OpenReplay vs FullStory
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $199 per month (Cloud dedicated instance, billed hourly at $0.276)
Free tierQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Self-hosting costs only infrastructure and is the main reason to pick OpenReplay. Managed cloud is an instance you rent rather than a per-session rate, though a usage-based serverless option also exists.
Quote-based annual contracts priced by session volume. Among the more expensive tools in the category.
Free tier
Self-hosted community edition is free and unlimited.
Free plan with limited monthly sessions.
Open source
ELv2
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OpenReplay · since 2021
Widely used
FullStory · since 2014
Strengths
- Full data sovereignty — recordings stay inside your infrastructure.
- Developer-focused feature set comparable to LogRocket.
- No volume-based pricing when self-hosted.
- Retroactive analysis is a genuine capability difference, not a marketing angle.
- Excellent search: find the eleven sessions where a specific error occurred in checkout.
- Strong privacy controls with element-level exclusion rules.
Limitations
- Self-hosting session replay is a non-trivial operational commitment, including storage.
- Smaller community and fewer integrations than the commercial tools.
- Analytics and funnel features are thinner.
- Expensive, with opaque quote-based pricing.
- Capturing everything raises data-governance questions that need answering up front.
- Meaningful learning curve to use the search language well.
Best for
Privacy-constrained or high-volume teams that cannot use a hosted replay vendor.
Product and support organisations that need to investigate specific user problems in depth.
All of these integrate with: Sentry, Jira, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.