Top 5 Behavior Analytics Tools & Tips to Choose the Perfect Fit

Wouldn’t it be great if picking the right business tool was as easy as trying out a new flavor of chips? Imagine, a few simple steps and you’re sorted. But of course, this is not the case.

When it comes to something as crucial as behavior analysis, finding the perfect tool can feel like a Herculean task. You’re probably knee-deep in research, drowning in a sea of names. Plus, there are stakeholders to please, and you’ve got to be strategic about where you invest your time and resources, especially in the early stages.

It’s enough to make anyone feel overwhelmed and stuck in limbo!

That’s why we’re here to help. In this blog, we’ve handpicked the top five web user behavior analytics tools to simplify your decision-making process. Plus, we’ve thrown in some essential factors to consider, guiding lights to lead you through this maze of options. Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

What exactly are user behavior analytics tools?

Behavior analytics tools are software applications that delve deep into user interactions to uncover the secrets behind their behavior. By tracking mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and user feedback with features like heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and form analysis, these tools paint a vivid picture of how users perceive their online journey.

While traditional web analytics tools like GA4 can tell you where users drop off, behavior analytics tools reveal the underlying reasons behind these actions. Armed with this knowledge, you can fine-tune your website to enhance user experience and drive conversions.

Now, let’s delve into the lineup of top-notch web user behavior analytics tools.

Discovering the best: A roundup of five web user behavior analytics tools

Below is a compilation of the top five behavior analysis tools, with their offered features, pricing, information about distinctive selling points and limitations, and tool experience based on a concise summary of customer feedback from third-party review platforms. This resource will assist you in narrowing down your options for behavior analysis tools.

1. VWO Insights – Web

Offered features:

Dynamic heatmap (includes heatmap, clickmap, scrollmap, click area, element list), session recording, form analytics, and surveys. 

Pricing and plans:

Its pricing begins with a complimentary plan (Starter pack) for 5000 monthly tracked users (MTU), followed by Growth, Pro, and Enterprise tiers, which are paid plans. The cost for these plans varies depending on the number of MTUs you intend to analyze. For instance, for 10,000 MTUs, the Growth plan costs $139 per month, billed annually, whereas for 50,000 MTUs, it is $248 per month, billed annually. MTU considers unique users rather than individual data logs, meaning multiple records from the same feature report are not counted separately, enabling a more comprehensive analysis of user behavior across a larger audience.

The enterprise plan boasts a comprehensive suite of features encompassing surveys, form analytics, heatmaps, and session recordings, ensuring you have everything you need for in-depth behavior analysis. Also, all the paid plans have an unlimited quota for session recordings. On the other hand, the starter plan provides a solid foundation for diving into behavior analytics, equipping you with all the essential features to kickstart your journey. You can learn more about VWO’s plans and pricing. 

Additional considerations:

VWO Insights – Web shines as a robust behavior analytics tool, offering a comprehensive suite of features for delving deep into user behavior. Its dynamic heatmaps capture real-time visitor data, providing valuable insights into website interactions. The heatmap report has segmentation options, that allow users to slice and dice data based on standard segments like traffic source and device, or customize segments to delve into specific page drop-offs. This capability helps dissect visitor behavior data comprehensively, providing valuable insights for optimization.

For session recordings, the platform offers flexible options, allowing you to review visitor behavior at your own pace. You can segment recordings of users based on specific actions, like those who dropped off at particular funnel stages, or those involved in A/B tests.

Its on-page surveys allow for a deeper understanding of visitor behavior, with customizable survey logic to guide respondent flow. The concise survey summary with word clouds helps to easily identify feedback patterns. What’s more, it has Gen AI-based features that summarize surveys and suggest actionable improvements based on respondent feedback.

With its form analytics, it assists in understanding visitor interactions with forms and identifying reasons for drop-offs. It provides insights into fields causing confusion, consuming time, or requiring multiple refills, helping optimize form usability and completion rates.

It has the impressive ability to streamline behavior analysis through the Insight dashboard, providing a detailed overview of pages and segments experiencing the most friction. By quantifying user behavior on a scale of 0-100 via session behavior analysis, it enables targeted analysis of low-experience pages and segments, saving time and effort. 

An added boon is its capability to not only collect user behavior insights but also act on them through other VWO website optimization tools such as A/B testing and Personalization on the same platform.

