9 Best Real User Monitoring Tools

Real user monitoring tracks and records user sessions on a website or application. It provides insights into user experiences by measuring load times, errors, and overall performance.

Real user monitoring (RUM) tools offer a comprehensive view of how users interact with your application, providing real-time data and insights to identify performance issues. You can leverage these actionable insights to optimize your website or application to improve user satisfaction and conversion rates.

Traditional analytics often provide quantitative website traffic data, such as total traffic, page views, and bounce rates, but they fail to dive deeper into qualitative user behavior data, like which forms users have filled out or which buttons they have clicked. That’s why it’s essential to choose a robust real-user monitoring tool to gain deeper insights into user behavior and performance on your website or application.

Geekflare has researched and compiled a list of the best real-user monitoring tools based on key features such as performance monitoring, user experience tracking, session replay, error reporting, and real-time alerts.

• 1. Uptrends – Best for Comprehensive Performance Insights
• 2. Catchpoint – Best for Omnichannel User Experience Monitoring
• 3. Raygun – Best for User-Centric Performance Analysis
• 4. Pingdom – Best for Small to Medium Business
• 5. Elastic – Best for Integrated Application Performance Monitoring
• 6. Akamai mPulse – Best for Revenue Impact Analytics
• 7. New Relic – Best for Full-Stack Observability
• 8. Atatus – Best for Visual Performance Insights
• 9. Sematext Experience – Best To Integrate With Logs and APM
• Show moreShow less

Uptrends

Uptrends Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides deep insights into real user experiences, enabling you to gather and analyze website performance data directly from your visitors. It allows you to track user activity, monitor performance by specific location, and compare how your website performs across various countries worldwide.

Uptrends RUM lets you track website load speed across different browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices for a complete performance overview.

Uptrends RUM allows you to break down data by country and drill down further to state or province-level insights for the US, Canada, and Australia. It provides detailed load time analysis, offering metrics such as DOM duration, render duration, time to first byte, and page ready time for a comprehensive performance overview.

With Uptrends RUM, you can view performance levels for all visited pages to identify problem areas and analyze trends in charts to quickly track load times during peak business hours for quick insights. You just have to copy and paste the script on your website to implement Uptrends RUM.

Uptrends Pricing

Uptrends RUM pricing starts at $9.20 per month. It offers a 30-day free trial. 

Try Uptrends

Catchpoint

Catchpoint is a leading name in internet performance monitoring, offering various monitoring solutions, such as real user monitoring, endpoint monitoring, and tracing. 

Catchpoint RUM provides real-time insights into real-user web performance. It enables you to monitor key metrics like response rates, conversions, and page views and check your website load time from a single, unified dashboard. By combining technical and business performance data, it helps you make data-driven decisions to enhance your site’s functionality.

With Catchpoint RUM, you can assess how changes in web performance could affect your business revenue. It helps you simulate performance improvements to understand their impact on page views, bounce rates, and conversions. It also allows you to track custom metrics using tailored indicators that align with your unique business goals.

Catchpoint RUM offers real-time reachability diagnostics, helping you troubleshoot issues quickly at scale. Combining real user data with synthetic tests gives you a complete view of why users can’t reach your website.   

Additionally, Catchpoint RUM helps you compare incidents from active monitoring and passive telemetry to more accurately identify and understand the causes of performance outages and issues.

Catchpoint Pricing 

Catchpoint follows a custom pricing model. The company offers product tours to help understand its features. 

Try Catchpoint RUM

Raygun

Raygun RUM allows you to track user journeys and monitor trends across websites and mobile apps, helping you quickly pinpoint performance bottlenecks and user experience issues.

Raygun’s real-time performance metrics allow you to view live active sessions, track geo-distribution, and monitor 24-hour trends. This helps you understand how your application performs globally. It also offers a granular performance breakdown to analyze page load times and load distribution.

