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Tool Shortlist

Here’s the list of the best user tracking apps that I’ll cover in this article.

  1. 1. Dynatrace — Real user monitoring tool with powerful web analytics features
  2. 2. ActivTrak — Best for tracking your workforce
  3. 3. Hotjar — Best website visitor tracking tool with heatmaps
  4. 4. Pingdom — Real user monitoring tool for fast problem resolution
  5. 5. SolarWinds Security Event Manager — Activity logging to improve platform security
  6. 6. AppDynamics — Real-time insight into the user experience
  7. 7. Datadog — See a complete overview of product performance
  8. 8. User.com — Best for marketing automation features
  9. 9. Creabl — Best for tracking conversion and customer retention
  10. 10. Sematext Experience — Analyze data from real user sessions

You need to know how users interact with your product if you run a SaaS or website. User tracking shows which pages and features visitors use and identifies issues such as slow pages or broken features. 

With this information, you can improve the experience for customers and leads, which has a direct impact on your business. For example, knowing your most popular features helps with onboarding and marketing, while improving slow-loading pages can seriously impact conversion rates. 

User tracking software is an easy way to gain this insight. The best tools provide data about all parts of the user experience. You’ll see which pages or features users interact with, product issues that impact UX, and even security problems. 

But, not all of these tools offer the same feature set. Some are best for websites and marketing teams, while others are more focused on SaaS products. In this article, I’ll look at some of the best user tracking software and show the use cases that suit each one. 

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. 

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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.

1

Dynatrace

Real user monitoring tool with powerful web analytics features

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5
1059 reviews

15 days free trial

From $11/month

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.

2

ActivTrak

Best for tracking your workforce

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5
266 reviews

14-day free trial + free plan available

From $10/user/month

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.

3

Hotjar

Best website visitor tracking tool with heatmaps

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.4
251 reviews

15-day free trial + free plan available

From $59/month

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.

4

Pingdom

Real user monitoring tool for fast problem resolution

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
3.5
4 reviews

30-day free trial

From $15/month

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.

5

SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Activity logging to improve platform security

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3
701 reviews

From $2,636 for a subscription

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.

6

AppDynamics

Real-time insight into the user experience

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3
359 reviews

Free Plan

Real user monitoring costs From $0.06/1,000 tokens

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.

7

Datadog

See a complete overview of product performance

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3
273 reviews

14-day free trial

From $15/user/month (billed annually)

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.

8

User.com

Best for marketing automation features

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2
34 reviews

Free Plan

From $49/month to help you scale up fast

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.

9

Creabl

Best for tracking conversion and customer retention

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5
1 review

Creabl offers a 30-day free trial upon sign-up.

When paid annually, Creabl’s Pro plan starts at $36 per month.

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.

10

Sematext Experience

Analyze data from real user sessions

14 days free trial

From $9/month for up to 25,000 page views

Sematext Experience is a website analytics tool that monitors website traffic so you can optimize your site’s front-end performance. The ability to monitor page load speeds is central. You can see in real-time when issues around page loading impacts the user experience. And you can set up alerts so your dev team is notified of problems immediately.

Once the tool spots issues, it provides insight into the causes. For example, the tool records each event as a page loads, which can highlight the cause of page speed problems. The tool also has features to track Core Web Vitals. Getting this right is key to your website’s SEO efforts and will improve the user experience.

The tool also monitors Apdex to help track user satisfaction. Sematext pricing starts at $9 per month for up to 25,000 page views. You can try the tool for free for 14 days.

Need expert help selecting the right Customer Experience Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company, and you can access exclusive software discounts!

The 10 Best User Tracking Software Solutions Summary

Tool Free Option Price
1
Dynatrace

Real user monitoring tool with powerful web analytics features

15 days free trial

From $11/month Visit Website
2
ActivTrak

Best for tracking your workforce

14-day free trial + free plan available

From $10/user/month Visit Website
3
Hotjar

Best website visitor tracking tool with heatmaps

15-day free trial + free plan available

From $59/month Visit Website
4
Pingdom

Real user monitoring tool for fast problem resolution

30-day free trial

From $15/month Visit Website
5
SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Activity logging to improve platform security

Not available

From $2,636 for a subscription Visit Website
6
AppDynamics

Real-time insight into the user experience

Free Plan

Real user monitoring costs From $0.06/1,000 tokens Visit Website
7
Datadog

See a complete overview of product performance

14-day free trial

From $15/user/month (billed annually) Visit Website
8
User.com

Best for marketing automation features

Free Plan

From $49/month to help you scale up fast Visit Website
9
Creabl

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. Visit Website
10
Sematext Experience

Analyze data from real user sessions

14 days free trial

From $9/month for up to 25,000 page views Visit Website

Other Options

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

  1. Raygun Real User Monitoring - Real user monitoring for in-depth front-end visibility
  2. Montis - All-in-one application monitoring
  3. Fullstory - Intelligence to provide better digital experiences
  4. Google Analytics - Free tool to track website visitors

Related: User Behavior Analytics Tools To Assess Product Use

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.

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