Optimizing your company’s digital presence is a priority for most businesses. In order to do so, it’s crucial to have a good understanding of user behavior.
It has become increasingly important to employ the right digital experience analytics tool to surface opportunities for improving your user experience while simultaneously focusing on the KPIs your company cares about. When comparing popular digital analytics tools, you might have come across Fullstory. In this guide, we’ll introduce you to Fullstory, explore its shortcomings, and cover some popular analytics tools, such as LogRocket, that better fit your needs.
Fullstory touts itself as a “behavioral data platform” that shows user behavior to help you create a good digital experience. Fullstory is known for its session replays that “capture every mouse movement, click, scroll, and more.” However, Fullstory lacks many capabilities to help you comprehensively track product performance.
With Fullstory:
In the following sections, we’ll explore some of the reasons why Fullstory isn’t always the best tool for the job, and why you might want to consider using alternatives.
While Fullstory helps you see what users are doing when you know what to look for, there are often bigger opportunities where you don’t already know to look.
Fullstory’s session replay tool records every user session, but doesn’t offer an efficient solution for sifting through these session recordings. That means you have to rely on other data sources to know where to look or review a huge number of sessions manually to identify specific areas of concern for your team to focus on.
LogRocket solves this issue with an AI-first approach to session replay and analytics. Our Galileo AI automatically recommends the user sessions that matter most based on impact to users and KPIs.
Galileo:
Your team can’t watch every user session and understand every user interaction, but Galileo can!
While users are engaging with Fullstory, their sessions are defined as periods of user activity and user inactivity. User activity is defined by heuristics like clicks, touches, and scrolls, while issues – known as frustrations signals – are identified by rage clicks, error clicks, and dead clicks, as well as mouse thrashing.
These heuristics are ineffective, frequently resulting in false positives when signaling that a user is encountering a significant issue. When using Fullstory, you’ll encounter more false positives than real positives, so your teams will have to navigate a very noisy report to identify the actual areas for digital experience improvement.
LogRocket blends these heuristics with an AI-driven understanding of user impact to more effectively surface the most valuable opportunities to improve digital experience.
Galileo AI employs an issue recommendation model that has trained on data from other LogRocket sessions and issues to identify user-impacting issues. Galileo’s models have been trained on billions of data points to predict whether identified issues and friction points are important, automating the analytics work that humans already do in LogRocket.
You also have the opportunity to triage behaviors according to the KPIs that matter to your business, marking them as “Untriaged,” “High Impact,” “Low Impact,” and “Ignored”:
Then, Galileo describes the issue in natural language titles so you can review them at a glance. This saves you hours, providing easy understanding and direct links to problem areas so you have the context to quickly understand what your users are doing:
Additionally, LogRocket delivers a weekly Issues Digest to your channel of choice (email, Slack, Teams, or Webhook), customized to the areas you care about, that summarizes your app’s most critical issues from the last week and delivers them in real time to responsible stakeholders. This ensures you stay updated on the most frequently surfaced opportunities for improving your digital experience product and optimizing conversion rate:
LogRocket’s Galileo AI helps you prioritize the areas that have real user impact, saving you from endless reviews of session replays.
In their product analytics, Fullstory offers a conversion funnel tool to identify the conversion opportunities that are important to you. However, Fullstory does not show where issues are occurring in the funnel, making it difficult to understand what aspects of your digital experience are affecting conversions.
LogRocket offers a full product analytics solution that reveals the reason behind every metric and KPI and helps you visualize key behaviors, user flows, retention, and other important trends over time.
LogRocket’s AI-powered conversion funnels proactively surface areas within your funnel where users struggle the most before dropping off and the positive signals that are encouraging conversion. LogRocket’s Funnel Insights help you track the conversion rate between multiple steps or paths within your application, as well as funnel completion for users within a single session or across multiple sessions:
Funnel Insights provide a list of user sessions that likely didn’t complete a funnel due to specific issues, such as JavaScript errors or UX problems. This number will inform the Conversion Rate Impact. You can then click into each issue to view the sessions at any step in the funnel and access insights for users who dropped off at that particular step, instead of having to view the entire funnel as a whole.
Because LogRocket’s Funnel Insights are powered by Galileo AI, they’re more sophisticated at identifying real issues and understanding the context surrounding the event. Meanwhile, Fullstory leaves you guessing due to its lack of synthesized information when you enter into a conversion funnel.
