Smartlook is sunsetting. Cisco — its parent company — has marked the product End of Sale as of May 31, 2026. New signups stop, new features stop, and existing accounts move into a maintenance window with no published end date. Smartlook the product was technically solid for years; that's not in dispute. But "owned by a giant that's lost interest" is a weak place to keep your conversion data.
Propel Replays is the Shopify-native answer. Session recordings, click and area heatmaps (scroll and movement on the near-term roadmap), surveys — built on Shopify primitives instead of bolted on top of them. Filter every replay by any Shopify customer field, link replays back to actual orders in admin, install in one toggle. AI summaries that see Shopify customer and order context. Insight alerts that proactively surface the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts, and biggest abandoned checkouts. 0ms measured impact on Core Web Vitals. Free up to 750 pageviews/month, $9.90/mo paid.
The recommendation: if you're on Shopify and on Smartlook today, install Propel during your active Smartlook subscription, run them in parallel for a week, cut over before your next Smartlook billing renewal, and cancel. The cutover is an afternoon, not a project. If you'd rather see all the live alternatives lined up first, our roundup of the best Shopify session replay apps for 2026 ranks them with pricing and trade-offs.
Smartlook was acquired by Cisco a few years back. Since then Cisco's product priorities have shifted toward enterprise observability, networking, and AI infrastructure, and the SMB-shaped session-replay product has been deprioritized. The public posture, written into the product itself (the homepage banner, the in-app notices), is End of Sale on May 31, 2026.
What that means in plain English: as of June 1, 2026, Smartlook stops accepting new accounts and stops shipping new features. Existing accounts continue to function in a maintenance mode — billing keeps running, recordings keep capturing — but the product is on a glide path to retirement. Cisco hasn't published a hard sunset date for active customers, and probably won't until closer to the actual cutover; that's how acquired SaaS products usually wind down. Bug fixes slow first, integrations rot next, and at some point the dashboard goes read-only.
None of this is a knock on Smartlook the product. It was a credible session-replay tool with strong mobile-app SDKs and a deep feature set. The wind-down is a strategic decision at the parent-company level, not a verdict on the product. The smart move for merchants is to migrate before the cutover gets messy — not after.
If you only read one section of this page, read this one.
Smartlook pricing is no longer publicly published as the product approaches End of Sale; check the Smartlook site for any current availability. Propel pricing accurate as of April 2026. The "0ms" claim reflects Propel's measured Lighthouse delta with the tracking script enabled vs. disabled.
Past tense, because the product is sunsetting — but worth recognizing what Smartlook did well, because that's the gap you're filling when you migrate. If you picked Smartlook in the last few years, you probably picked it for one of these reasons:
None of this is being celebrated as it goes away. Smartlook leaving the market is bad for competition and bad for the customers who built workflows around it. The job is to migrate cleanly to the next-best fit — not to gloat about the shutdown.
Propel started as the tool Chris Norton (founder) wanted when he was running his own Shopify store, SOLID Tool Chests. Smartlook, Hotjar, and Lucky Orange were the alternatives at the time, and they all felt like aftermarket bolt-ons that didn't speak Shopify. We built the tool we wished existed. If your situation matches any of these, that's the migration story:
Four sub-tables so you can skip to the parts that matter for your store. Smartlook entries reflect the product as it stood when active; "EOL May 31, 2026" appears where the wind-down materially changes the picture.
Smartlook is in EOL mode — its pricing is being shown for reference only, since no new accounts can be created after May 31, 2026. Propel pricing is current and stable.
Annual = 35% off. 7-day free trial on every paid plan. No overages — pageview limits are soft caps with email notifications, not hard cutoffs.
Smartlook pricing as last published. New signups close after End of Sale; existing customers continue on their current plan in maintenance mode until the eventual hard sunset.
Pricing as of April 2026. Smartlook published prices reflect the public pricing page before End of Sale; check Smartlook directly for any transition offers. Propel pricing is shown live on the Shopify App Store and updates there if it changes.
Switching session-replay tools is annoying — we won't pretend otherwise. The good news is that for Shopify storefronts the work is mostly mechanical: install, parallel-run, validate, cut over, cancel. Plan an afternoon, not a project. Below is the exact playbook we walk merchants through, in order.
smartlook.com means clean removal.
Two practical tips. First, audit Lighthouse on a few key pages before and after the script swap — that's the easiest way to confirm the 0ms claim on your specific theme, and it's a useful before/after to share with stakeholders. Second, don't wait until May 30, 2026 to start. Smartlook may push redirects or maintenance modes earlier than the announced End of Sale date, and the last-minute migration scenario is how stores end up with gaps in their recording history.
7,000+ Shopify stores. 4.9★ across 500+ reviews. Three verbatim quotes from merchants who came to Propel from other tools.
Smartlook leaving the market is bad for competition and bad for the customers who built workflows around it. The product was technically solid for years and the team behind it did real work. We don't take that for granted, and we're not gloating about the shutdown.
For Shopify merchants, Propel Replays is the natural successor: Shopify-shaped by construction, AI summaries on every replay, 0ms Core Web Vitals, pricing that stays sane, and an independent studio that's been profitable since 2019. If you need native mobile-app session replay alongside web (the one thing Smartlook did that Propel doesn't), look at the dedicated mobile-app analytics tools — Propel is built for Shopify storefronts only, and we'd rather tell you that up-front than pretend otherwise.
Best test: install Propel free today, leave Smartlook running, and decide in a week. Don't wait until May 30 — last-minute migrations during a vendor wind-down are how stores end up with gaps in their data.
Free up to 750 pageviews/mo. 7-day free trial on every paid plan. First replay typically captures within 30 seconds of installing — plenty of time to run side-by-side before your next Smartlook billing cycle.