9 Best Real User Monitoring Tools [2023 Comparison] - Sematext - The first knowledge sharing application in Vietnam

The most important thing we can do as software-based businesses is stay in control of our user’s experience. This means knowing how users are interacting with our sites and tracking the end-users level of satisfaction.

But this is impossible to do without a monitoring strategy and the proper tools. The tools you need to accomplish this are called real user monitoring solutions, or RUM.

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RUM tools give you data directly from the users’ sessions. This helps us understand how our web app or website is performing in the real world.

RUM tools can help you find slow pages or screens that make your customers run in the direction of your competitors.

In this post, we will explore what are the best RUM tools available today and explain what you need to know before investing in one.

If you’re in the market for a RUM solution, here is a list comparing 8 of the best real user monitoring (RUM) tools:

1. Sematext Experience

Sematext Experience is a real user monitoring solution that offers 100% visibility into your website or web app that affects your users’ experience.

Here is what puts Sematext on the top of our list:

Easy installation
Single page application support
Individual session performance
Inspect Page load events
Monitor your

Apdex score
Real-time automatic alerts

Sematext Experience allows you to inspect individual sessions to get page-level specifics. This helps assess the user’s satisfaction to prevent customer loss due to poor performance.

Furthermore, you can set up alerts for Apdex score, script errors, and page load time and receive real-time notifications whenever performance anomalies are detected. this, in turn, will enable you to troubleshoot issues faster.

Sematext Experience

Analyze real user session data and increase customer satisfaction

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Sematext Experience was designed so DevOps and BizOps can work together. Having easy access to all your actionable data provides your whole team with in-depth insights. With this data, effectual decisions can be made with ease to ensure your customers are always satisfied.

Pricing

From $9/mo

Pros

Combine the power of metrics, logs, and end-user monitoring under one roof with

Sematext Cloud
First-class support for popular frontend frameworks such as React, Ember, and Angular
URL grouping for both

page-load

events and

HTTP requests
Powerful cost control using data sampling
Has a solution for

synthetic monitoring
Error tracking

Check out the video below to learn more about Sematext’s real user monitoring tool, Experience:

2. Dynatrace RUM

Part of Dynatrace’s digital experience monitoring toolset, Dynatrace RUM is a powerful website monitoring service that offers complete real-time visibility of customer experience. You can monitor the activity of all mobile and web application users across all devices and browsers to assess and improve user satisfaction.

With Dynatrace RUM you can also collect business-relevant metrics, allowing you to correlate performance issues with potential business impact.

Features

Map the whole user journey
Replay individual customer sessions
Business-relevant, user transaction monitoring
Real-time AI-based analysis

Pricing

Available on request

Pros

Intuitive non-technical dashboard usability
Interactive interfaces and visual reports for ROI tracking
Mobile monitoring breakdowns

Cons

Reportedly pricey
The UI can be overwhelming at first

3. AppDynamics Browser RUM

AppDynamics’s RUM tool tracks customers’ journey to provide full visibility into their interaction with your webapp. You receive browser-user insights to help you optimize web experiences. Self-learning algorithms use the app’s behavior to dynamically baseline web metrics with automatic anomaly detection and resolution.

Features

Real-time intelligent alerting
Backend and frontend monitoring in same solution
Business transaction correlation
Browser snapshot waterfalls
Dynamic performance baselining

Pricing

Available in two options: Lite (free) version and Pro version. Pricing available on request

Pros

Free training
Self-learning platform

Cons

Reportedly pricey

4. New Relic Browser

New Relic is mostly known for their APM tool, but they completed their monitoring tools set with a RUM solution, New Relic Browser.

New Relic Browser has advanced RUM features that give you access to insights from the users’ perspective by focusing on browser performance. It monitors the entire life cycle of a page or a view, from the moment users enter the app until they disconnect.

