Smartlook is shutting down — what to do about it
A migration guide, not a sales page.
Written by the Replayfy team at Appify Commerce. Competitor facts last checked against their own pages on 2026-09-29. If something here has gone stale, tell us and we'll fix it.
Smartlook was acquired by Cisco and is being retired. The last day to buy it was 2026-05-31, and the last day to renew or expand a subscription was 2026-08-31. Paid subscriptions keep their support until 2027-08-31. The platform is then decommissioned on 2027-09-30, and all remaining customer data is deleted. The official path onward is Splunk's enterprise digital-experience product, which is priced for a different kind of company entirely, and Splunk has said it will not migrate Smartlook's historical data.
When your paid subscription ends, the account is not closed straight away: it falls back to Smartlook's free plan, with the free plan's limits, until 2027-09-30. That is a window for getting your data out, not a place to keep working.
So the first thing to do has nothing to do with us: export what you still have. Recordings, heatmap data and any saved segments. Smartlook's own advice is to export before your paid subscription ends, and in any case no later than 2027-08-31. After the decommission there is no retrieval.
The second thing is to be realistic about what a replacement can restore. No session-replay vendor can import another vendor's recordings — the formats are not interchangeable and the DOM snapshots reference an asset pipeline that no longer exists. Whatever you move to, you start collecting fresh. Anyone promising a Smartlook import is describing something that does not work.
| Smartlook | Replayfy | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Being retired. Last day of sale 2026-05-31; renewals ended 2026-08-31. | Live, and run by the company that built it. |
| Support and shutdown | Paid support ends 2027-08-31. Decommissioned 2027-09-30, all remaining data deleted. | Supported by email, by the people who build it. |
| When your paid plan ends | Falls back to Smartlook's free plan, with its limits, until 2027-09-30. | Free plan: 2,000 sessions a month, no card, no trial clock. |
| Migration path offered | Splunk Observability — enterprise pricing, a different product category. | Paste a script tag and start collecting today. |
| Your historical data | Export before your paid subscription ends, and no later than 2027-08-31. Splunk will not migrate it. | Not importable — nobody's is. Start fresh and keep the export as an archive. |
Where Smartlook wins
- Smartlook had mobile SDKs for native iOS and Android apps. We do not, and are not building them — Replayfy records web pages only.
- It shipped heatmaps and funnels, which we have not built yet.
If all you need is web session replay with frustration signals and error context, you can be running in about a minute. If you need heatmaps or native mobile, be honest with yourself that we are not the replacement yet.
Other comparisons: Microsoft Clarity · Hotjar · Lucky Orange