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 technically solid for years. It's just that "owned by a giant that's lost interest" is a weak place to keep your conversion data, and the smart move is to migrate before the cutover gets messy. We track the live alternatives in our roundup of the best Shopify session replay apps for 2026.
Ranking is opinionated. The honest summary: if you run on Shopify, install Propel. If you don't, Microsoft Clarity is free and excellent. The rest of the list is for specific cases.
Propel Replays is the Shopify-native answer to Smartlook. It does what Smartlook did — session recordings, click and area heatmaps, surveys — but built on Shopify primitives instead of bolted on top of them. Every replay is filterable by Shopify customer fields (order count, total spent, customer tag, cart value), every replay links back to the actual Shopify order in admin, and the install is one toggle on a theme app embed. No GTM, no theme.liquid edits, no dev time.
The differentiators that matter most for migrating Smartlook customers: insight alerts that proactively surface the replays worth watching, product-page alerts that flag ATC-rate drops on PDPs the moment they happen, and AI summaries on every replay — open a session and Propel writes a two-sentence narrative with full Shopify customer and order context: "Returning VIP customer landed on the bestseller PDP from Meta, scrolled past reviews, hesitated on size selector, abandoned at checkout step 2." You can skim two hundred sessions in the time it used to take to watch ten. Smartlook never shipped any of this.
The other reason Smartlook customers move to Propel: speed. Smartlook's tracking script is multi-platform, which means it ships through GTM or a hard-coded snippet — structurally heavier than a Shopify-native embed. Propel's script ships as a Shopify theme app embed: Shopify injects it at the bottom of every page after everything else has loaded, async, with 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. Lighthouse scores are identical with Replays installed and disabled. Verifiable.
Pricing is straightforward and stays sane at scale. Free up to 750 pageviews/month forever. Basic at $9.90/mo (or $6.44/mo billed annually) covers 20,000 pageviews. Plus, Premium, and Enterprise tiers go up from there. Every paid plan starts with a 7-day free trial. 35% off annual. 7,000+ Shopify stores already recording, 4.9★ across 500+ reviews — including a notable cluster from former Hotjar, Lucky Orange, and Microsoft Clarity customers who switched.
If you don't run on Shopify, Clarity is the obvious move. It's free — really free, not freemium — with unlimited sessions, unlimited heatmaps, and no pageview cap. The product is well-built, the team behind it is well-resourced, and the data ownership tradeoff (Microsoft sees your traffic and uses it to improve Bing) is the only real cost. For most non-Shopify sites this is the right answer and we'll happily say so.
Where Clarity falls short, specifically for Shopify merchants: it doesn't speak Shopify. The filters don't know what a Shopify customer is, can't segment by order count or customer tag, and replays don't link back to orders in admin. The script is also a third-party tag that you wire in through GTM or a snippet — we don't have a published Lighthouse benchmark on Clarity, but a third-party tag in theme.liquid may add Lighthouse cost depending on the theme. If "in Shopify" is load-bearing for you, this is the wrong shape. If it isn't, install Clarity today.
Hotjar is the original brand in this category. The feature set is wide and well-shaped — recordings, heatmaps, funnels, surveys, feedback widgets — and the dashboards are familiar to most marketers because most marketers have used Hotjar at some point. If you came to Smartlook because you wanted "Hotjar but cheaper," Hotjar itself is now an option again at the lower tiers.
Two cautions. First, Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare and the product is in transition — not a shutdown like Smartlook, but the roadmap is being absorbed into Contentsquare's enterprise platform, and the SMB-friendly version is no longer the main product line. Second, pricing climbs sharply once you exceed the free tier's session cap; Plus and Business plans get expensive at higher traffic. For Shopify merchants specifically, multiple reviewers (including ours) have noted Hotjar isn't Shopify-shaped — filters don't speak Shopify, no order linkage.
Lucky Orange has been on the Shopify App Store for years and has the install base to prove it. Recordings, heatmaps, live chat, surveys, conversion funnels — the surface area is broad and the integration with Shopify is real (more than Hotjar's, less than Propel's). If your store has been around since the 2010s there's a non-zero chance someone already trialed Lucky Orange on it.
Where it shows its age: the UI is dated, the onboarding is sales-first (lots of email follow-ups), and the tracking script bundles many modules into one payload — structurally heavier than a Shopify-native embed (we don't have a published Lighthouse benchmark on it). Pricing also climbs fast: Launch is $19/mo, Build is $39/mo, Grow is $89/mo. Lower tiers cap session length and DVR replay days. Reasonable choice for a merchant who specifically values feature breadth over modern craft.
MIDA is the closest direct peer to Propel — also Shopify-native, similar pricing tiers, similar feature surface (recordings, heatmaps, funnels). If you're shopping side-by-side with Propel, you'll find a lot of overlap. We'll be honest: MIDA is a real, viable option and a reasonable Smartlook replacement for Shopify merchants. Where we think Propel pulls ahead is on craft — the product details, AI summaries on every replay, and the support experience (Tom on our team is named by merchants in 5-star reviews; not a generic queue) — but we won't pretend MIDA is a bad choice.
Mouseflow is closest to Smartlook architecturally — multi-platform, recordings + heatmaps + funnels + form analytics, similar pricing model. The form-analytics module is genuinely strong; if your conversion problem is at the form-fill stage (lead-gen, account signup, complex checkout) Mouseflow's friction-detection on individual fields is the most detailed in this list. For pure Shopify merchants the form-analytics edge matters less since checkout is Shopify-managed, but for hybrid B2B-and-D2C stores it can be a deciding factor.
Switching session-replay tools is annoying but it's not a project. A few things to know going in so you don't lose anything that matters.
This is industry-wide, not a Smartlook-specific limitation. Session replays are stored as compressed DOM-event streams and the formats don't translate between vendors. If a particular Smartlook recording is load-bearing — a customer-support case, a regression you're investigating — screenshot the relevant moments now. Going forward, the new tool starts collecting on day one and the data accumulates fast: most stores have a useful sample within a week.
The cleanest migration is to install the new tool today on its free tier (Propel is free up to 750 pageviews/mo; Clarity is free always), let it record alongside Smartlook for a week to sanity-check the data, then cancel Smartlook before your next billing cycle. You won't double-pay if you time it. Don't wait until May 30 — Smartlook may push redirects or maintenance modes earlier than the announced date.
Spend an hour exporting the structure of what you've built in Smartlook: segment definitions (mobile-only, paid-traffic, returning-customer), funnel step definitions (PDP → cart → checkout → confirmation), event names you're tracking, and any saved dashboards or reports. These rebuild in a couple of hours in any new tool. The recordings stay in Smartlook until they don't.
Smartlook didn't speak Shopify — its filters didn't know what a Shopify customer was, replays didn't link back to orders in admin, and the tracking script ran through GTM. If you're migrating, this is the moment to upgrade. A Shopify-native tool installs as a theme app embed (no GTM, no theme.liquid edits), filters by customer fields, cart value, order tags, UTM, and links every replay back to the actual order. If you've been frustrated by Smartlook not knowing what Shopify is, you don't have to recreate that with a non-native replacement.
Six options at a glance. Keep this honest — your specific stack will tip the decision.
Pricing reflects the lowest paid tier billed monthly, accurate at time of writing (April 2026). Vendors change pricing without notice — check before you commit.
Free up to 750 pageviews/mo. 7-day free trial on every paid plan. First replay typically captures within 30 seconds of installing.