Heap vs. Smartlook

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Heap
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Heap is a web analytics platform captures every user interaction on web iOS with no extra code. The tool allows you to track events and set up funnels to understand user flow and dropoff. It also provides visualization tools to track trends over time.
$0
Up to 10k sessions/month
Smartlook
Score 8.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels. Data is seen on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This is to support clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers,…
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Pricing
HeapSmartlook
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 10k sessions/month
Growth
Starting at $3,600 annually
Up to 300k sessions/year
Pro
Contact Heap Sales
Custom sessions per month and unlimited projects
Premier
Contact Heap Sales
Custom sessions per month
Pro
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Free
Free forever
per month 3000 sessions
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HeapSmartlook
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional DetailsHeap pricing is based on session volume. A session is a period of activity from a single user on your app or website. It can include many pageviews or events.All Smartlook packages support both web and mobile app platforms.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HeapSmartlook
User Ratings
HeapSmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HeapSmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
Heap is well suited for 1. Capture customer journey with session replay 2. Identify customer behaviour and improve overall customer experience 3. Frequent and quick implementations and modifications 4. Comparative analysis for historical marketing insights Heap is not so well suited, if the aim is to capture only analytics data without any goals to improve upon customer experience / targeting appropriate users based on data tracking.
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Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.
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Pros
  • The Auto Capture function does indeed save quite a bit of time, and being able to build new reports off historical data is really valuable.
  • Interface is really intuitive and user-friendly. Much easier to pick up and use than GA.
  • Building reports out on the fly is really quick and easy, allowing you to give right into all kinds of analyses.
  • The Event Definition screen is really useful, giving a quick glance at the most used events, which you then decide to turn into conversions or goals if you want.
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  • Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
  • Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
  • Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.
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Cons
  • I think Heap can improve its onboarding; I would love to see some info that is helpful for someone who isn't in Heap every single day.
  • Sharing dashboards can be tricky, it feels like a huge learning curve that I already have forgotten how to do.
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  • Events -- but I think this is something that we could improve ourselves in our system.
  • Create some suggestions for funnels and heatmaps.
  • Give general insights for a certain period of time, e.g. from Oct. 7th to 12th, 75 users left the checkout step and 60% of them left due to a payment issue. IDK just bringing some ideas!
  • Send an e-mail with main insights.
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Likelihood to Renew
Heap helps me understand key data points without fussing with the formatting of a dashboard. It gives me the benefit of data analyzation without the fuss of the formatting - as well as the ease of sharing data collected with my colleagues
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As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.
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Usability
Sometimes, Heap has issues reconciling similar selectors, and I have not found the manual tagging system to be the most intuitive, especially when best practices are not used when designing the front-end infrastructure. Even so, it helps that the data is unmodified, and all analytics are done through an interfaced layer, so damage and confusion [are] not permanent.
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Smartlook is very intuitive and simple for an average programmer (I don't know if it will be as simple for a normal user). We have never had to resort to looking for information on the web or ask for help for something we didn't understand or didn't work as expected.
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Reliability and Availability
I've never run into any issues with Heap's availability, Heap is always there when I need it. I haven't run into any issues like application errors or unplanned outages during my 2+ years of using Heap. Each and every time I log in to Heap I have a completely functional experience
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No answers on this topic
Performance
On a scale from 1-10, Heap loads pages fairly quickly. The only time I experience delays is when I am loading a graph with perhaps too many events or filters on the page. But in terms of creating or searching for events or viewing reports, I don't ever experience a lag.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Heap support has allowed us to troubleshoot and test a lot of different items. Their support team is always helpful and friendly, even when we come to them with the most complicated questions. I think this greatly improves the value proposition of the product because their support team is knowledgable and friendly.
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I am always very happy when a company offers the option to use online chat, as I do not like to call customer support and writing an email is just too slow and cumbersome. I did not even expect a reply right away, yet it took the customer support team less than a minute to respond to my problem.
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Implementation Rating
The implementation was smooth and easy. The Heap team helped us with implementation and it went great! Within a few weeks, we were fully up and running and utilizing the platform to its full capability. This is an additional thing that has made this platform so great and we couldn't recommend it enough.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Heap is better because its easy to use, easy to install. With Heap you just add a snippet of tracking code to your header, instead of having to instrument each event like you do with other tools.
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Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some custom dashboards.
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Scalability
The most challenging part of using Heap in a growing organization is the naming and structure in which reports and dashboards are organized. I work within the marketing department and our Heap leader internally works within the IT/Product department, which makes it challenging because we often don't speak the same language, so the learning curve has been steep without any specific use-case examples to leverage online.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • It has helped us make decisions on what products to scope for our MVP based on the usage data.
  • It's allowed us to measure success with our beta product.
  • It's helped us view our conversion rates in an easy and usable manner.
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  • We have increased the conversion rate from the beginning till now with 120%.
  • We redesigned our landing pages and decreased the bounce rate by 41%.
  • We rethinked and redesigned our menu structure and internal site linking to increase the time users spent on our site based on the data we got from Smartlook analysis.
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ScreenShots

Heap Screenshots

Screenshot of Dashboard in Heap (Use to get Product or User Behavior Insights)Screenshot of Effort Analysis provides the first-ever quantitative measurement of user friction, capturing the difficulty users face when moving through every step of every user flow across the digital experience.Screenshot of Heap Illuminate looks for the most common events between two steps in a funnel and generates a Top Events table that displays how well paths including different events convert to the next step so you can understand how that behavior is helping or hurting conversion.Screenshot of From Top Events you can choose an event and use Path Comparison to fork your funnel and see how the selected behavior impacts conversion downstream.

Smartlook Screenshots

Screenshot of HeatmapsScreenshot of RecordingsScreenshot of DashboardsScreenshot of EventsScreenshot of FunnelsScreenshot of Analytics for websites & mobile apps