Smartlook

Smartlook combines session recordings with event-based analytics, and has joined Cisco, which is context worth carrying into any evaluation since roadmap and packaging decisions now sit within a much larger organisation.

The product's distinguishing position is genuine mobile app support alongside web. That distinction matters more than vendors in this category usually admit. Recording a website is comparatively straightforward, since the browser exposes the document and events can be captured in JavaScript. Recording a mobile application requires an SDK inside the app, has to handle native views rather than a document, must cope with releases that ship weeks apart rather than continuously, and has to respect platform privacy constraints. Tools that treat mobile as a variant of web generally handle it poorly.

Combining recordings with event-based analytics addresses the analytical gap that recordings alone leave. A recording shows you one user's experience in detail but tells you nothing about how common it is; event analytics tells you how many users did something but not why. Having both against the same session lets an analyst move between the two: see that 12 percent of users abandon at a step, then watch a sample of those specific sessions.

Advanced filtering is emphasised, which is the practical requirement that makes recordings usable at all. A product with meaningful traffic generates far more recordings than anyone can watch, so the value depends entirely on finding the twenty sessions worth watching among fifty thousand.

Pricing is not published as plan figures.