Features

Browser Pageviews and Page Load Times
Java Errors and Instance details
AJAX Timing and Call Reports
Browser Session Traces
Filterable Geography Analytics
Route changes in apps with single page application (SPA) architecture
Individual session performance

Pricing

Pricing information available on request. Also has a free (Lite) version with fewer features

Pros

Synthetic monitoring option available

Cons

Most features are available for Pro accounts only
Reports are not very comprehensive
Missing detailed HTTP resources metrics

5. Pingdom

Pingdom is a unified performance monitoring tool that brings together transaction, uptime, and real user monitoring.

Pingdom allows you to filter data from specific users to get greater insights on the regional performance of your website and make optimizations to deliver a better experience to your most valuable users. It’s highly scalable, allowing you to monitor millions of pageviews without compromising your data.

Features

Tailored incident management
Real-time data and alerting
Website and server monitoring
Mobile accessibility

Pricing

The basic setup starts at $10/month, up to $199 – $15,000

Pros

Customizable, fast and comprehensive alerting and reporting
Synthetic and end user monitoring
Notifications to multiple destinations (text message, email)

Cons

Expensive if you increase volume or scale up as there is no data sampling available
No error tracking or error management

6. Akamai mPulse

Akamai mPulse (former SOASTA) lets you dive deep into performance and error analyses to understand their impact on user experience metrics such as conversions or pageviews. That way, you can discover website performance issues, as well as optimization opportunities using data straight from the user’s browser.

Features

Real-time alerting
Advanced and custom metrics monitoring
Single page application support
Third-party visibility

Pricing

Available on request

Pros

Single page application support

Cons

Tends to be slow at times
No support for error tracking

7. Raygun Real User Monitoring

With Raygun’s RUM tool you can see how visitors are interacting with your applications, as well as detect, diagnose, and solve performance bottlenecks they encounter along the way. Raygun works with real-time data from every user session and suggests the most “profitable” improvements you can make to ensure a smooth web experience.

Features

Error tracking support
User tracking
Single page application support
Insights

Pricing

Starts at $80/month

Pros

Individual session traces
Detailed user-centric profiles
Simple and easy to use interface

Cons

No log management solution that would allow you to bring RUM and logs under one roof

8. TeamViewer Web Monitoring (former Monitis)

TeamViewer Web Monitoring is a real user monitoring solution will give you detailed information on the users’ browser and platform performance, page load times, geographic user breakdown, and more.

This solution stands out from the crowd by featuring a fully customizable pricing scheme that allows its users to pick and choose what features they want to use. While they do have a Basic plan with fixed monthly fees, they also offer a custom plan, meaning the final monthly price will be based on the total number of customizations you choose.

Features

Generous amount of Basic Monitors
Multiple Check Locations
Multiple Check Frequencies
Support for HTTP, HTTPS, ICMP protocols
Webpage content check
Instant alerts

Pricing

Fixed monthly fee

Pros

Ensure business critical processes like your web shop and registrations are working
Get detailed information for every step of your process funnel
Check your transactions automatically from 30+ locations

Cons

Bulk creation of alerts could use some improvements
The tool could use some additional optimization
Email alert handling could be improved

9. Datadog Real User Monitoring

Datadog’s real user monitoring tool provides complete visibility into individual users’ real-time behavior and activity. The solution addresses four sorts of use cases for web and mobile application monitoring. It allows you to monitor individual user journeys and how users interact with your application, tracking performance and all of the information related to a user session such as duration, visited pages, loaded resources etc.

Features

Explorer and visualizations
Integration with logs, APM, and profiler
Error tracking and crash reporting
Web and mobile vitals
Web view tracking

Pricing

Pricing based on usage

Pros

Simple interface that is very clean, useful and effective
Dashboard screens packed with graphs
Dependency mapping

Cons

Navigation can sometimes be counterintuitive
Finding the right metric or dashboard can be challenging
Documentation is lacking in some places

How to Choose a Real User Monitoring Tool

Now that you’ve compared what each RUM tool offers, here are some points you need to consider before making a decision and a process you can follow on how to decide what end user experience monitoring tool is a good fit for you:

Features

As with any other tool, make it a priority to compare RUM solutions by features and functionalities. The most basic RUM tool should be able to:

Capture user journey (logical transactions)
Capture standard W3C Navigation metrics
Track errors and crash reports
Monitor your Apdex score
Monitor HTTP requests
Monitor HTTP resources
Measure the Core Web Vitals

Advanced RUM capabilities help to optimize business processes. If that’s your goal, look for a tool that can:

Capture user data, including geolocation, device type, browser, OS, etc.
Identify performance trends and outages
Generate intuitive alerts to reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)
Notify teams in case of performance anomalies
Detect application processes in need of improvement.
Combine the power of logs, RUM, infrastructure, and application monitoring under one roof.

