10 Best Digital Experience Monitoring Tools
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 27 tools reviewed.
There are tons of digital experience monitoring tools available, and identifying the best one can be a challenge. You want to enhance your website's performance and user satisfaction by swiftly identifying and addressing any digital inefficiencies - and need to find the right tool for the job. I've got you covered! In this post, I draw from my personal experience with researching and testing leading CX software to share this list of digital experience monitoring tools.
What is a Digital Experience Monitoring Tool?
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools are software solutions designed to assess, monitor, and optimize the user experience on digital platforms such as websites, mobile apps, and other online services. They perform crucial functions including real-time monitoring of user interactions and system performance, full-stack visibility from the user interface to backend systems, and rapid detection of performance issues with alerting mechanisms to enable swift resolution.
DEM tools are invaluable in industries such as e-commerce, digital marketing, IT, and any industry where a stellar digital experience directly impacts customer retention and business growth. Businesses use them to identify potential issues, measure user interactions, and provide actionable insights for improved customer satisfaction and engagement.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Digital Experience Monitoring Tools
To help you find the digital experience monitoring tool for you, I’ve provided detailed summaries of my top 10 choices and explained why I included each option in this list. I’ve also highlighted their noteworthy features, pros & cons, and best use cases to help you find the best option for your needs.
Plus, I’ve included 17 additional options below, in case you’d like even more choices to consider.
Dynatrace is a software intelligence platform that provides observability and advanced AIOps capabilities. By leveraging artificial intelligence, Dynatrace can offer real-time insights into your applications, infrastructure, and user experience.
Why I Picked Dynatrace: I selected Dynatrace for its exceptional ability to utilize artificial intelligence for in-depth data analysis and anomaly detection. It additionally combines AIOps with digital experience monitoring and application performance monitoring in a single platform. For example, Dynatrace's AI analyzes the impact of performance issues on end-users and business processes. It prioritizes problems based on their impact, severity, and the affected user groups or transactions. This allows IT teams to focus their efforts on resolving critical issues that have the most significant impact on user experience and business outcomes.
Dynatrace's AI-powered insights also focus on user experience analysis, capturing and analyzing user interactions and behavior. It provides insights into user journey paths, clickstreams, session anomalies, and conversion rates.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include automatic and intelligent observability, application performance monitoring, business analytics, and digital experience monitoring (DEM). It is also known for its Davis AI engine, which offers automatic use cases, automated problem resolution, performance optimization recommendations, and root cause analysis.
Integrations include GitLab, PagerDuty, JFrog, xMatters, Gremlin, Akamas, NeoLoad, and LaunchDarkly.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Allows users to see end-to-end transactions
- Rich AI capabilities for data analysis and anomaly detection
- Offers responsive live chat customer support services for users
Cons:
- Customization can be complex and require expert knowledge
- Interface can be overwhelming for beginners
- Smaller organizations cannot use synthetic monitoring
Glassbox is a digital experience analytics platform that provides real-time session replay to aid businesses in understanding user behavior. Its capacity to offer in-depth visibility into customer interactions on apps and websites makes it an essential tool for businesses focusing on customer experience optimization.
Why I picked Glassbox: I chose Glassbox for its strong capabilities in capturing user sessions as they interact with a website or mobile app. The session replay feature then allows businesses to visually replay these sessions, providing a pixel-perfect playback of the user's actions, including mouse movements, clicks, form inputs, and scrolling behavior.
Session replay is also available in real-time, allowing businesses to monitor user sessions as they happen. By observing how users interact with a website or app in real-time, businesses can gain valuable information about user engagement, interests, and interactions with specific elements or features. This capacity to reveal customer behavior patterns sets Glassbox apart from many other tools in the market.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include user journey mapping, collaboration and sharing features, conversion funnel analysis, and issue identification and troubleshooting. GlassBox additionally ensures data privacy and compliance by allowing businesses to mask or exclude sensitive information during session replay.
