approach to capturing behavior data by recording all user sessions on your app. Plus, they also have features like session recordings, heatmaps, and events that help you analyze how users interact with your app.

But despite the similarities, UXCam and Smartlook have fundamental differences that affect what you can do with each tool. 

In this article, we’re going to explore both tools’ features, use cases, and pricing, so you can make a well-informed decision. We’ll break down our comparison into three sections:

1. UXCam and Smartlook’s overlapping features

UXCam and Smartlook share some key features, including session recordings, heatmaps, events, and crash reports. We’ll discuss how these four features work and how they can benefit your business. 

2. UXCam vs Smartlook: Differences in features and use cases

The key difference we’ll explore stems from the fact that Smartlook is available for websites, web apps, and mobile apps, whereas UXCam can only be used on mobile apps. This affects how much of the customer journey you can actually capture and analyze.

3. How UXCam’s pricing compares to Smartlook’s

Both tools offer free plans, free trials, and personalized demos, and their pricing is suitable for businesses of all sizes. However, their pricing plans are different in terms of transparency and customization options, as you’ll learn in this section.

Smartlook brings rich product analytics & visual user insights for mobile apps and websites under one roof — without hiding the price tag. Book a free demo with our team or start analyzing your users’ experience with Smartlook’s full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required. 

UXCam and Smartlook’s session recordings, heatmaps, and other overlapping features

UXCam and Smartlook both have features like session recordings, events, funnels, and crash reports. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analytics capabilities lets you:

• Analyze aggregate product usage data and metrics like daily active users, retention, and conversion rates.
• Track the occurrence of specific actions and the completion of important flows with events and conversion funnels.
• Watch how individual users interact with your product and uncover valuable product experience insights with session recordings.

In this section, we’re going to discuss these overlapping functionalities and how you can use them to make better product decisions. 

Note: Since UXCam is only available for mobile apps, we’ll be looking at the features below exclusively in the context of mobile analytics. 

Session recordings

Session recordings (also called session replays) capture users’ entire sessions in your mobile app — from the moment they open your app to the moment they close it. 

This lets you see everything users do, including where they tap, which screens they navigate to, and so on. For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook session recording of a user completing a checkout flow.

Besides the session replay video, both UXCam and Smartlook give you additional information about each user, like:

• A timeline of all the events they triggered (under the video).
• Their device, location, and previous sessions (to the left).

UXCam and Smartlook’s session recordings are private by default, so sensitive data like passwords or credit card information is never captured. You can also manually:

• Prevent the session recorder from recording certain screens.
• Mask or exclude elements from appearing in your session recordings (e.g., email fields or elements with users’ photos).
• Maintain privacy on all screens by default. Smartlook has Wireframe Rendering Modes, which replace all elements with abstract representations, while UXCam lets you blur screens (as shown below). In both cases, you can still see users’ interactions and analyze their behavior, without the risk of exposing personal data.

Lastly, both tools give you a similar set of filters to find the session recordings you need, including:

• Location filters like country and city.
• Behavior filters like triggered events or funnel stages.
• Technology filters like device model and operating system.

Further reading on this topic:

• How to set up mobile app tracking to analyze user behavior
• How to record website visitors: Practical tips, tools & examples
• 8 session replay & visitor recording tools for fixing UX issues (including Smartlook, FullStory, Hotjar, and more)

Heatmaps

Heatmaps give you a high-level overview of how users interact with each app screen. 

For example, the screenshot below shows a Smartlook heatmap of a mobile game screen. 

The colored spots are areas where users tap, with the red color showing where most taps were concentrated.

UXCam and Smartlook (as well as most other heatmap tools) allow you to create heatmaps for each app screen. They also let you filter the heatmap data based on the device, date, country, and other criteria. 

UXCam supports a few more pre-set filters for its mobile heatmaps, like first and last gesture on a screen or in a session. 

For more details on this topic, check out our guide to reading a heatmap and getting actionable user experience (UX) insights.

Events

Events are user actions that you can monitor over time, like button taps, screen visits, navigation changes, and more. 

UXCam and Smartlook’s event tracking capabilities can help you quantify user behavior, evaluate the impact of certain changes, and much more. Both tools also capture some events automatically, which lets you skip the tedious event tracking setup in certain situations.

For example, Smartlook automatically captures two types of mobile app events:

1. User interaction events like finger touches, gestures, and focus on UI elements.
2. Analytics events that initialize an action in your app, like button clicks and navigation between screens.

You can also create custom events to track pretty much any other user interaction you want with either tool. The screenshot below shows two custom events that are triggered when users finish their search or forward a video.

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button under each event’s name. Clicking that takes you directly to all the session recordings where the event took place (this can also be done in UXCam).

Lastly, you can use the events you’re tracking to build funnels with either tool. Funnels are sequences of steps users take to complete a goal, like finishing a checkout process (shown in the screenshot below) or a level in a mobile game. 

Funnels are vital in many situations, so for more details, see our guide to improving conversions, retention & UX with funnel analysis.

Crash reporting

UXCam and Smartlook can automatically detect application crashes. This feature is called Crash Analytics in UXCam and Crash Reports in Smartlook.

For example, Smartlook’s reports give you information about the version of your app where each crash happened and the number of users that experienced it.

Both tools also show you the stack trace for each crash and let you jump into the session recordings that show how it occurred.

Combining the stack trace information with session recordings makes debugging much easier, as we explained in our article on the top 6 Crashlytics alternatives.

Lastly, UXCam’s Crash Analytics feature is available for iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React Native, while Smartlook’s Crash Reports are available for Android and iOS apps right now. However, we will expand this feature to other platforms, so refer to our documentation for the most up-to-date information. 

