Smartlook End of Life: Dates and Migration Plan

Smartlook is being retired by Cisco on a published schedule. End of Sale passed on May 31, 2026. End of contract renewals is August 31, 2026, after which no renewal or expansion can be sold. Paid subscriptions end August 31, 2027, and the platform is decommissioned on September 30, 2027 with all remaining customer data deleted. Splunk is not migrating any historical Smartlook data into Digital Experience Analytics. Dates verified on Smartlook's own end-of-life notice in August 2026. Last updated August 2026.

Of the four dates, the renewal deadline is the one with a hard edge: August 31, 2026. Everything after it is a long tail you can plan around calmly. Once that date passes, what you are allowed to buy changes for the rest of the product's life.

The practical test takes a minute. Open your Smartlook contract and find the term end date. If it falls before August 31, 2027 and you have not renewed yet, you have until August 31, 2026 to lock in one final term, and after that the option disappears permanently. If your term already runs into 2027, you cannot extend it further and there is nothing to do on this date except start the replacement. Either way you cannot buy more capacity after August 31, so if your recording volume is growing, size the decision for next year rather than this month.

The full Smartlook end-of-life timeline

Here is every published date in one place, with what each one actually does to you.

Between the last day of support and decommissioning, existing customers drop to a limited Smartlook Free plan. That is a read-only-ish grace period, not a product you should run on, and it ends with deletion.

What actually happens to your data

Two things, and only one of them is widely understood.

The first is straightforward: Splunk will not be migrating historical data from Smartlook into Digital Experience Analytics in Splunk Observability Cloud. Subscriptions are not auto-transitioned either. If you assumed Cisco would carry you across to the successor product with your history intact, that assumption is wrong and it is stated plainly in the vendor's own notice. You export via the Smartlook APIs or you lose it.

The second is the part almost nobody writes about, and it is the reason a migration plan built around "export everything" quietly fails.

You cannot move session replays to another tool. Any tool.

Session replays are not videos. They are compressed streams of DOM mutation events plus the assets needed to reconstruct the page, stored in a proprietary format. There is no interchange standard, so no vendor can import another vendor's replays. This is an industry-wide limitation, not a Smartlook decision, and it applies equally if you move to Clarity, Hotjar, FullStory, PostHog, or anything else.

What that means concretely: every recorded session, every documented UI bug, every user journey you have collected in Smartlook stops being viewable when the servers go dark, and there is no file you can save that changes that. Aggregate metrics and event data are exportable through the API. The replays themselves are not portable, only viewable while the platform is alive.

So the only real continuity strategy is overlap. Install the replacement now and run both in parallel, so that by the time Smartlook goes read-only you already have months of history in the new tool instead of starting from zero on the day you most need data. Teams that treat this as a cutover on a deadline end up with a blind spot exactly as wide as the gap between when they cancelled and when they installed.

Why the August 31, 2026 date matters more than it looks

End of contract renewals is not the shutdown. Your service keeps working. What it removes is your ability to change anything about the commercial relationship: you cannot renew when your term expires, and you cannot expand, which includes adding seats or moving up a plan because your traffic grew.

Three practical consequences worth checking against your own contract:

• Find out when your current term actually ends. That date, not August 31, is when you lose the paid product. If your term runs into 2027 you have real time. If it renews in the fall, you have very little.
• Do not plan on scaling up. If your recording volume is likely to grow, you cannot buy more capacity after August 31. Size your replacement for where you are going, not where you are.
• Budget the export work before support ends. API access to pull event data out is only useful while support exists to help when the export breaks, and support stops August 31, 2027.

What to do in the next few weeks

1. Confirm your renewal date in the billing area, and write it down. Everything else scales off it.
2. Pick a replacement and install it now, in parallel with Smartlook. Overlap is the only thing that buys back continuity, and it costs you one extra script tag.
3. Export what is genuinely exportable through the Smartlook API: event data, aggregate metrics, funnel definitions. Pull it into somewhere durable rather than a laptop folder. Routing an API export into a warehouse or spreadsheet on a schedule is a job for a tool that connects APIs and databases, not for a one-off manual download you will forget to repeat.
4. Screenshot or record the replays that matter. If a specific session documents a bug or a user-journey problem you are still working on, capture it as a screen recording while you can. It is crude and it is the only option.
5. Rebuild your funnels and events in the new tool while Smartlook is still live, so you can check the numbers agree before you lose the ability to compare.

