10 Best User Tracking Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 19 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
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.
Fullstory is a digital behavioral data platform designed to help teams understand how users interact with their website or app. By injecting behavioral data into an organization's analytics stack, Fullstory provides technology leaders with quality behavioral insights at scale. This approach drives more customer-centric decisions.
Its session replay function lets you see a pixel-perfect recording of what users are doing on your site, whether they’re scrolling, clicking, or encountering issues. You can filter these replays to focus on specific users or behaviors, making it easier to identify problems and understand exactly how users are interacting with your content. Another key feature is heatmaps, which visually display where users are focusing their attention on your site. This type of insight helps enterprise businesses move closer to their customers and enhances the ability to create experiences that drive higher funnel conversion and detect potential fraud or malicious behaviors.
Fullstory’s custom event tracking also gives you the ability to monitor specific actions, like button clicks or form submissions, without needing to set up manual tracking through your development team. You can retroactively track events from past sessions too, saving time and eliminating the need to predict user behavior in advance.
Integrations include Google Analytics, Segment, Optimizely, Slack, and Jira.
Sprig is a product experience platform that offers a full suite of tools—including session replay, heatmaps, surveys, and AI analysis—to help businesses gain deep insights into user behavior and sentiment, and optimize their user experience at scale. What sets Sprig apart is its AI Analysis, which instantly analyzes and surfaces trends in user feedback and behavior data, allowing teams to identify user pain points and product optimizations without hours of manual analysis.
Compared to other tools, Sprig stands out due to its AI-powered capabilities. These abilities automate the analysis of user experience data, making it easier for teams to deeply understand their customer and confidently make data-backed decisions about their product. For example, it can capture targeted user behavior through features like session replays and heatmaps and then use AI to instantly surface trends in the data and make product recommendations.
Sprig integrates with popular tools, including Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, Census, LaunchDarkly, Optimizely, and Google Tag Manager.
Pricing starts at $175 per month, billed annually. You can get a demo or a 14-day free trial via the website.
Mouseflow is a powerful user-tracking software designed to help businesses understand user behavior on their websites. By visualizing user journeys and pinpointing areas of friction, Mouseflow enables businesses to optimize their websites for better user experience and higher conversion rates.
One of the key reasons Mouseflow stands out is its comprehensive feature set that provides deep, actionable insights. Mouseflow's session replay feature allows businesses to watch real-time recordings of user interactions, helping identify usability issues and understand user behavior on a granular level. The heatmaps feature visually represents clicks, scrolls, and movement on a webpage, highlighting the most and least engaging areas.
Additionally, Mouseflow’s funnel analytics track the steps users take toward conversion, identifying where drop-offs occur and why, allowing for targeted improvements. The software integrates with Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Segment, HubSpot, WordPress, Wix, Kiss Metrics, Shopify, and Unbounce.
The platform offers a free trial and free plan.
Real user monitoring tool with powerful web analytics features
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The Best User Tracking Software Solutions Summary
Tools | Price | |
---|---|---|
Fullstory | From $199/month | Website |
Sprig | From $175/month (billed annually) | Website |
Mouseflow | From $39/month | Website |
Dynatrace | From $21/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
ActivTrak | From $10/user/month | Website |
Hotjar | From $59/month | Website |
Pingdom | From $15/month | Website |
SolarWinds Security Event Manager | From $2,877/year | Website |
AppDynamics | From $6/core/month | Website |
Datadog | From $15/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- User.com
For marketing automation features
- Noibu
For monitoring your website to detect, prioritize and resolve errors
- Creabl
For tracking conversion and customer retention
- Sematext Experience
Analyze data from real user sessions
- User Tracker
Essential insight into how users interact with web apps
- Semrush
Deep audience demographics data + heatmap tracking
- Google Analytics
Free tool to track website visitors
- Raygun Real User Monitoring
Real user monitoring for in-depth front-end visibility
- Montis
All-in-one application monitoring
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:
- 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.
- Usability: The tool should be user-friendly while still containing the advanced features product teams need to make them useful.
- Integrations: Website visitor tracking tools integrate with software such as reporting, CRM, and communication tools.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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