In addition to these funnel metrics, LogRocket also provides heatmaps, such as hovermaps, clickmaps, and scrollmaps, so you can see where users are spending time on your page. You can access these heatmaps directly from session replays or save them as charts in your dashboard for easy access:
Though Fullstory offers a high-level view of performance data, it doesn’t offer the depth that engineering stakeholders need to understand why problems are happening and how to fix them. LogRocket, on the other hand, offers a wide array of technical data so both your product and engineering teams can understand your customers.
If you’re familiar with Chrome DevTools, LogRocket’s Developer Tools will look familiar. LogRocket captures logs, warnings, errors, and debug information, and offers a waterfall of all network requests – both successful and failed. Performance data is also captured from Core Web Vitals, including:
The only technical data that Fullstory shares are Page Load Time, Time to First Byte, and DOM Complete. LogRocket shares all the information that your product, engineering, design, support, and marketing teams need to get the answers they need and to create more efficient workflows.
A LogRocket customer, RoadSync, lacked insight into the analytics they needed to understand their users’ behavior and kept running into issues that were difficult for their engineering team to reproduce. They chose LogRocket over Fullstory for the superior technical data it offers when solving issues.
As a result, LogRocket upleveled the capability of RoadSync’s Support team to self-serve, reducing the average number of daily questions Support asks Engineering from 17 to almost 0. And when issues do make it to Engineering, LogRocket’s technical data helps resolve them significantly faster than before.
“Our engineers love LogRocket compared to Fullstory because the developer tab for each session gives them way more information to help them catch and resolve issues faster.” — Taylor Cronin, Product Manager, RoadSync
Solutions like Fullstory force you to choose between capturing every session or inflexible, nonspecific sample rates like “X% of all sessions.” Neither is helpful or feasible for high-traffic sites.
LogRocket’s Conditional Recording allows customers to capture only the sessions that are important to them. You can stack conditions like:
Set recording rules based on the criteria that most matter to your business, including:
LogRocket ingests everything but only retains the sessions that matter to you. It also offers a lookback feature, which records the user behaviors that led to your recording conditions being met. This allows you to better understand the context within which a user activity occurred.
LogRocket stands out as an AI-first session replay and analytics tool because it surfaces the most impactful opportunities to improve KPIs like conversion and user engagement.
Unlike Fullstory, LogRocket uses AI to surface the sessions that matter most to your business. It identifies issues affecting vital sections of your site, such as conversion funnels, clearly communicates them in natural language, and offers detailed technical information to help your engineers solve those issues efficiently. LogRocket brings together stakeholders across the entire product cycle, from product to engineering teams, giving everyone the information they need to build a fantastic digital experience.
Below, we’ll explore some other popular analytics tools you might want to consider when looking for alternatives to Fullstory.
Quantum Metric is another popular digital analytics tool that lets you monitor and diagnose user journeys. Quantum Metric offers features such as:
Quantum Metric’s Felix AI is an AI assistant that summarizes customer sessions. Though it differentiates Quantum Metrics from tools like Fullstory, it only provides insights for sessions you’ve already identified. So, although they’re utilizing AI, Quantum Metric’s toolset isn’t surfacing new knowledge.
Based on G2 reviews, Quantum Metric customers find the following issues with this tool:
Quantum Metric is good for teams that want classic session replay functionality and want to take advantage of emerging artificial intelligence assistance, but not ideal if you need to work through multiple false positives, need to analyze a high volume of sessions, and are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the reasons behind your conversion dips.
Like Fullstory, Quantum Metric makes it difficult to identify the sessions that are important to your team, lacks key frontend performance metrics, and is expensive for a tool that essentially only gives you details for what you already know to look for.
Heap is another Fullstory alternative and product analytics tool that lets you understand your users’ behavior in aggregate, with key features including:
Despite these features, Heap has limitations as a session replay tool due to its poor session replay quality and the inability to search for specific sessions. It also lacks support for native mobile applications. And while Heap claims to offer a fully integrated solution, it acquired Auryc, a separate tool that you must still purchase if you want to use it alongside Heap.
Based on G2 reviews, customers find the following issues with Heap:
Heap is good for teams focused on quantitative data but it falls short when it comes to providing holistic insights into user behavior. Because it does not offer the ability to filter or perform searches across sessions, Heap makes it difficult to understand your users’ sessions even if you have access to the recordings. Heap also lacks key frontend performance metrics like page load time, CPU usage, browser crashes, and more.
If your team is looking for a clear explanation about issues in your app or website, Heap is limited. It does not highlight opportunities for improvement and its analytics are inherently retrospective. By the time you respond to a dip in revenue or conversion, the damage has already been done, leaving your team to play catch up. LogRocket alerts you as soon as a problem surfaces, allowing your team to immediately address the issues before they significantly impact conversions.