Choosing a Smartlook replacement

Smartlook's mix was unusual: session replay plus heatmaps plus event-based product analytics, with genuinely good mobile app SDKs. Most replacements cover part of that, so the honest advice depends on which part you actually used.

For most teams leaving Smartlook, Microsoft Clarity is the sober answer and we say so even though it is free and we are not. It does replay and heatmaps at unlimited volume for nothing, and the main thing it does not do is A/B testing. If you need the product-analytics half of what Smartlook gave you, PostHog is the closer match. The full comparison including the trade-offs is in the best session replay tools roundup, and the direct swap analysis is on the Smartlook alternative page.

One option worth knowing about, because it changed recently and most migration advice has not caught up: Hotjar now bills through Contentsquare, and its free plan tracks up to 200,000 monthly sessions with 10,000 replays. For a team leaving Smartlook that wants heatmaps, recordings, and surveys from one vendor without starting a new subscription mid-migration, that is a larger free allowance than it used to be. The catch is retention, one month of analytics history on the free tier against 13 months paid. The priced breakdown of every rival sits in the best Hotjar alternatives roundup.

Questions people are asking about the Smartlook shutdown

Is Smartlook shutting down?

Yes. Cisco has published a formal end-of-life schedule. Smartlook stopped selling new subscriptions on May 31, 2026, stops renewals on August 31, 2026, ends all paid subscriptions on August 31, 2027, and decommissions the platform on September 30, 2027, at which point all remaining customer data is deleted.

What is replacing Smartlook?

Cisco is directing customers toward Digital Experience Analytics in Splunk Observability Cloud, but this is not a drop-in replacement and it is not automatic. Subscriptions are not transitioned, and no historical Smartlook data is migrated across. Most former Smartlook users end up on Microsoft Clarity, PostHog, or Mouseflow instead, depending on which half of the product they relied on.

Can I export my Smartlook session recordings?

No, not in any portable sense. Replays are stored as compressed DOM-event streams in a proprietary format, and no session replay tool can import another vendor's recordings. You can export event data and aggregate metrics through the Smartlook API, and you can screen-record individual sessions manually, but the replay library itself cannot be moved and disappears at decommissioning.

How long do I still have access to my Smartlook data?

Until September 30, 2027, when the platform is decommissioned and all remaining customer data is deleted. After your paid subscription ends on or before August 31, 2027, you drop to a limited Smartlook Free plan for the remaining window. Treat that period as time to export, not time to keep operating.

Do I need to do anything before August 31, 2026?

Check when your current contract term expires, because after August 31, 2026 you cannot renew or expand it. If your term ends soon after that date, you need a replacement running before then. If it runs well into 2027, you have room, but install the replacement in parallel anyway so you are building history rather than waiting.

The thing worth doing while you are switching tools anyway

A migration is a rare moment when someone actually looks at the analytics stack instead of just paying for it. Worth asking: what did Smartlook change about your site in the last year? For a lot of teams the honest answer is that recordings were watched a few times, a heatmap was screenshotted for a deck, and nothing shipped.

Session replay is a diagnostic tool. It tells you where people hesitate, and it is genuinely good at that. What it does not do is tell you what to write instead, which is why replay libraries fill up while conversion rates stay flat. We covered the split in session replay vs heatmaps and the wider version in product analytics vs session replay.

If your reason for having Smartlook was to work out why a page is not converting, a landing page audit gets to the answer faster than watching sessions, because it reads the copy, layout, CTAs, and page speed directly and hands back variants you can ship. Start from why your landing page is not converting if you want the diagnostic checklist first. Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees, and no tool replaces knowing your own customers.