Alternatives to Fullstory

What changes when you move off Fullstory

Fullstory runs only as a hosted service, so leaving is a date rather than a server to switch off. Two things decide how hard that date is. The first is the plan: prices for Business, Advanced and Enterprise are given on request, and the plans page compares selected features rather than all of them. The second is the unit, sessions rather than pageviews or events, which is why most rows show a unit instead of a difference.

Capture works differently too. The help centre says a session cannot be recorded without the first-party fs_uid cookie, which lasts a year, so a consent banner that blocks cookies blocks the recording. A tool that counts pageviews without a cookie, as some in the tables do, reports visitors your replay tool never captured.

Region is a one-way door as well. New accounts sit in the US data center by default and an EU data center in Google Cloud is available on request, but the vendor says an existing account cannot move between them, and notes that some collected information is still transferred outside the EEA and the UK.

What to check before you switch

1. Which export your plan has. Segment Export writes individuals or events as gzipped CSV, JSON or NDJSON, and the help centre lists it on the Advanced and Enterprise plans, set up by an admin or architect.
2. How far back the data goes. FullstoryFree keeps 12 months of analytics and 12 months of session replay; on paid plans retention is part of the contract.
3. What happens at the limit. Capture pauses when the account reaches its session quota and resumes in the next cycle. Overage blocks of 100,000 sessions are opt-in and capped at ten per cycle.
4. What the numbers mean afterwards. A session here is a recorded session, and a pageview in a traffic tool is not, so nothing you export lines up row for row.

What a web analytics tool will and will not answer

The second table exists because few replay tools are left in this directory, and people leaving one of them often move to the traffic side instead. A web analytics tool counts pages, visits and sources for everyone, keeps its history for years rather than one contract, and loads a far smaller script. It will not replay a session or show a rage click, because it never records the page.

That trade works when the weekly question is where traffic comes from and which pages carry it, and replay was something the team opened twice a quarter. It does not work when support or design work starts by watching what one person did.

Which of these can import your data

Nothing on this page reads a Fullstory export: Crazy Egg, Microsoft Clarity and the traffic tools below them all start counting when their script goes live.

Their importers point at Google instead. Crazy Egg connects a Google Analytics 4 property and pulls aggregated dimensions and metrics into its Web Analytics dashboard, keeping the 2,000 largest values per dimension and storing no raw events. Microsoft Clarity connects one Google Analytics property per project and displays that data inside Clarity, which is a live link rather than a copy. In the second table, TinyAnalytics imports Google Analytics 4 through a Google sign-in and reads exports from Plausible, Umami and Simple Analytics.

Questions and answers

Can I take my Fullstory history with me?

Partly, and only on some plans. Segment Export writes individuals or events to file on Advanced and Enterprise. Replays are not portable, so what leaves is a table of sessions and events.

Will the new tool show the same numbers?

No. Fullstory counts sessions it managed to capture, and capture depends on a cookie. A tool that counts every pageview, or one that keeps no identifier, draws that line elsewhere, and bot filtering differs by vendor. The cookieless page covers the methods.

Do I have to remove the Fullstory snippet to try something else?

No. Two scripts on the same page count separately, which is what an overlap period is for. Keep capturing until the new dashboard looks right, then remove the snippet.