Pendo is a product experience tool that aims to help product teams improve user experience with features such as:
Pendo is best known for its in-app guidance software, which enables you to directly communicate with customers while they interact with your product. This tool allows you to share product announcements or promote calls to action and other interactive elements to engage customers.
Beyond its guides, however, Pendo falls short as a session replay or user behavior analytics tool. For example, Pendo allows customers to view retention graphs and conversion funnels but struggles with segmenting data on an individual user level, making it a challenge to determine the best course of action. And although Pendo offers some autocapture event tracking, you’ll still need to manually tag events to capture those that matter most to your company.
According to G2 reviews, Pendo users identify the following limitations with the tool’s features:
While Pendo might be a helpful tool if guides are your top priority, its analytics and session replay are middle-of-the-road and it isn’t expected to be able to provide deep insights into user behavioral analytics. Additionally, they only started offering a beta for session replay in late 2023, making them less mature in the space.
Amplitude is a product analytics and event tracking platform that offers several features to help companies improve their digital experiences, including:
Amplitude users often mention inconsistencies between Amplitude data and their internal data systems, which raises significant issues when analyzing user behaviors. Additionally, Amplitude lacks customization and flexibility in data visualization, making it difficult for companies to easily identify and address areas of concern that could enhance digital experience and improve conversions.
According to G2 reviews, Amplitude users identify the following issues with the tool’s features:
In 2024, Amplitude introduced autocapture and session replay. These features are available to new customers while existing customers must purchase an add-on to gain access. Despite these updates, Amplitude still faces data discrepancies and lacks the sophisticated analytics capabilities of a tool like LogRocket.
Hotjar, acquired by Contentsquare in 2021, is another experience analytics tool suitable for small businesses. Hotjar offers tools such as:
Hotjar’s feedback feature enables you to hear directly from users as they interact with your site, helping you understand why they leave or how you can improve their experience. However, gathering and analyzing this feedback is time-consuming for both you and your users. Relying on manual feedback is inefficient — your analytics tool should uncover areas for improvement, not your customers.
According to G2 reviews, Hotjar users identify the following issues and limitations with the tool’s features:
Overall, Hotjar does not scale well for large businesses and is more suited to small teams with fewer users, no need for self-hosted options, and the time and resources to review many session recordings for insights.
Mixpanel is another Fullstory alternative and product analytics tool designed to help businesses understand user behavior across both mobile and web platforms. It offers features such as:
However, Mixpanel only tracks predefined, or known, metrics; it doesn’t cover metrics related to technical or usability issues that might be affecting your KPIs. If certain events or issues are not explicitly tracked, Mixpanel can’t detect them or report on them, meaning you miss out on potentially crucial information.
Critical G2 customer reviews note that Mixpanel:
Although Mixpanel is good at performing quantitative analysis at the aggregate level, it falls short as a comprehensive user behavior analytics tool. The beta version of its session replay feature was introduced in June 2024, meaning it also lacks as a fully developed session relay solution. Mixpanel can offer valuable insights for small companies aiming to optimize their websites, so long as they are willing to invest time in the setup process, can manage without self-hosted capabilities, and are not concerned with having an advanced session replay feature.
Contentsquare is a digital experience analytics tool that offers similar features to Fullstory, including heatmaps, customer journey analysis, and session replay. It is known for its Find & Fix tool, which provides high-level information about errors but requires constant maintenance to identify when something goes wrong.
Contentsqaure offers:
However, Contentsquare’s high cost and complex setup make it better suited to large organizations with teams dedicated to regular maintenance and data analysis. According to G2 customer reviews of the tool, users find the following issues with Contentsquare:
For companies that can accommodate constant maintenance on their analytics tools and don’t require advanced AI insights, Contentsquare may be a suitable option. However, businesses seeking more cost-effective solutions with enhanced functionality and AI capabilities should consider other alternatives.
Glassbox is a digital experience analytics tool for web and mobile apps with features such as:
Glassbox is good for ecommerce use cases and companies with a focus on mobile apps. However, it doesn’t provide frontend performance metrics like CPU and memory usage, browser crashes, and average network speed, all of which would allow you to better understand your customers.
According to reviews from G2, Glassbox has the following limitations:
Glassbox offers good features for ecommerce businesses and mobile app developers thanks to its mobile analytics. However, its effectiveness is limited: its reporting often requires a lot of setup, its user interface can be confusing to understand, and the learning curve is steep. Additionally, session recordings may include irrelevant requests and the platform generates large amounts of data, which can become costly to manage.
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