A Review of Tapefailure, RobotReplay and ClickTale

June 29th, 2007 by Lars Johansson

Key findings:

Tapefailure

The taping and playback seems to be robust
You can download tapes
You can view Page Scroll Percentage statistics
There is a Path Cluster overlay
You can view the most average tape (how accurate is it?)
Possibility to filter on date, identifier, IP address, platform, browser, window size and visit length

RobotReplay

Quite basic, sticking to recording
No background information on recordings
The server appears to have problems handling the load
Possibility to share tapes through email
Currently free

ClickTale

Helpful information right by the recordings (country, referrer etc.)
Mouse cursor represented by a box and not by an arrow in playback (they’ve told me they’re working on this)
Heatmaps for attention, time spent, number of visitors and number of pageviews with the possibility to segment them by activity (pauses of inactivity limited to 20 seconds, 60 seconds or entire session with unlimited pauses of inactivity)
Bubble charts for screen resolutions & sizes
Possibility to filter recordings based on demographics, viewing times, sizes and mouse activity.

RobotReplay is the most basic of the three, but it’s also completely free. They will be releasing a more advanced paid version. I like the recording function of RobotReplay and Tapefailure best, but miss some of the information provided right by the recordings in ClickTale. Tapefailure offers page scroll percentage statistics in a graph and ClickTale does variations of it with a heatmap instead. The weakest alternative at the moment is RobotReplay, but the version I tested is also a no-strings attached version. I am looking forward to testing their more advanced solution.

ClickTale