Integrations include Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, GetFeedback, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Medallia, Jira, Slack, Adobe Target, and Optimizely.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides robust analytics
- Business flow feature helps track KPIs
- Funnels are searchable and easy-to-use
Cons:
- Requires a learning curve to fully utilize its features
- May not be scaled for smaller businesses
- No transparent pricing structure
Hotjar is a digital experience monitoring tool renowned for its focus on visualization. It allows you to track and understand user behavior on your website through heatmaps, session recordings, and conversion funnels, allowing website owners and marketers to gain insights into how users interact with their website.
Why I picked Hotjar: I selected Hotjar because of its unique and visually-appealing way of representing user interactions. For example, Hotjar offers different types of heatmaps, including click heatmaps, move heatmaps, and scroll heatmaps. It additionally offers session recordings, which are video recordings of individual user sessions on your website. These recordings capture the user's mouse movement, clicks, scrolls, and other interactions, allowing you to replay and analyze their behavior.
By leveraging these visualizations, website owners and marketers can gain valuable insights into user behavior and make data-driven decisions to improve website design, layout, and overall user experience.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include conversion funnels, form analytics, feedback polls, surveys, behavior analytics, multi-device support, features to help recruit user testers, and feedback buttons that can be embedded into your websites.
Integrations include Slack, Jira, HubSpot, Asana, Trello, WordPress, Shopify, Webhooks, Mixpanel, and Google Analytics.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- One-stop tool for qualitative website analysis
- Offers detailed user data and actionable insights
- User-friendly, intuitive interface
Cons:
- Data storage is limited in the basic plan
- Advanced features only available at higher pricing tiers
- No free version for commercial use
AppDynamics, a part of Cisco, is a DEM solution provider that focuses on end-user monitoring (EUM) and tracking business transactions. It also offers end-to-end application performance management (APM) to help businesses ensure peak application performance.
Why I picked AppDynamics: AppDynamics made it to my list because of its extensive focus on application performance management (APM) and its clear emphasis on end-user experience and trend analysis. For example, AppDynamics provides real-time visibility into application performance metrics, transaction tracing, code-level diagnostics, and database monitoring. This allows organizations to identify performance bottlenecks, inefficient code, and database issues impacting application performance.
AppDynamics is also designed to handle large-scale, distributed environments. It can monitor applications across multiple servers, containers, and cloud platforms, including web, mobile, and desktop. This provides visibility into the performance of distributed components, enabling organizations to optimize performance in complex and dynamic architectures.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include end-to-end transaction tracing, alerting and proactive issue detection, cloud and microservice monitoring, and dynamic baselining. AppDynamics also allows monitoring and tracking of critical business transactions within applications. It can provide insights into transaction flow, response times, and performance metrics.
Integrations include Medallia, Moogsoft Platform, Contentsquare, Zenduty, SquaredUp, ThousandEyes, Sainapse, Squadcase, Atlassian, and Slack.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides easy-to-understand graphics and visual data
- Offers customizable alert thresholds
- Simple, straightforward user interface
Cons:
- Advanced features require a steep learning curve
- Business transaction tracking can be slow
- Can be complex for beginners
Datadog is a unified, cloud-based monitoring software that provides visibility into application performance, infrastructure, and services. It particularly excels at comprehensive cloud monitoring, offering a holistic view of your entire digital ecosystem.
Why I picked Datadog: I chose Datadog for its impressive ability to deliver comprehensive overviews of cloud environments. Its unified approach sets it apart from other tools, providing a one-stop solution for cloud-based monitoring needs. For example, it alerts users on the global performance and availability of endpoints, monitors and maintains user SLAs, and validates HTTP requests to user services.
