Choosing the Right Session Recording Tool

Choosing a session recording tool is one of the most impactful decisions for product and UX teams. The right tool helps you understand user behavior, find bugs faster, and make data-driven improvements. The wrong one leaves you drowning in data without actionable insights.

In this comparison, we'll look at three popular options: Hotjar, FullStory, and Revisit. We'll be honest about the strengths and limitations of each—including our own—so you can make the best choice for your team.

Quick Comparison at a Glance

Highlighted rows show features where competitors have an advantage over Revisit.

Hotjar: The Established Player

Hotjar has been a household name in session recording since 2014. It's known for its accessible interface and affordable entry point, making it popular with startups and small marketing teams.

Hotjar Strengths

• Best-in-class feedback tools — Surveys, polls, and feedback widgets are Hotjar's killer feature. No other tool does this as well built-in.
• Hotjar Engage — Built-in user interview scheduling and video calls. Recruit participants directly from your site.
• Easy to set up — Quick installation, minimal technical knowledge required. Non-technical marketers love it.
• Free tier available — Generous free plan for small sites or testing.
• Clean heatmaps — Visually intuitive click, scroll, and move heatmaps.
• Highlights & Collections — Save and organize notable moments from recordings for team collaboration.

Hotjar Limitations

• Session sampling — Doesn't capture 100% of sessions by default; coverage depends on plan and traffic volume
• Session limits on lower tiers — Can be restrictive for high-traffic sites; very short sessions may be skipped
• Basic AI features — AI Hotjar Ask is limited compared to dedicated AI-first tools
• No mobile app support — Web only, no native iOS/Android analytics
• Less suited for technical debugging — Great for UX, not for deep technical issues

Best for: Marketing and UX teams who need qualitative feedback tools (surveys, polls, user interviews) alongside basic session recordings. If gathering user opinions is as important as watching behavior, Hotjar is hard to beat.

FullStory: The Enterprise Solution

FullStory positions itself as an enterprise-grade digital experience intelligence platform. It's comprehensive, powerful, and comes with enterprise-level pricing to match.

FullStory Strengths

• OmniSearch — The most powerful session search in the industry. Filter by any event, element, user attribute, or behavior retroactively.
• Product Analytics & Funnels — Built-in funnel analysis, conversion tracking, and journey mapping. Revisit doesn't offer this.
• Mobile App Analytics — Full iOS and Android support with native SDKs. Revisit is web-only.
• StoryAI — AI-powered summaries, friction detection, and natural language queries across sessions.
• Frustration signals — Built-in rage click, dead click, and error click detection with visual overlays.
• Journeys — Visualize how users flow through your product across multiple sessions.
• Console/Network debugging — See errors and network requests alongside session replays.
• Enterprise security — SOC 2 Type II, extensive compliance certifications, dedicated support.

FullStory Limitations

• Expensive — Pricing is custom/enterprise, often prohibitive for smaller teams. No public pricing.
• Complex interface — Powerful but steep learning curve
• No built-in surveys/feedback — Unlike Hotjar, lacks qualitative feedback widgets
• Overkill for many teams — Feature-rich but not always necessary; can lead to data overload
• Event-based AI — StoryAI analyzes behavioral event data, not literal video frames

Best for: Enterprise teams with dedicated analytics resources and budget for comprehensive digital experience intelligence and powerful search capabilities.

Revisit: AI-First Session Intelligence

Revisit takes a different approach: AI-first session analysis. Instead of just recording sessions and leaving analysis to you, Revisit's AI actually watches your recordings and tells you what matters.

Revisit Strengths

• True AI video analysis — AI watches actual MP4 recordings, not just event metadata
• Natural language chat — Ask "Why are users abandoning checkout?" and get visual answers
• Auto-generated timelines — AI creates chapter breakdowns for every session
• Interest scoring — Sessions rated 1-5 so you know which are worth watching
• GitHub + Jira integration — AI can auto-create issues with full context
• Live session streaming — Watch users in real-time, no waiting
• BYOK option — Bring your own Gemini API key for zero AI markup
• Privacy-first — Automatic PII masking, DNT/GPC respect, GDPR/CCPA compliant
• Transparent pricing — Clear per-visitor pricing, no surprise enterprise quotes

Revisit Limitations — Let's Be Honest

We're biased, but we also want to be honest. Here's where Revisit may not be the best fit:

• No surveys, polls, or feedback widgets — If you need to collect qualitative feedback directly from users, Hotjar is the better choice.
• No product analytics or funnels — We don't offer conversion funnel analysis, journey mapping, or retention metrics. FullStory does.
• No mobile app support — Revisit is web-only. FullStory has native iOS/Android SDKs.
• No user interview tools — Hotjar Engage lets you schedule and conduct video interviews. We don't.
• Less powerful search — FullStory's OmniSearch is more powerful for complex filtering across large datasets.
• Newer platform — We're smaller and newer than Hotjar or FullStory.
• AI requires tokens — Advanced AI analysis uses Gemini tokens (BYOK or pay-as-you-go).

Best for: Product teams, developers, and UX researchers who want AI to surface insights automatically—and who don't need surveys or mobile app analytics.

Deep Dive: AI Capabilities Compared

AI capabilities vary significantly between tools. Here's an honest comparison of what each offers:

Note: FullStory's StoryAI is a powerful AI feature that analyzes behavioral event data to surface insights, friction points, and answer questions. The key difference with Revisit is that Revisit's AI analyzes actual video frames (MP4), while StoryAI works with reconstructed event/DOM data. Both approaches have merit—event-based analysis can be faster and more structured, while video analysis can catch visual context that events miss.

Privacy & Compliance Comparison

Privacy is non-negotiable for any analytics tool. Here's how the three compare:

Developer Experience Comparison

For engineering teams, integration quality matters. Here's what we can verify about each tool:

Note: Some technical details (network capture, console logs, script sizes) vary by plan and configuration. We've focused on features we can verify from public documentation. When in doubt, check each vendor's current documentation or contact their sales team for specifics.

Which Tool Should You Choose?

Based on our analysis, here's our honest recommendation:

Conclusion

All three tools—Hotjar, FullStory, and Revisit—are legitimate options for session recording and analytics. Each has genuine strengths: Hotjar excels at qualitative feedback with surveys and polls, FullStory offers powerful search/segmentation with StoryAI summaries, and Revisit provides AI that analyzes actual video frames.

The right choice depends on your team's priorities. Consider: Do you need built-in surveys (Hotjar)? Powerful event-based search and enterprise compliance (FullStory)? AI that watches videos and creates visual outputs (Revisit)? There's no universally "best" tool—only the best fit for your specific needs.

A note on honesty: As the Revisit team, we've tried to be fair in this comparison. We've updated claims about competitors based on their current documentation (including FullStory's StoryAI). If you spot anything outdated, let us know—we'd rather be accurate than favorable.

Whatever you choose, the most important thing is to actually use your session data. The best tool is the one that helps you understand your users and build better products.