Ease of Use

RUM solutions are maturing, adapting to the rapid growth of the software industry thus becoming more and more complex.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be just as complex to use and understand. Usually, all you need to do to implement RUM is add a small JavaScript snippet to your website, for example to the head tag on your pages.

Before deciding on a tool, understand how you can integrate it with your app, what are the requirements for implementation, what environments are supported, and if you can use it with mobile apps as well.

Standalone vs. Integrated Solutions

There are many processes that you can monitor to ensure end-to-end visibility into how your application or website performs and just as many tools. RUM is one of those tools. It helps keep an eye on your end users’ digital experience in real time and provides actionable insights into every aspect of your website or webapp performance. Discover what exactly can RUM tools can monitoring from our blog post about key real user metrics you should measure.

Each tool down the line has its purpose, but you can choose any combination that makes more sense to your monitoring strategy – you can use RUM alone or integrate it with other monitoring tools, such as synthetic monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, or application performance monitoring tool. We do recommend you choose a tool that encompasses more than one observability product.

Data Reporting and Visualization

The built-in reporting functionality of a RUM solution is critical. It makes a world of difference if you have various report types you can choose from, as well as other custom reporting functions that help you build meaningful and comprehensive reports.

At the same time, check how easy it is to work with RUM data. It should allow you to export data in a format that can be easily integrated and displayed by other external tools such as dashboards.

Along with the reporting feature, a RUM tool should also come with data visualization capabilities. Without mapping out data in charts and graphs, it’s difficult to spot performance trends and anomalies.

Data Handling

RUM tools are different in terms of how often they collect data, how long they store it, and how exactly they capture and report it.

Frequency can vary from 24 hours to under 5 minutes. While daily updates have historical value, near real-time data is relevant for active operations management.

Being able to view data over long periods of time is very valuable to performance analysis as it enables you to evaluate historical and current trends.

You should also learn how the RUM tool collects data. For instance, if it’s capturing and reporting every visit, or it’s reporting only a certain number of visits. Being able to use data sampling can also have a big impact on costs.

Licensing Options

There are various RUM license models available on the market. Understanding the differences between them will help you choose one that covers your monitoring needs and saves you money.

Depending on your monitoring needs, you can opt to use a RUM solution alone or in combination with other tracking tools, like synthetic monitoring tools or different types of website monitoring services. On that note, some vendors offer standalone RUM solutions, while others include RUM for free as part of a digital experience monitoring tools package.

Other RUM services are based on end user defined sampling to reduce license costs. They collect a subset of data instead of every page in the app.

What RUM Tool Will You Use?

It’s not enough to deliver a great app or website if you don’t make sure your users also have a pleasant experience. That means no performance issues, as they can easily turn around and go back the way they came, thus affecting your goals. There are many website optimization tips you can apply to improve the experience, one of them being using a RUM tool such as Sematext Experience.

Investing in a good RUM solution will pay off in no time. However, RUM doesn’t replace traditional synthetic testing. Instead, it complements it by adding another facet to monitoring and giving DevOps teams more complete visibility.

Real user monitoring, along with logs and metrics helps paint a more complete picture of what your website or webapp is doing at any time. By combining them under one roof, you cover all the angles prone to performance anomalies and get in-depth, actionable insights faster. If this is your use case, you should look for a full-stack observability solution, such as Sematext Cloud, that helps you stay in control of how happy your customers are.

Sign-up for the 14-day free trial to see what Sematext Experience can do for you. And if you want to explore the benefits of a full-stack monitoring solution, adding logs and metrics to your dashboard is as easy as a few clicks away.