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With so many different user tracking solutions available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to capture data related to user behavior, preferences, and engagement and get insights to optimize your products but need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different tracking tools with large teams and diverse products, with my picks of the best user tracking software.

What is user tracking software?

User tracking software is a digital tool that collects and analyzes data regarding user interactions with websites, applications, or other digital platforms. It enables businesses to gain a deeper understanding of user behavior, helping them make data-driven decisions to improve usability, engagement, and conversion rates.

It does this through features like event tracking, user journey mapping, session recording, analytics dashboards, and segmentation capabilities. Overall, this type of tool helps improve user experience design, enhance product optimization, personalize user engagement, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Overviews Of The 10 Best User Tracking Software Solutions

Here’s a brief description of each user tracking platform to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.

Real user monitoring tool with powerful web analytics features

  • 15 days free trial
  • From $11/month
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Rating: 4.5/5

Dynatrace is real user monitoring software that provides insight into your customers’ digital experiences. It takes in data from your entire infrastructure, giving you a complete view of the user journey. The tool has powerful issue spotting functionality that you can see in the dashboard. Once you spot an issue, you can see which factors may be causing the problem and then take steps to fix them.

This can help you solve website speed issues that affect your Google search results. Session replay is another useful feature. If you identify an error, you can replay affected sessions to see exactly when it occurred. This will give you a better understanding of what caused the problem. The tool works in web, mobile, and SaaS applications to provide insight into all channels.

Dynatrace integrates with plenty of business software, including Adobe Analytics, OneAgent, and Microsoft Active Directory Services. Pricing starts at $11 per month for digital experience monitoring. Full-stack monitoring, security, and infrastructure monitoring are added extras on top of this price.

You can grab a demo or a free trial via the website.

Best for tracking your workforce

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $10/user/month
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Rating: 4.5/5

ActivTrak is a workforce analytics tool that provides insight into how your employees use your tools. Managers can use it to see and track actions on any company device or network. With this information, you can identify the most productive employees and the tools people use. You can also see online activity, which helps maximize productivity while keeping your business secure.

This tracking occurs in real-time and you can set up notifications that alert you to dangerous activities. This could be when someone visits a particular website or downloads unapproved software to their computer.

ActivTrak costs $10/user/month. You can also sign up for a 14-day free trial on the website or test drive their freemium plan with limited features.

Best website visitor tracking tool with heatmaps

  • 15-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $59/month
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Rating: 4.4/5

Hotjar is a tool that helps you understand how users behave on your website. This insight helps you improve the user experience and increase your website conversion rate .Hotjar’s main feature is heatmapping. This shows where users click, move, and scroll on your site. This is super useful for seeing how people interact with ecommerce or sales landing pages. The idea is that it shows what they interact with and what they avoid.

It’s super helpful in optimizing your website. For example, you can see which buttons or CTAs generate clicks and which users ignore. You can also compare how users act on mobile, tablet, and desktop versions of your site to ensure that each one is optimized. This isn’t the only feature for tracking behavior, though.

You can also view session recordings to see what each user did when they visited your tool, allowing you to map the exact journey customers take. The other main feature is surveys, which help you gather quick user feedback. Use this alongside user information to create informative user stories.

Hotjar has a free plan for small sites which tracks up to 35 daily sessions. Paid plans start at $39 per month for up to 100 daily sessions.

Real user monitoring tool for fast problem resolution

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $15/month
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Rating: 3.5/5

Pingdom (owned by SolarWinds) is a tool that provides information about how users interact with your product. It uses real user monitoring to give data about users’ location, the devices they use, and how they behave. You can combine this information with data about where site performance issues occur. This lets you look for patterns that could point toward problems. For example, if iOS users suddenly see an increase in page load times, it could be that your site is having issues with the Safari browser. Another cool feature is the ability to set target performance levels to notify you when your tool is struggling to keep up with activity. These goals can be based on factors like load time, first time to byte, or Apdex score.

Pingdom tracks and stores all this data over time. You can see how page performance and popular content changes year on year. This information helps you optimize top-performing pages while deprioritizing ones people don’t visit. The tool provides access to its API so you can write your scripts and automation.

You can also connect to Zapier for more out-of-the-box integrations. Pricing starts at $15 per month for up to 100,000 pageviews. You can get a free trial on the website.

