Three behavior tools get mentioned together so often that they start to sound like one product: heatmaps, session replay and form analytics. They are not interchangeable. Each one answers a different question about your visitors, and most comparison guides only ever compare two of them. This guide puts the three side by side, tells you which question each one answers, and helps you pick the one to start with. When you are ready to compare actual products, three separate roundups exist for that: one for heatmap tools, one for session replay tools and one for form analytics tools.<\/p>\n
If your question is about a page, start with a heatmap. If your question is about one confusing visit, open a replay. If your question is about a form that loses people, read the form report. Most teams end up using more than one, because the questions build on each other. The order you start with depends on the problem you can see first.<\/p>\n
| <\/th>\n | Heatmap<\/th>\n | Session replay<\/th>\n | Form analytics<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it collects<\/td>\n | Many visits piled onto one page picture<\/td>\n | One recorded visit, played back<\/td>\n | Starts, submissions and drop-offs on a form<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| The question it answers<\/td>\n | Where do people click and scroll?<\/td>\n | What did this person do?<\/td>\n | Where does the form lose people?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Best when<\/td>\n | You want to judge a page, headline or layout<\/td>\n | A visit looks odd and you want to see it<\/td>\n | People reach a form but do not submit<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
| Example finding<\/td>\n | Most clicks land below the fold<\/td>\n | A visitor clicked the button three times then left<\/td>\n | Half the visitors stop at the email field<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n None of these is better than the others in the abstract. They answer different questions, and the tool that seems redundant on a calm day becomes the one that explains a problem on a bad one.<\/p>\n When to start with a heatmap<\/h2>\nStart with a heatmap when the question is about the page, not about one person. Which headline gets the clicks. Which part of a long page nobody scrolls down to. Whether the button is where people expect it. A heatmap stacks many visits into one picture, so you are judging the page the way the crowd actually uses it, not the way you think they do.<\/p>\n Heatmaps need traffic before they are useful. A picture built from a handful of visits shows almost nothing, and a fresh page with little data will look thin at first. That is the data doing what it does: give the page time to gather a sample before you judge it.<\/p>\n When to start with session replay<\/h2>\nStart with session replay when a visit did something you cannot explain from the numbers. Someone reached the form and left. Someone clicked the same control again and again. Someone came from an ad and never opened a second page. A replay plays that one visit back, page by page, so you can see the clicks, the scrolling, the pauses and the moment they left instead of guessing from a chart.<\/p>\n Replays are strongest as an investigation tool for individual visits. If your team already knows a page is losing people and wants to see the exact step, a replay shows what the step looked like in practice. If your question is instead “which part of the page gets used”, the heatmap is the faster tool, because it does not require you to know which visit to open first.<\/p>\n When to start with form analytics<\/h2>\nStart with form analytics when the pattern is already clear: visitors reach the form, and they do not submit. The form report counts how many visitors started the form, how many submitted and how many left without finishing, and it can show the exact field where people stop. That tells you the shape of the drop-off without watching dozens of replays to find it.<\/p>\n Form analytics is the quiet workhorse of the three. It does not record the values people type, only the interaction pattern, so it answers the funnel question of where people give up while staying light to run.<\/p>\n How the three fit together<\/h2>\nThe three tools do not compete, they layer. You can see the same problem from three sides:<\/p>\n
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