Raygun’s advanced filtering helps you quickly find the most relevant information by applying filters based on device, location, operating system, and browser. What’s more, the customer experience monitoring feature helps you search individual users for insights into sessions and errors.

You can integrate Raygun with Slack to receive daily performance summaries and insights. Raygun also offers lightweight SDKs and a simple code snippet to connect to your website or application quickly.

Raygun Pricing

Raygun pricing starts at $120 per month (100,000 sessions/mo) and goes up to $1200 per month (1,000,000 sessions/mo). Annual plans offer 33% discounts. You need to contact the company for a custom plan. Ragun offers a 14-day free trial.

Try Raygun

Pingdom

Pingdom, a subsidiary of SolarWinds, offers various monitoring services, including real user monitoring (RUM), synthetic monitoring, infrastructure morning, and application monitoring.   

Pingdom RUM provides visual hot spots with live mapping of your user’s activity across the globe, helping you identify users affected by outages and poor experiences. It also helps you spot patterns across regions and devices, allowing you to refine your messaging and website configuration for a better user experience.

With Pingdom RUM, you can identify how your key customers access your site. You can filter real user data by browser, device, and location to gain insights into performance issues and address them effectively. It also allows you to set performance benchmarks to analyze your website performance.  

A unique feature of Pingdom is that it offers historical data on the top visited pages, browsers, active sessions, and platforms. This helps you know how your website is performing in terms of performance improvement. 

Pingdom offers comprehensive reports that end users can filter. So, anyone with whom you share these reports can customize their view.

Pingdom Pricing

Pingdom Real User Monitoring starts at $15/month for 100,000 pageviews. It offers a 30-day free trial.

Try Pingdom

Elastic

Elastic Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides full user interaction and performance visibility. It can collect, measure, and analyze performance data related to user experience on your website. You can analyze data by various perimeters, including location, browser, operations system, and URLs. 

Elastic RUM lets you visualize key performance metrics, such as Google’s Core Web Vitals. You can view metrics by specific pages or sets of pages to gain detailed insights. 

Elastic RUM allows you to filter user monitoring data by client-side factors like device, browser, and operating system to understand the user experience of any user cohort. By just looking at the user’s visual map, you can identify regions with poor user experience. 

When paired with Elastic APM, Elastic RUM isolates real user transactions. You can review logs, metrics, and traces tied to these transactions, making it easier to identify patterns. This correlation helps quickly resolve performance issues, even in complex cloud environments.

Elastic Pricing

Elastic RUM pricing starts at $95 per month and goes up to $175 monthly. A free trial is available.

Try Elastic RUM

Akamai mPulse 

Akamai mPulse offers insightful, investigative, and actionable user experience metrics and performance data that offer in-depth visibility into web and mobile user experience. It can collect a wider range of data, including Core Web Vitals, performance metrics, sessions, user agents, geographics, resource timing data, and more. 

Akamai mPulse RUM helps you collect data from every user event on your website. You can store this data for 13 months for historical analysis. It captures all your users in real-time and can differentiate between human traffic and bot traffic.  

Using real user data and advanced predictive analytics, mPulse lets you correlate your website performance with key business metrics, such as revenue and conversions. You can combine performance and marketing analytics from Google Analytics, IBM Coremetrics, and Adobe Analytics to visualize all the data for better analysis. 

Akamai mPulse also lets you understand the impact of third-party resources on performance. This feature helps you optimize third-party resources to improve your website performance. 

Akamai mPulse Pricing

Akamai mPulse hasn’t published pricing information on the site. It offers a free trial.

Try Akamai mPulse

New Relic

New Relic is a full-stack observability platform that identifies and fixes backend issues affecting your web application performance. 

New Relic RUM or browser monitoring checks page performance across different parts of the world using interactive maps that allow you to filter and analyze global user activity. This helps you identify performance issues in specific areas more easily.

New Relic lets you instantly compare your application’s performance metrics to industry standards to identify underperforming pages. It includes a feature that lets you track error rates after new deployments, helping you assess the impact of each deployment on system errors.