Activity logging to improve platform security

  • From $2,636 for a subscription
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Rating: 4.3/5

SolarWinds is activity monitoring software designed to help teams spot and respond to malicious activities on their platforms. It has features for threat detection, automated incident response, and compliance reporting. The tool works by collecting log data from around the organization and storing it in a single location. The tool has a customizable dashboard you can use to highlight the metrics that are most important to your business’s security.

You can see both real-time and past activity. The tool has plenty of automated templates to help you respond to threats. You can also create your own based on how you want your system to respond. For example, you can automatically kill processes, block IP addresses, or detach USB devices when relevant threats are detected.

Solarwinds Pricing starts at $2,636 for a subscription. The exact amount you pay will depend on the number of nodes that send log and event information.

You can contact the company’s sales team for further details.

Real-time insight into the user experience

  • Free Plan
  • Real user monitoring costs From $0.06/1,000 tokens
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Rating: 4.3/5

AppDynamics is a complete product monitoring tool with security, network, and user monitoring solutions. The user monitoring features have all you need to understand user behavior. You can view UX information across any device, browser, or third-party service. Experience journey mapping is central to the tool. This tracks the application pathways that see the most traffic and shows you the customer experience at each touchpoint.

With this information, you can spot opportunities to improve the experience, for example, by removing page errors or dedicating additional resources to high-traffic areas.Another good feature is the ability to deal with potential issues before they affect customers. You can choose to be alerted when CPU utilization reaches a certain level and then solve the issue before it starts affecting UX.

AppDynamics integrates with plenty of relevant tools. The tool has several plans, and real user monitoring costs $0.06 per 1,000 tokens.

You can try the software for free before buying.

See a complete overview of product performance

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $15/user/month (billed annually)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.3/5

DataDog is a monitoring and security platform that provides detailed insight into your product’s user experience. You can see everything from an overview of your platform to detailed transaction data.The tool will highlight when factors like slow load times negatively impact UX and show the root cause. You also see whether the issue affects all customers or specific segments, such as people using a particular device or OS.The tool collects this data in real-time and shows the most critical information in customizable dashboards.

It’s easy for your team to check this data wherever they are, either via the browser or a mobile app.One of the tool’s standout features is AI-powered anomaly detection. This continually monitors your system and highlights suspicious activity. Your team can then dig into related logs to assess whether they need to take further action.

DataDog integrates with 500 different tools in categories such as security, messaging, and compliance. This allows you to bring together metrics and logs from throughout your system. Integration set up is easy due to the autodetection feature, which identifies technologies running on your host and highlights potential connections. Pricing starts at $18 per host per month.

You can get a discount if you have more than 500 hosts. You can grab a free trial via the website.

Best for marketing automation features

  • Free Plan
  • From $49/month to help you scale up fast
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Rating: 4.2/5

User.com is a visitor tracking tool with powerful marketing automation features. This allows you to trigger marketing or sales-related workflows based on how users interact with your tool or website. The CRM is central to these features. The software creates a profile for each visitor the first time they visit your site based on their IP address. It tracks page views, important events in the customer journey, and browser and device information.

You can add contact information or account details when the customer signs up.Once you have profiles, you can create segments and start to set up automated processes to target each one. Send automated email flows with personalized snippets to encourage actions based on how the sales lead behaves on your website. Automation features can also take in live chat, text, call centers, web notifications, and even dynamic page content.

The tool also has powerful analytics and reporting modules. These provide up-to-date information that your sales and marketing teams can use to improve performance. The tool has plenty of other non-tracking-related features like a knowledge base and customer support.

User.com integrates with plenty of tools used by marketing and sales teams, including Slack, Zapier, WordPress, and Intercom. The company doesn’t promote pricing, but you can find out more on the website.

Best for monitoring your website to detect, prioritize and resolve errors

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

Noibu is intuitive and easy-to-use user tracking software that aids businesses of all sizes in monitoring the performance of their website and ensuring a seamless user experience. It provides comprehensive data on user sessions, page performance, and UI errors, enabling businesses to identify and fix issues that may impact the user experience.

Session replay lets businesses view user interactions and behavior during a web page session. It works to create a re-enactment of a user’s interaction with a website by recording user data such as mouse clicks, scrolling, and page navigation. This feature allows businesses to identify user pain points and optimize their website to improve user experience.

Noibu integrates seamlessly with various third-party tools and services, including Google Analytics, Slack, and Jira. This makes it easy for businesses to create workflows and alerts around specific events, such as a high number of error occurrences or a sudden drop in conversion rates. Additionally, Noibu's API allows businesses to leverage its data to build custom integrations with other tools and services.