However, it currently lacks features like user feedback pop-ups.

Note: VWO Insights – Web provides a 30-day full-featured free trial, allowing you to explore the tool and gauge its impact on your CRO process without any financial commitment.

Tool experience:

VWO Insights – Web receives acclaim from users for its intuitive interface and an extensive array of features, encompassing heatmaps, session recordings, form analytics, and surveys. Users find it effortless to extract valuable insights into customer behavior and pinpoint areas for enhancement. The platform’s responsive customer support earns praise for its effectiveness in addressing concerns and offering assistance.

2. Hotjar

Offered features:

Heatmap, session recording, feedback widget, surveys, and user interviews. 

Pricing and plans:

Hotjar categorizes its features into “Observe” (heatmap and recordings), “Ask” (surveys and feedback), and “Engage” (interviews). Each category offers four pricing plans, ranging from a complimentary “Basic” option to a premium “Scale” plan designed for enterprises. Here’s a detailed breakdown:

Observe – Basic – $0/month, Plus – $32/ month, Business – $80/ month, Scale – $171/ month. The Basic plan offers the fewest allowed recordings for capture, while the Scale plan provides the highest limit.

Ask – Basic – $0/month, Plus – $48/ month, Business – $64/ month, Scale – $128/ month. The Basic plan offers the fewest allowed responses to capture, while the Scale plan provides the highest limit.

Engage – Basic – $0/month, Plus – €82.5/ month, Business – €332.5/ month, Scale – custom pricing. The Basic plan offers the fewest allowed interviews to be conducted, while the Scale plan provides the highest limit.

Custom package – Allows you to pick any two plans from the Observe and Ask plan.

Additional considerations:

Hotjar provides essential features for behavior analysis, including funnels for mapping out page journeys and scrutinizing user behavior. Its dashboard offers a quick snapshot of key metrics, and session recordings, heatmaps, and user feedback are readily accessible. Additionally, its AI-based surveys can craft surveys and generate reports for actionable insights.

However, it’s important to note that Hotjar primarily focuses on behavior analytics and may require integration with third-party tools for data tracking, transfer, experimentation, or design changes.

Tool experience:

Users value its functionalities such as heatmaps, session recordings, and click tracking, which aid in visualizing website navigation and assessing landing page effectiveness. Nevertheless, users are dissatisfied with Hotjar’s limited features compared to other marketing and analytics tools, as well as its perceived high pricing.

3. FullStory

Offered features:

Dynamic heatmap, session recordings, funnel visualization 

Pricing and plans:

FullStory’s pricing is not publicly disclosed, but it offers three plans: Business, Advanced, and Enterprise. The Enterprise plan boasts the most features, followed by Advanced and Business. Additionally, FullStory provides a free trial of the Business plan and demos for all plans.

Additional considerations:

FullStory provides insights into user experience, capturing data on page load time, rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks, and custom events. Its “Retention” feature, available for Advanced and Enterprise plans, allows users to analyze user retention and segment users based on their interactions with the site. For instance, metrics like daily active users and hourly active users are available.

However, FullStory lacks built-in survey and form analytics capabilities, instead relying on third-party integration with Survicate for surveys. Another challenge is dealing with the vast amount of data FullStory collects, making it difficult for customers to effectively sift through and analyze.

Tool experience:

Users value its capability to swiftly pinpoint issues, troubleshoot problems, and comprehend user behavior. Nonetheless, some raise concerns about pricing and recommend enhancements in search functionality and data export options.

4. MouseFlow

Offered features:

Session recordings, heatmaps, user feedback, and conversion funnel.  

Pricing:

Mouseflow has six pricing plans:

Free – $0/ month free forever

Starter – $31/ month billed annually 

Growth – $109/ month billed annually 

Business – $219/ month billed annually

Pro – $399/ month billed annually

Enterprise – Custom pricing

It also provides these plans with monthly billing options. The free plan offers the lowest recording quota, tracked website, and data storage, while the enterprise plan offers the most.

Additional considerations:

Mouseflow offers a dynamic heatmap feature with six distinct heatmap reports, capturing movement, attention, scrolling, geo-location, live activity, and clicks. Additionally, it automatically detects forms and tracks their data for analysis. Its proprietary friction score aggregates visitor satisfaction levels based on +7 friction events, providing valuable insights. Moreover, Mouseflow sends notifications for new user feedback responses through third-party apps like Slack and email.