UXCam vs Smartlook: Differences in features and use cases

Despite their similarities, UXCam and Smartlook have essential differences, like their supported platforms and integrations.

These differences make Smartlook a more versatile tool because it can be employed in more use cases than UXCam. 

In the sections below, we’ll look at three of these use cases and discuss how Smartlook’s versatility gives it an edge over UXCam.

Use case #1: Analyze the entire customer journey across different platforms

Because Smartlook is available for websites, web apps, and mobile apps, you can use it to track the whole user journey, instead of only one aspect of it. 

For example, say you have a product that can be accessed via a website or through a native mobile app. Users may start certain flows on the website — like registrations, onboarding, or checkouts — but complete them on the native mobile app. 

This is a classic example of a cross-platform journey. With UXCam, you can get a good idea of the user’s mobile experience. You could then use an additional website analytics tool to understand how users interact with your site. 

However, this would give you an incorrect picture of the actual customer experience. 

First, your website analytics would show that the journey ends when visitors close the site. This is obviously wrong since they’re just jumping to a different platform.

Second, the mobile app analytics wouldn’t be able to tell you what interactions users had with your site before opening the app. As a result, you can’t understand the context of their actions, what they’re looking for, or how to improve their experience.

And third, you’d have to constantly toggle back and forth between different tools, which can be annoying and time-consuming.

That’s why Smartlook has a cross-platform analytics feature that lets you track these journeys in a combined web and mobile project. This feature, alongside our Identify API, automatically matches each user’s website and mobile app sessions and shows them in one place. 

For example, the screenshot below shows all the sessions in a customer’s cross-platform journey in chronological order. The mobile and desktop icons represent which platform each session took place on. 

As a result, you can get an accurate picture of the complete user journey, instead of dealing with siloed data that can lead you to invalid conclusions.

Use case #2: Integrate with other product, marketing, UX, customer support, and developer tools

Integrations let you incorporate tools into your workflow and help other teams benefit from their capabilities. This makes them a crucial functionality for any product analytics solution.

At the time of this writing, UXCam offers six built-in integrations — Segment, Amplitude, Crashlytics, Google Analytics (Firebase), Intercom, and Mixpanel. It’s possible to integrate UXCam with other tools as well, but each one must be set up with manual code changes.

Smartlook also has integrations with these six tools, along with many other SaaS solutions, including:

• Survicate. Survicate lets teams run different types of surveys. Thanks to our integration, you can watch the session recordings of participants who gave a specific answer to a survey question (e.g., watch users who answered “No” to a question like “Did you like the checkout experience?”). Product managers, marketers, and UX professionals can all benefit from Survicate and the additional context that Smartlook provides to the survey answers.
• Google Optimize. Google Optimize is a popular tool that helps marketers, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts, and UX designers experiment with different versions of their website and see which ones convert better. By integrating Google Optimize with Smartlook, you can watch how users interact with each page variant you’re testing. This is crucial for validating the accuracy of your experiments, as we explained in our article on the top 10 A/B testing tools.
• Sentry. Sentry is a popular performance monitoring and error tracking tool for development and quality assurance (QA) teams. Smartlook provides a qualitative upgrade to Sentry’s data by letting you watch the sessions where certain issues occurred. This makes bug reproduction much easier.

Click here for a complete list of Smartlook’s integrations.

Use case #3: Automatically record users’ sessions without impacting their experience

Session recordings are a powerful tool for analyzing user behavior. However, they can also be taxing on users’ devices, leading to fast battery drainage, high network traffic, and potential app crashes — problems that can lead users to abandon your app. 

UXCam and Smartlook both offer options to mitigate these issues. For example, you can adjust each tool’s recording quality, reduce the frame rate, and have the recordings uploaded only when the device is connected to WiFi so no mobile data is wasted.

However, Smartlook has an additional feature that minimizes the impact on users’ devices by default — our Wireframe Rendering Modes.

As we mentioned earlier, when one of these modes is enabled, Smartlook draws an abstract representation of the content, instead of capturing the UI as users see it.

All user interactions are still clearly visible in these modes, but the UI isn’t captured in full detail. This automatically minimizes the impact on users’ devices, without you having to manually change the recording quality, frame rates, and other similar settings. 

How UXCam’s pricing compares to Smartlook’s

The final big difference between UXCam and Smartlook is their pricing. 

On the one hand, UXCam doesn’t have transparent pricing plans or an option to build a custom plan by yourself. You either have to complete a free trial or contact their team to get pricing details.

On the other hand, Smartlook offers transparent pricing and has more flexible and customizable plans. 

First, you can choose between two pre-made plans:

• Free
• Pro plan ($55/month)

Additionally, you can build a custom Startup or Business plan by clicking on the buttons below the price. This lets you choose a higher user session limit and longer data storage, without contacting our team and having to wait for a demo.

Lastly, you can also talk to our team about creating an Enterprise plan that’s tailor-made for you.

Analyze the complete customer journey with Smartlook

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show everything your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

Our tool can be used on:

• Mobile apps built with popular native mobile app platforms, frameworks, and engines, including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity, and more.
• Websites and web apps, including ones built with popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.

If you don’t want to spend time setting up Smartlook, you can see it in action by booking a free demo. Оur team will give you a detailed Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business at a convenient time for you.

You can also try Smartlook with a full-featured, 30-day trial — no credit card required.

author Ondřej Machek

CTO

The post UXCam vs Smartlook: Features, use cases & pricing comparison appeared first on Smartlook Blog.