Been looking into session replay tools for our app, but most seem pretty invasive with data collection.
Trying to balance getting useful insights with respecting user privacy. What tools have worked for you without being creepy about it?
We switched to LogRocket after having similar concerns. They let you mask sensitive data pretty granularly and you can turn off text capture entirely if needed.
The insights are still solid for understanding user flow issues. We caught a checkout bug that was costing us 8% of conversions just by watching how people got stuck.
Hotjar has decent privacy controls too but the free tier limits are annoying if you’re testing at scale.
FullStory has privacy settings that let you block recording on certain pages. Pretty basic but it works.
Mixpanel actually added session replay recently and it’s been solid for us. The privacy angle is better than most because you can set it to only capture specific events instead of everything.
We use it on our onboarding flow and it helped us spot where users were dropping off without recording their personal info or text inputs. The setup takes maybe 30 minutes and you can toggle what gets captured pretty easily.
Found this walkthrough that shows how to set up the privacy controls properly:
Biggest win was catching a button that wasn’t working on mobile - cost us about 12% of signups for two weeks before we spotted it in the replays.
Skip the tools. Just add basic click tracking instead.
I stick with PostHog for this because you can self host it and control all the data yourself.
The replay feature lets you mask anything sensitive and you decide what gets recorded. Plus having the analytics and replays in one place makes it easier to spot issues without switching between tools.
Microsoft Clarity is free and lets you block specific elements from recording. You can exclude form fields, sensitive areas, or entire page sections. The heatmaps show you interaction patterns without capturing actual user data. We use it alongside our conversion tracking and it caught a mobile navigation issue that was killing our signup flow. Setup takes 10 minutes and the privacy controls are straightforward. No usage limits either.