However, it falls short in offering an on-page survey feature and cross-platform tracking functionality for heatmaps.

Tool experience:

Users praise Mouseflow for its user-friendly interface, rapid deployment, and exceptional customer support. However, there are areas for improvement, such as streamlining the appearance of the survey tool, offering greater control over session credit usage, and enhancing survey capabilities.

5. Microsoft Clarity

Offered features:

Heatmap and session recordings

Pricing:

Microsoft Clarity is available for free with all the offered features. 

Additional considerations:

Microsoft Clarity provides unlimited access to heatmap and session recording reports without any charges. Its static heatmap offers insights into click and scroll behavior, while its dashboard quickly summarizes user behavior based on heatmap and session recording data. With over 25 segmentation filters, including Geo and device, users can analyze recordings to identify underlying patterns. Integration with web analytics tools like Google Analytics is seamless, ensuring a comprehensive report on user experience.

However, it lacks features such as surveys, form analytics, and user feedback. It doesn’t support capturing screenshots of dynamic sections like menus that open upon hover or click. Recordings are retained for only 30 days from the time of recording, except for favorite recordings saved on the dashboard.

Tool experience:

Users commonly commend Microsoft Clarity for its simplicity and effectiveness in delivering insights into website user behavior. However, some users have reported minor accuracy issues with the data and occasional processing delays. Additionally, the limited data retention period of 30 days may present challenges for businesses requiring analysis of long-term trends or historical data. Clarity also uses the user data to train their AI/ML models raising concerns from users. 

Choosing the right web user behavior analytics tool: What factors should you consider?

Now that we’ve explored the top behavior analytics tools, let’s delve into what you should consider when selecting one.

a. Full-featured free trial

Obtaining a comprehensive free trial of these tools provides a holistic view of their capabilities and their potential to help you achieve your business objectives. This trial allows you to assess how they integrate with your current third-party tool stack and monitor behavior specific to your business scenario. Furthermore, it enables you to select the most suitable plan from the multiple offered plans. So prioritize the tools that are giving a full-featured free trial. 

b. A comprehensive tool that also allows to take action on the insights

After the behavior analysis, the next natural step is to enhance the user experience based on insights, conduct experiments, or craft personalized experiences to boost the conversion rate. Utilizing a comprehensive tool that allows you to seamlessly transition from observing behavior to implementing the mentioned campaigns directly from the platform can save time, backend resources, and money. Therefore, aim for a tool that offers more than just standalone behavior analysis capabilities.

c. Gen-AI based features

Generative AI is revolutionizing how businesses approach problem-solving, and behavior analysis is no different. Traditional challenges like spending hours on session recordings or manually analyzing survey responses are being addressed with generative AI. For example, platforms like VWO utilize Gen AI-based surveys to summarize survey data and provide actionable suggestions swiftly. Leveraging such tools can help conserve human resources and enhance the accuracy of your CRO efforts.

d. Pricing model based on unique tracked users

Several tools offer quotas for heatmap reports, session recordings, or other features depending on your chosen plan. However, these pricing models individually count multiple data records, such as recordings or heatmap reports from the same user. This limitation may prevent you from obtaining user behavior data from a wider user base. 

It’s preferable to opt for tools that are based on unique users, where the quota is based on unique users rather than data logs. In such cases, multiple data records from the same feature report (heatmap, session recording) are not counted individually, allowing you to gain a broader understanding of user behavior across a wider user base.

The four pointers mentioned above can guide you in selecting a tool that minimizes financial risk, offers comprehensive features, utilizes modern technology, and enables tracking of a broader user base, thereby maximizing the benefits of your behavior analysis efforts.

Wrapping up

With the plethora of options available in the market, it can be a daunting task to choose the right one. However, with our handpicked list of the top five web user behavior analytics tools, along with their features, pricing, key information, and customer feedback, you can make an informed decision. 

One of the standout tools is VWO Insights – Web, which offers a comprehensive suite of features, including dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, form analytics, and surveys, as well as intuitive dashboards and AI-generated insights. It offers a full-featured free trial and offers plans based on unique tracked users monthly. By leveraging the insights provided by such behavior analytics tools, you can optimize your website for maximum conversions and better user engagement.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)