Datadog's real user monitoring (RUM) feature also collects and analyzes data from actual web application users. It provides insights into user behavior, page load times, browser breakdowns, and geographic distribution, and it overall helps optimize web application performance from a user-centric perspective.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include infrastructure monitoring, log management, data visualization and dashboards, collaboration and alerting features, and an application performance monitoring tool. It also provides synthetic monitoring, which allows organizations to simulate user interactions and monitor the performance of critical transactions and workflows.
Integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitLab, Jira, Workday, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cisco, Gartner IT, and Google Cloud.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Unified monitoring across applications and infrastructure
- Extensive cloud platform integrations
- Full-stack observability
Cons:
- Advanced log management features require higher-tier plans
- Might be overwhelming for beginners
- Higher cost compared to some competitors
Totango is a customer success platform designed to provide real-time, actionable insights about customers. It aims to assist businesses with customer success management by driving customer engagement, reducing churn, and maximizing customer lifetime value.
Why I picked Totango: I chose Totango for this list because of its ability to simplify complex customer success processes using a proactive and goal-oriented approach to managing customer relationships. For example, Totango provides tools for businesses to engage with customers proactively. This enables personalized and automated communications, such as in-app messaging, emails, and notifications, to nurture customer relationships, provide support, and drive desired actions.
Totango also enables businesses to monitor the health and engagement of their customers. It tracks various metrics and signals to assess customer satisfaction, product adoption, and usage patterns. This helps organizations identify at-risk customers and take proactive measures to mitigate churn and drive upsell opportunities.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include customer segmentation, role-specific success metrics, customer success workflows and playbooks, customer lifecycle management capabilities, visual dashboards, and custom reports. Totango also facilitates collaboration among customer success teams by providing a centralized platform for sharing customer information, tasks, and notes.
Integrations include Salesforce, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, HubSpot, Jira, Monday, Tableau, Stripe, Zoom, and Google Analytics.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Automated processes free up team time for other obligations
- Helps keep track of client information and activities
- User-friendly, intuitive interface
Cons:
- Customer health parameters are not stackable
- High level of customization might lead to complexity
- Lack of transparent pricing
Contentsquare is an analytics platform that provides insights into customer behavior throughout their digital journey. Its ability to visualize customer interactions and experiences in a clear and digestible format makes it an ideal tool for businesses that need to understand and improve their customer journey.
Why I picked Contentsquare: I selected Contentsquare for its advanced customer journey analytics capabilities. Among many available tools, it stands out for its visual representation of customer interactions, making its analysis more intuitive and insightful. Such capabilities include customizable dashboards and reports, which allow businesses to create visual representations of customer journey data, making it easier to identify trends, patterns, and actionable insights. Reports can also be generated and shared with stakeholders to facilitate data-driven decision-making.
ContentSquare additionally allows businesses to visualize and map out the typical user journey. This helps organizations identify the different touchpoints and steps users go through, such as landing pages, product pages, checkout processes, and more, in order to identify areas of opportunity or friction.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include user flow analysis, conversion funnel analytics, segmentation and personalization features, session replays, and heatmap visualizations. ContentSquare's analytics platform also provides behavioral insights by analyzing user interactions and engagement patterns.
Integrations include Google Analytics, Tableau, AWS, Salesforce, Optimizely, Qualtrics XM, and Adobe Analytics.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides consistent live customer support services for users
- Allows for macro and micro-level analytics
- Offers unique metrics and actionable insights
Cons:
- Might be too feature-rich for small businesses with straightforward needs
- The tool may have a steep learning curve
- Pricing isn't transparent
ControlUp is a real-time IT management solution designed to provide insights into IT infrastructure. It offers a single-pane-of-glass view to visualize, analyze, and optimize your IT environments, making it particularly suitable for IT infrastructure monitoring.
Why I picked ControlUp: I chose ControlUp for on this list because of its extensive capabilities in monitoring IT infrastructure, including real-time insights and remediation features that provide a complete solution for managing complex IT environments. For example, ControlUp provides a wide range of performance metrics and insights to help IT teams understand and optimize their infrastructure. It tracks CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, network traffic, and other key performance indicators. These metrics are presented through intuitive dashboards and visualizations. These enable IT teams to quickly identify performance bottlenecks or anomalies.
