Smartlook Alternative: What to Use After the Smartlook Shutdown

The Smartlook shutdown timeline, in dates

Four dates matter, and they were reconfirmed against Smartlook's own end-of-life notice in August 2026. Nothing has been extended.

Between the last two dates you keep access to a limited Smartlook Free plan, so the lights do not go out the moment your paid plan lapses. That is a grace period, not a plan you can run on.

The August 31, 2026 renewal deadline and what it changes

August 31, 2026 is the date with the hard edge. From that point renewals and expansions are no longer sold, which means you cannot extend your way out of the problem or add seats and volume to cover a busy quarter. If your contract renews after that date, it does not renew.

The practical consequence is that the decision moves from "sometime before 2027" to your current renewal cycle. Migrating by August 31, 2026 was never the requirement. Knowing whether your current term carries you far enough is, because from that date your runway is fixed and cannot be topped up.

The check takes a minute. Open the contract, find the term end date, and compare it to August 31, 2027, when all paid subscriptions end regardless. If your term ends before then and you have not renewed, August 31, 2026 is the cutoff for buying one more term. If it already runs to 2027, there is nothing to buy and the only useful action is starting the replacement in parallel. Either way, capacity cannot be increased after that date, so size the decision for next year rather than for current volume.

If you would rather land somewhere that keeps heatmaps, recordings, and surveys on one vendor, the option that changed most recently is Hotjar, which now bills through Contentsquare and carries a free plan tracking up to 200,000 monthly sessions with 10,000 replays. The trade is retention, one month of analytics history free against 13 months paid. Every rival priced side by side is in the best Hotjar alternatives roundup.

Your historical data does not come with you

This is the detail that catches teams, and it is worth stating plainly. Current subscriptions are not automatically transitioned into Digital Experience Analytics in Splunk Observability Cloud, and Splunk is not migrating historical Smartlook data into it. Recordings, events, funnels, and heatmap history do not transfer.

So if any of that history has value, whether for a benchmark, a client report, or an argument you expect to have later, export it through the Smartlook API while the platform is still up. Everything remaining is deleted on September 30, 2027. Exporting is the one task here with a hard, irreversible deadline, and it is the one most likely to be left until it cannot be done.

The recordings themselves cannot be exported anywhere

This is the part that undoes most migration plans, so it is worth being precise. Event data, aggregate metrics, and funnel definitions come out through the API. The session replays do not, and not because Smartlook is being difficult.

Replays are not video files. They are compressed streams of DOM mutation events stored in a proprietary format, and there is no interchange standard for them, so no session replay tool can import another vendor's recordings. That is industry-wide. It applies equally whether you move to Clarity, Hotjar, Fullstory, or PostHog.

Which means the only real way to keep continuity is overlap. Install the replacement now and run it alongside Smartlook, so that when the old tool goes read-only you already have months of history in the new one rather than starting from zero. Teams that treat this as a clean cutover end up with a blind spot exactly as wide as the gap between cancelling and installing. The full dated breakdown with the export checklist is in the Smartlook end of life guide.

What to replace it with, by job

Smartlook bundled two jobs that most teams buy separately now: watching what visitors did, and working out what to change. Splitting them usually costs less than a mid-tier Smartlook plan did.

The most common post-Smartlook stack is a free replay tool plus one paid audit tool. Microsoft Clarity covers the watching, and Converto covers the deciding, which is the half Smartlook never really did. The wider comparison is in the best session replay tools roundup, and if you are choosing between the two obvious free and paid replay options, Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar covers that directly.

A migration order that works

Do these in sequence rather than all at once. First, check your renewal date against August 31, 2026 and work out how much runway your current term actually gives you. Second, install the replacement replay tool now, in parallel, so it starts accumulating sessions while Smartlook is still running and you are never blind. Third, export the Smartlook history you care about through the API, because that is the step with the deadline you cannot undo.

Only then switch off Smartlook. Running both for a few weeks costs nothing if the replacement is Clarity, and it protects you from discovering a gap after the old tool is gone.

One last thing worth saying, because a forced migration is a good moment to ask it: replay tools tell you where people hesitated, not what to write instead. If the reason you are watching recordings is that a page is not converting, a landing page audit gets to the answer faster than a week of sessions will, and session replay vs heatmaps is a useful read on what each format can and cannot tell you.