New Relic provides insights into how different browsers and devices affect your application’s user experience, helping you figure out negative experiences and fix issues to improve performance. 

With New Relic, you can analyze your application performance based on key factors such as browser type and page views. It also allows you to set alerts for key performance indicators so that you can promptly fix the issues affecting user experience.

New Relic RUM Pricing 

New Relic follows usage-based pricing. Contact the company with your requirements to determine how much you need to pay for real user monitoring. It also offers a forever free real user monitoring plan for up to 30 tools and 100 GB ingest monthly.

Get New Relic

Atatus

Atatus RUM is known for providing easy-to-analyze visual performance insights into users’ complete digital experiences, including page load times, web vitals, specific errors, asset performance, DNS, SSL connections, and more. 

Atatus RUM collects connection time, response time, first-bite time, server time, page rendering time, geo data, Google Core Vitals, and many other key RUM metrics. 

Atatus RUM Session Traces enable you to replay user sessions and analyze how each website asset influences the user experience. With deployment markers, you can track the impact of newly deployed code, allowing you to compare site performance before and after updates—spotting changes in page load times, new errors, and more.

To provide valuable insights relevant to your core business, Atatus lets you filter bots, user agents, IPs, and many more. It is easy to start using Atatus RUM–you just have to add two lines of code to your website.

Atatus RUM also allows you to set alerts for various events, such as increases in response time, API failures, and more. You have multiple options to receive these alerts, including Slack, Teams, Email, and more. Additionally, you can integrate it with project management tools like Jira or Asana for ticket management. 

Atatus RUM Pricing 

Atatus pricing starts at $2.6, which is billed monthly ($1.96 for annual billing) for 10k views per month. You can avail of a 14-day free trial to assess its features. 

Try Atatus RUM

Sematext Experience

Sematext Experience RUM offers full visibility into different areas of your website and application that affect user experience. Its resource waterfall view highlights slow-loading elements, making it easy to identify performance bottlenecks. You can get real-time alerts when page speed impacts the end-user experience.

Sematext Experience records each page load event with user activity monitoring, giving you insights into the time spent on the back end and in the browser. It filters data by geolocation, operating systems, browser type, version, and URLs. You can also inspect your resources, such as stylesheets, fonts, and JavaSript files, and check their load times.

Sematext Experience offers detailed insights into individual user sessions, including page load timelines, HTTP requests, and on-page transactions. It also tracks essential core web vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), helping you optimize the user experience and site performance.

Sematext Experience helps you gain insights into the percentage of users who experienced error-free sessions, helping you understand overall system performance. Additionally, you’ll receive detailed crash reports that provide in-depth information on any issues, allowing you to identify and resolve problems affecting user experience quickly.

Sematext Experience Pricing 

Sematext Experience offers three different plans: Startup (starting at $9/ month), Standard (starting at $19/month), and Pro (starting at $89/month). Annual plans save 10%. It also offers a free 14-day trial.

Try Sematext Experience

Here, we compare the best real-user monitoring tools based on tracked key metrics, integration options, and pricing.

What Is Real User Monitoring?

Real user monitoring is a performance monitoring process that tracks, records, and analyzes user actions on a website or application in real-time. Also known as end-user experience monitoring, it offers insights into end-user experience in a website or application, providing visibility into real-time issues users face when navigating your application.

Real user monitoring collects data, such as page load times, user actions in each session, and error rates, as users navigate your application to offer you a complete picture of the user experience. 

Importance of Real User Monitoring

Real user monitoring is important because it gives insights into how users interact with your application. Without understanding user behavior, you can’t make informed decisions to improve your app’s performance or features.

For example, if customers frequently abandon carts on your e-commerce site, real user monitoring can reveal that the checkout page is too slow. Fixing this allows users to complete purchases smoothly, boosting sales and customer satisfaction. Without RUM, this issue could go unnoticed, resulting in lost revenue.