ControlUp also includes end-user experience monitoring capabilities to measure and analyze the performance of end-user devices, such as desktops, laptops, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. It captures metrics related to login times, application responsiveness, system latency, and other user experience factors.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include real-time monitoring, performance analytics, infrastructure notifications and alerts, historical reporting and analytics, and remote monitoring and management of distributed IT environments. ControlUp also offers an application performance monitoring functionality to track and analyze the performance of business-critical applications.
Integrations include VMware, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft RDS, Citrix, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Virtual Desktops, and Microsoft Teams.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Offers an efficient IT automation feature
- Control of specific areas can be delegated to specific teams
- Provides customizable alerts and notifications
Cons:
- Can be complex to set up and configure
- Script-based automation must be purchased separately
eG Innovations is a user experience monitoring solution designed to provide comprehensive insight into the end-user experience. It enables organizations to proactively track, measure, and enhance the digital user experience.
Why I picked eG Innovations: I picked eG Innovations for this list because of its robust capabilities in tracking end-user experiences, including deep monitoring capabilities. For example, eG Innovations' solution offers multi-dimensional monitoring of end-user experiences. It tracks performance across different dimensions, such as network latency, server response times, application responsiveness, and user interface usability. This comprehensive view helps identify the root causes of performance issues and facilitates efficient troubleshooting.
eG Innovations' solution additionally includes proactive alerts for IT teams based on predefined thresholds, enabling timely troubleshooting and resolution of performance issues affecting end-users.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include real user monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), digital experience management scoring, and user experience metrics. eG Innovations also offers dashboards, visualizations, and reports that summarize and present key metrics and performance trends.
Integrations include HP Orchestration, BMC BladeLogic, ServiceNow, ServiceDesk, ManageEngine, RemedyForce, HP ServiceDesk and BMC Remedy.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Delivers detailed insights and reporting
- Dashboard provides a single view of routers, servers, and applications
- Facilitates quick debugging and problem resolution
Cons:
- Requires a learning curve to fully utilize its features
- May be too complex for smaller businesses
- Lack of transparent pricing
Elastic is a comprehensive search company widely known for its Elastic Stack, which provides robust logging, searching, and visualization capabilities. Its ability to handle large volumes of digital experience data and present it in a meaningful, digestible way makes it an ideal choice for log data analysis and visualization. Note that the tool is also known as the ELK Stack, as it is a combination of the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana tools.
Why I Picked Elastic: I chose Elastic for this list due to its flexible, scalable approach to data handling and its robust visualization features. For example, Elastic's Logstash is a data ingestion and processing pipeline that can collect log data from various sources, such as log files, databases, messaging systems, and cloud platforms. Logstash also allows you to define input plugins to gather log data from different sources and apply filters to parse, transform, and enrich the data before sending it to Elasticsearch for indexing.
Additionally, Kibana allows you to create interactive visualizations and dashboards to represent log data in a meaningful way. You can build charts, graphs, maps, and tables to visualize log statistics, trends, and correlations. Kibana also provides a user-friendly interface for exploring log data visually and drilling down into specific details.
Standout Features & Integrations:
Features include log data storage, indexing, analysis, and search through Elasticsearch, as well as pre-built log analytics features, such as the Logs and Logs UI applications, through Kibana. Elastic Stack also includes a feature called Watcher, which enables you to set up alerting and monitoring functionalities based on log data.
Integrations include various types of data sources, including system logs, web applications, and cloud services, as well as Slack, Citibank, Engadget, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Highly scalable and flexible to handle varying volumes of data
- Open-source components make Elastic easy to implement
- Powerful full-text search and analytics capabilities
Cons:
- The learning curve can be steep for beginners
- Higher-tier plans can be costly
- UI can be a bit outdated
The 10 Best Digital Experience Monitoring Tools: Pricing Comparison Chart
This comparison chart summarizes basic details about each of my top digital experience monitoring software selections. You can view pricing details and the availability of free trials or demos side-by-side to help you find the best tool for your budget and business needs.
