FullStory Alternatives: Five Top Analytics Tools to Choose From
Interested in FullStory but curious to know what alternatives are out there? Learn how the other services compare.
If you’re shopping around for a mobile app analytics platform before biting the bullet with Fullstory, you’ve landed in the right place. FullStory is a robust web and analytics tool but there are platforms out there that may specialize in one of the features you want. Or there are other analytics solutions that might fit your needs and budget better.
In this article, we will go over 5 of the best FullStory alternatives on the market, explain what each one does best and how they compare to help you narrow down your choices.
What are the best FullStory alternatives?
- UXCam: Best for detailed mobile app analytics and powerful integrations.
- Amplitude. Best for AI-powered future outcomes predictions.
- Chartbeat. Best for content performance insights.
- Mouseflow. Best teams on a budget who need the basics.
- Datadog. Best for monitoring product performance and identifying frontend issues.
What is FullStory used for?
FullStory dubs itself a “Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platform” using web and mobile analytics to understand user behavior. They combine quantitative and qualitative data to help businesses understand the big picture of their user experience.
FullStory comprises of three main offerings:
- Complete Data Capture. As the name implies, FullStory auto logs all aspects of users’ interactions such as scroll, swipe, click, and pageview.
- Product Analytics. Their tightly packed visual dashboards organize the data in a way that makes it easy to map out sales funnels, track common paths, uncover behavior patterns, and identify friction points.
- Session Insights. Advanced record and playback tools enable customer experience (CX) teams to capture user sessions across browsers, interfaces, and devices.
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Why is it worth considering FullStory alternatives?
FullStory is used by enterprises and large organizations but the platform has a few shortcomings:
Mobile integrations. While FullStory works for mobile apps, the web/mobile hybrid platform doesn’t cover every framework, particularly with non-native tech stacks (e.g. Flutter, React Native). So if you’re a mobile app team, consider using a mobile-first analytics platform.
Pricing. Users say their website pricing is a bit opaque. FullStory.com seems to be more geared towards enterprise and larger organizations. If you qualify for their scholarship program, startup plans can start at $2028 per year, which is still a bit pricey if you’re just starting out.
Learning curve. Creating custom events requires technical expertise and new users who aren’t data-savvy will need a bit of time trying to understand the platform.
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Comparing the best alternatives to FullStory
1. UXCam vs FullStory
G2 rating: 4.7/5
Cost: Free for up to 10,000 monthly sessions.
UXCam is the leader in mobile app analytics, while FullStory is a leader in web/mobile hybrid. The key difference in performance is that UXCam is built exclusively for mobile apps only. So if you’ve got an app or are thinking about investing in mobile in the future, UXCam is a reliable SDK since it was built for mobile-specific data.
Quick humble brag here — UXCam is listed among 80 other reliable SDKs in the Official Google SDK Index, a resource that enables app developers to see the health of an app before they put it into their product.
The solution serves the needs of mobile teams empowering them with actionable in-app user insights. With it, you can dig deep — from identifying the most common patterns in user behavior to getting a truly granular view of how individual users are engaging with your app.
Product, growth, engineering, and support teams use UXCam for:
- Reviewing auto-captured user sessions
- Discovering how users interact with app screens
- Understanding the reasons behind low conversion and retention rates.
- Capturing where users are dropping off
- Identifying early signs of frustration with an app
- Tracking UI freezes and crashes
- Prioritizing issue resolving
All of these are made possible with UXCam’s built-in tools:
- Session & event replays
- Issue analytics
- Funnel analytics
- Embedded event analytics
- Screen flow analytics
- Heatmap analytics
Why is UXCam the best alternative to FullStory?
Unlike FullStory, UXCam can be integrated with both native and hybrid frameworks. They also provide session replay, heatmaps and user journeys, and auto-captures bugs and user frustration signals for mobile.
As a mobile-friendly solution, UXCam’s offers push notifications, so your support and UX teams can connect with specific user segments more easily.
One of the challenges of FullStory is that you need to be pretty data-savvy to use it. In terms of reporting, UXCam’s drag and drop team dashboard is easy for non-technical team members to use. The dashboard’s widget wizard contains a library of pre-configured dashboards. This allows everyone to quickly set up their mobile app dashboards.
The app analytics solution is also know for its great customer support, which does not just include customer success managers, but also SDK specialists, and customer success engineers who are all specialized in various mobile SDKs.
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2. Amplitude vs FullStory
G2 rating: 4.5/5
Cost: Free for up to 10 million monthly events and core analytics features.
Amplitude offers three separate products serving different goals: Amplitude Analytics, Amplitude Experiment, and Amplitude Recommend. We’ll focus on Amplitude Analytics as the FullStory alternative.
What does Amplitude have to offer?