A good real-user monitoring tool typically comes with the following features. 

• User Behavior Tracking—This is the primary function of RUM tools. They monitor and record actions in user sessions, such as clicks, scrolls, and navigation, to provide user behavior tracking.  
• Performance Metrics—RUM tools provide key performance metrics to improve your application performance, such as site speed and responsiveness. They help you track key performance indicators, such as page load times, time to first bite (TTFB), first contentful pain (FCP), bounce pages, most frequently visited pages, and more.   
• Error Reporting—RUM tools provide detailed error reporting, helping you investigate crashes and errors that send customers away from your application. They can also enable you to check error instances on a per-customer level and see the line of code or asset that caused the error. 
• Real Time Analytics—RUM tools offer real-time analytics to help you proactively address issues as they surface. You will have real-time data on complete user sessions, performance bottlenecks, errors, and more.  
• Geographical Data—RUM tools provide detailed geographic data about your users, including performance data across different regions worldwide. This will help you optimize your application performance based on user locations. 
• Device and Browser Information—RUM tools give you insights into device types (smartphones, tablets, and PCs) and browsers (Safari, Chrome, or Edge) your audience uses to access your application and how your application performs on these parameters. This will help you optimize your application to offer an enhanced user experience based on the user’s device and browser information. 
• Session Replays—Many RUM tools come with a session replay feature, allowing you to replay user sessions to look into what exactly your users experience when they interact with your application.   
• Integration Capabilities—RUM tools have robust integration capabilities, allowing you to integrate them with other performance monitoring and collaboration tools such as Google Analytics, Jira, and Slack for better reporting, communication, and collaboration. 
• Customizable Reporting—Rum tools offer customizable reporting, helping you personalize your reports on specific metrics in line with your business goals. For example, you can easily customize reports based on the most visited pages or the slowest loading pages. 

Benefits of Real User Monitoring

Real user monitoring offers multiple benefits to businesses. If used strategically, real user monitoring can improve user experience, provide faster issue resolution, give better conversions, and do proactive performance optimization. Also, you can plan better content and features for you app based on users interactions with you application. 

Additionally, by identifying performance inefficiencies, RUM solutions help companies better use their resources and reduce infrastructure costs by efficiently allocating resources.     

Choosing the best real-user monitoring largely depends on the nature of user sessions on your application and the types of performance data you want to monitor. Here are some quick tips to help you pick the best RUM tool: 

• Understand Your Needs—Before searching for a RUM tool, you must understand user session characteristics and performance data metrics you want to focus on. You, for example, may want to track user session characteristics such as peak usage times and common user paths, as well as performance data like page load times.
• Evaluate Core Features—Once you have defined your requirements, evaluate the core features of as many RUM tools as possible to find the best solution that meets your needs. Most RUM tools offer free trials, making it easy to test them without any commitment.
• Assess Data Privacy and Compliance—Depending on your business’s nature and location, you might be required to comply with various data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, HIPPA, and CCPA. So, make sure the RUM tools you have narrowed down can be configured to meet application data protection regulatory compliance. 
• Check Scalability and Performance—As your user base expands, the volume of data that a RUM tool processes will increase significantly. Therefore, it’s crucial to evaluate the scalability and performance of your chosen RUM tool to ensure it can accommodate your application’s growth in the coming years.
• Consider Pricing—To maximize your investment, evaluate the pricing of RUM tools in relation to their features. Choose a RUM tool whose functionalities align with your business requirements. There’s no benefit in paying for features you will never use, either now or in the future.

Impact of Effective Real User Monitoring

Effective real user monitoring, by offeriong you real-time insights into user interactions, can help your business in many ways. You can quickly identify and resolve performance issues faster, make data-driven decisions, and optimize your overall user experience. Also, real user monitoring helps you plan better content and features that your users would love.  

Moreover, the insights you get from real user monitoring will help you allocate business resources efficiently, reducing operational costs.

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