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| Dynatrace | From $0.08/8 GB/Hour | Website |
| Glassbox | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Hotjar | From $59/month | Website |
| AppDynamics | From $6/core/month | Website |
| Datadog | From $15/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Totango | From $249/month (2 users + 200 customer accounts) | Website |
| Contentsquare | Customized price upon request | Website |
| ControlUp | Upon Request | Website |
| eG Innovations | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Elastic | From $16/month | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Digital Experience Monitoring Tools
Below is a list of additional digital experience monitoring solutions that I considered for this list. While they didn’t make my top 10, they are still worth checking out. One of them might be the right tool for you!
- New Relic
Best for software analytics
- Site24x7
Best for real-time website monitoring
- Pingdom
Best for uptime and performance monitoring of web applications
- Germain UX
Best for real user experience and performance monitoring
- Raygun
Best for diagnosing performance issues across the software development lifecycle
- Sentry
Best for error tracking in real-time
- SolarWinds AppOptics
Best for a combined infrastructure and application monitoring solution
- BMC TrueSight
Best for AIOps-driven automation and cost prediction
- Riverbed SteelCentral
Best for end-to-end visibility into network and application performance
- Apica
Best for testing and monitoring web application performance
- IBM Instana
Best for application performance management in microservices and cloud environments
- Moogsoft
Best for AI-driven IT Operations (AIOps) and observability
- Uptrends
Best for synthetic and real user monitoring
- Centreon
Best for open-source IT operations monitoring
- ThousandEyes
Best for network intelligence and cloud monitoring
- Catchpoint
Best for comprehensive digital experience monitoring
- Splunk APM
Best for analyzing and visualizing application performance data
Selection Criteria for Digital Experience Monitoring Tools
Selecting the right digital experience monitoring tool is a crucial decision that can impact the performance of your websites and the satisfaction of your users. As such, I took my search for the best DEM tools very seriously. I started by developing a comprehensive list of criteria that each tool had to meet to make it onto the list. I then evaluated each tool to ensure that they met the criteria. Finally, I consulted user reviews to determine pros and cons for each tool.
My list of criteria included the following:
Core Functionalities
In order to be included on this list, all digital experience monitoring tools must perform several basic functions, such as:
- Real-time monitoring: The tool should provide real-time updates on user interactions, system performance, and errors.
- Full-stack visibility: The tool should monitor everything, from the user interface to backend systems.
- Issue detection and alerting: The tool should detect performance issues quickly and alert the team to enable prompt resolution.
Key Features
As important as basic functions are, they aren’t what makes a tool shine. To qualify for my list, the tools must include additional key features that allow them to go above and beyond in their functionality. Such features include:
- Artificial Intelligence: AI-powered tools that can offer predictive analytics and proactive problem resolution.
- Customizable dashboards: Displays and graphics that can be customized according to user needs.
- Reporting and Analytics: Detailed reports and analyses that can help the team understand performance trends and make informed decisions.
Usability
Even if you have conducted digital experience research and dealt with large volumes of data before, learning a new tool can be a lot to handle. Therefore, a good tool should come with comprehensive documentation and training resources to make onboarding as smooth as possible.
DEM tools should also provide responsive customer support that can help you solve problems that are not documented in onboarding materials. After all, resolving your tool problems quickly and easily translates directly into resolving your users’ problems quickly and easily as well.
User Interface
The massive amount of data provided by a digital experience monitoring tool can easily become overwhelming. As such, having a user interface that is easy-to-navigate and understand—and, preferably, customizable to your needs—is essential to being able to use a digital experience platform effectively. Additionally, tools should provide visual representations of data, such as graphs or charts, in order to efficiently provide your team with more intelligible insights.