- Core analytics features
- Behavioral reports
- Digital journey mapping
- Real-time performance tracking
- Conversion drivers identification (AI-powered feature)
- Collaboration tools
- Predictive analytics (AI-powered feature)
What makes Amplitude a good alternative to FullStory?
Alongside collecting behavioral data that helps product teams understand how users navigate their apps, Amplitude Analytics uses the power of machine learning to forecast behavior patterns. FullStory won’t do it for you.
Amplitude Recommend is an audience segmentation tool that helps you personalize user experiences. By clustering users into cohorts, you can apply predictions and recommendations for a particular group.
While machine learning is cool, you’ll have to see if having a sophisticated robot helper is worth it. Amplitude doesn’t publish prices on their Growth plan on their site. But starting plans could be up to $12,000/year.
3. Chartbeat vs FullStory
G2 rating: 4.4/5
Cost: Chartbeat doesn’t offer a free version. For pricing information, reach out to the Chartbeat team.
Media companies like Refinery 29 and Rolling Stone choose Chartbeat over FullStory for its dedicated content analytics toolkit designed for the news industry and content-driven sites. The platform identifies the best-performing content pieces and displays audience insights, like demographics, device types, and interests. Unlike FullStory, Chartbeat offers headline testing and content optimization tools.
Rather than focusing on the ‘user’, Chartbeat zeros in on ‘the reader’. You can use Chartbeat to filter data based on authors, sections, referrers, traffic sources, and so on. You can also use Chartbeat for apps to better understand how readers are engaging with your content.
Why is Chartbeat a good alternative to FullStory?
The company calls its product ‘Twitter search’ for performance reporting, referring to its capability to deliver instant insights into everything happening on your site. Contrary to FullStory, Chartbeat focuses primarily on content insights rather than pure product analytics.
If you’re looking for a performance analytics tool, you’d better pay attention to the other tools on this list. But if you’re a publisher, this product is right for you.
4. Mouseflow vs FullStory
G2 rating: 4.7/5
Cost: Free for up to 500 recordings per month. Pain plans start at $29/month.
Built for websites, is a behavior analytics platform that focuses on improving conversions. Like FullStory, they offer heatmaps and session replays. The web analytics toolkit includes:
- Heatmaps
- Session replays
- Funnel analytics
- Field-by-field form analytics
- Feedback tool
Why is Mouseflow a good alternative to FullStory?
While FullStory is a favorite among enterprises with big budgets, Mouseflow is a favorite among early-stage startups and small businesses looking for an affordable, basic tool. Unlike the other tools on this list, Mouseflow is heavily focused on website CRO.
One of the biggest differences between Mouseflow and FullStory is simplicity. Mouseflow is primarily used by customers for their recording and heatmap tools and is not a full user behavior solution with both quantitative and qualitative insights. FullStory has a more robust feature set for a deeper look into user behavior.
The main disadvantage of Mouseflow, if you’re looking for a FullStory alternative, is that they aren’t for iPhone or Android mobile apps. It’s an ideal tool if you want to increase conversions on your blog or online store.
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5. Datadog vs FullStory
G2 rating: 4.3/5
Cost: Datadog lets users purchase specific features based on their needs — the resulting product price depends on the features selected.
Datadog’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) is analytics software that helps product teams uncover UI issues promptly, optimize frontend performance, and get insights into end-user behavior. Datadog is primarily designed for engineers, whereas FullStory is meant to be used by the whole product team. To use Datadog you’ll have to be fluent in their query syntax. It’s not the most user-friendly tool and the dashboards aren’t meant for non-technical stakeholders.
With Datadog’s RUM, product teams can:
- Monitor user journeys
- Collect real-time product insights
- Keep track of the application’s frontend performance
- Identify the root cause for poor user experience
- Automatically segment application errors
- Analyze product usage by a range of dimensions
- Simulate user journeys and correlate results with real-time digital experiences
Why is Datadog a good alternative to FullStory?
If you’re looking into FullStory for performance monitoring, detecting problems with deployments, and measuring the overall performance of your app — consider using Datadog instead. It’s a monitoring and analytics tool specially made for IT and DevOps teams.
Unlike FullStory, Datadog has a transparent pricing plan based on what you need e.g. infrastructure, CI visibility, real user monitoring, and much more. Their plans are carefully laid out by use type e.g. mobile, browser, browser premium which makes it easier to estimate a quote. FullStory, on the other hand, has a very opaque pricing page and you have to contact them to get a quote based on your needs.
Choosing a FullStory alternative
As you’ve read from our list, there are options out there if you’ve got a tighter budget or want a company that specializes in one of FullStory’s special features.
Author: Adelina Karpenkova
Adelina is a content marketer and a freelance writer with a passion for working with mission-driven organizations. For years, she’s been helping SaaS companies strengthen their online presence with the help of quality content.
Originally published at https://uxcam.com.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