Best for tracking conversion and customer retention

  • Creabl offers a 30-day free trial upon sign-up.
  • When paid annually, Creabl’s Pro plan starts at $36 per month.
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Rating: 4.5/5

Creabl is a customer tracking software that helps teams track website visitor behavior, understand their audience base, and monitor conversion and product adoption. Some of the software's key features are session recording, web page heatmaps, custom funnels, and retention tracking. It also provides customer success tools such as a help center builder and email sequences.

Businesses can use the software to understand the journey from when a user lands on their website all the way through to becoming a paid customer and product adoption. The custom funnels tool allows teams to track how new users move through their sales funnel including unique activities and behaviors specific to their product, service, or business model. User segmentation and cohort analysis can be performed, helping teams break down their user groups and dig deeper into their findings.

A 30-day free trial is available, and paid plans start from $36 per month when paid annually.

The Best User Tracking Software Solutions Summary

Tools Price
Dynatrace From $11/month
ActivTrak From $10/user/month
Hotjar From $59/month
Pingdom From $15/month
SolarWinds Security Event Manager From $2,636 for a subscription
AppDynamics Real user monitoring costs From $0.06/1,000 tokens
Datadog From $15/user/month (billed annually)
User.com From $49/month to help you scale up fast
Noibu Pricing upon request
Creabl When paid annually, Creabl’s Pro plan starts at $36 per month.
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Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

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Other Options

Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.

  1. Sematext Experience

    Analyze data from real user sessions

  2. User Tracker

    Essential insight into how users interact with web apps

  3. Semrush

    Deep audience demographics data + heatmap tracking

  4. Google Analytics

    Free tool to track website visitors

  5. FullStory

    Intelligence to provide better digital experiences

  6. Montis

    All-in-one application monitoring

  7. Raygun Real User Monitoring

    Real user monitoring for in-depth front-end visibility

Related: User Behavior Analytics Tools To Assess Product Use

Comparison Criteria

What do I look for when I select the best user tracking system? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria: 

  1. User Interface (UI): A good UI provides a clear overview of user activity and helps you and your team spot problems as soon as they occur.
  2. Usability: The tool should be user-friendly while still containing the advanced features product teams need to make them useful.
  3. Integrations: Website visitor tracking tools integrate with software such as reporting, CRM, and communication tools. 
  4. Value for $: User tracking tools need to cost an amount that makes sense for your business. The tools on this list are available at various prices, so both large and small businesses can find something that suits their needs.

User Tracking Solution: Key Features

Here are some of the key features I look for in user tracking tools.

  1. Incident detection: This highlights potential problems and notifies you immediately, ensuring you can deal with the problem before it affects many customers. Some tools also proactively spot issues by identifying signals that could lead to future problems. 
  2. Real-time dashboards: Website visitor tracking software uses real-time dashboards to provide an overview of all activity that occurs on your website. This information helps you spot issues and take immediate action. 
  3. Website performance: These tools identify issues in website performance that could cause issues for customers. The best tools highlight potential causes so your team can dig in and solve the problem.
  4. Session replays: This feature lets you replay customer sessions on your app or website to see exactly what the user experienced. It will highlight front-end issues so you can identify problems or areas to optimize. 
  5. Feature usage: This shows you which features or web pages customers use the most. You can use this data to inform your marketing, sales, and retention efforts. 
  6. Customer data: The tool should track customer data such as their device, browser, and location. This provides further insight into any issues they may have. Some tools let you use this data to create automated marketing pathways for each customer segment. 

What do you think about this list?

This list contains some of the best tools you can use to track users. 

Each one offers a slightly different feature set, and different tools are best for different use cases. For example, some tools focus on conversion and page speed, while others focus on web app usage or security.

With this in mind, consider what you want to track and then look for software with these features. You can then try them out with free plans, free trials, or by asking for a demo.

For further context into the user experience, consider using these tracking tools alongside user feedback software. This will give you complete insight into how people use your tool.

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By Ben Aston

Ben Aston is an online media entrepreneur and founder of Black & White Zebra, an indie media company on a mission to help people and organizations succeed.

Ben applies his expertise in design and strategy to enable businesses to deliver innovative products and services that delight customers. Ben is passionate about understanding customer needs through design research, identifying opportunities based on those insights, and empowering designers and technologists to create solutions. He is driven to develop and uncover new opportunities for clients, establishing strong connections with their customers through product solutions that create lasting value.