Digital Experience Monitoring: Frequently Asked Questions
Digital experience monitoring can be a big task, encompassing massive amounts of data, charts, and insights. If you still need help with some of the basics—that’s okay! I have included some frequently asked questions about digital experience monitoring and digital experience monitoring tools to help you get started.
What are the benefits of using digital experience monitoring tools?
Digital experience monitoring tools provide numerous benefits, including:
- Enhanced User Experience: These tools ensure users have a seamless digital experience by constantly monitoring and optimizing application performance.
- Quick Troubleshooting: These tools help identify and resolve performance issues rapidly, minimizing the impact on the end user.
- Proactive Issue Resolution: These tools have predictive analytics that can alert you to potential issues before they become problems, enabling proactive resolution.
- Integrated View: These tools offer an integrated view of your entire application’s performance, which simplifies the management of complex, distributed systems.
- Informed Decision-Making: These tools provide detailed analytics and reporting that assist teams in making data-driven decisions to enhance their application’s performance and user experience.
How much do digital experience monitoring tools typically cost?
The cost of these tools can vary greatly depending on the scale of your operations, the specific features you require, and the vendor’s pricing model.
There are several common pricing models for these tools:
- Per User/Month: Pricing is based on the number of users.
- Per Instance: Pricing is based on the number of instances or applications being monitored.
- Data Volume: Pricing is based on the amount of data being processed or stored by the tool.
In general, pricing for digital experience monitoring tools typically ranges from $20/user/month for basic plans to over $200/user/month for more advanced features and larger infrastructures. Some high-end enterprise-level tools may even go into thousands of dollars per month based on their unique offerings and customization options.
Are there any free digital experience monitoring tools?
Yes, several vendors offer free plans or trials. For instance, New Relic provides a free tier with limited features, while tools like Dynatrace offer a time-limited free trial. These can be great options to test out the tool and see if it fits your requirements before committing to a paid plan.
What are the types of digital experience monitoring?
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) encompasses various techniques and tools designed to assess and monitor the user experience across digital platforms. Some different types of digital experience monitoring include:
- Real User Monitoring (RUM): RUM involves monitoring the actual experience of real users accessing a website or application.
- Synthetic Monitoring: Synthetic monitoring involves simulating user interactions with a website or application using automated scripts or bots.
- Mobile App Monitoring: Mobile app monitoring focuses on aspects such as app launch time, responsiveness, crashes, and network performance on different mobile devices and operating systems.
- Network Monitoring: Network monitoring primarily focuses on understanding the network performance and its impact on the digital experience.
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Application performance monitoring focuses on monitoring and optimizing the performance of specific applications or software systems.
- Log Monitoring: Log monitoring involves analyzing log files generated by servers, applications, or systems to gain insights into the performance and behavior of the digital service.
- Customer Experience Analytics: Customer experience analytics combines different data sources, such as user feedback, surveys, and behavioral analytics, to gain a holistic understanding of the customer journey.
More Digital Experience Software Reviews
Managing digital customer experience involve many moving parts. If you’re in need of more or different tools to help you manage your customers’ digital experiences—or if you just want to see what’s out there—feel free to check out some of our other articles on the subject:
- Digital Experience Platforms
- Customer Experience Management Software
- Usability Testing Tools for UX
- UX Testing Software
Final Thoughts
After reading this article, I hope you understand that the market for digital experience monitoring tools offers a highly diverse range of options, each with unique strengths, be they in-depth analytics, AI-powered insights, or detailed log analysis. Therefore, the first step in your search for a digital experience monitoring tool should be to determine what exactly you need.
Whether you are searching for a comprehensive, low-cost solution or you need access to extremely specific features, there is a tool out there for you. Even if that tool is not on this list, hopefully I have helped you narrow down your options so that you can find your perfect solution soon.
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