Session replay
From Hogpedia, the free encyclopedia
Session replay records a person's session in a product and plays it back. PostHog's glossary describes it as the ability to record and play back individual user sessions, so that a team can watch exactly how a real person moves through a product, and states that replays capture clicks, scrolls, inputs, and page transitions.[1]
It is not screen recording. The browser sends the changes to the page structure, and the player rebuilds the page from them. This is why a replay is small enough to store at scale, and why the text in a replay can be searched.
What problem it solves[edit]
Product analytics reports that 40 per cent of people fail at a step. It cannot report why. The usual reasons – a button below the fold, a validation message that does not say what is wrong, a control that looks inactive – leave no event behind, because nothing happened.
Session replay is the tool for that gap. It turns a number into an observation of one person.
How it works in PostHog[edit]
The PostHog SDK records mutations to the page and sends them with the same event stream everything else uses.[2] A recording is therefore joined to the rest of the data rather than stored beside it. In practice that means a team can:
- Open the replays behind a specific funnel step, rather than search a list.
- Jump to the moment an exception was thrown, from the error itself.
- Filter recordings by any person or event property.
Inputs are masked by default, and a team can mark further elements to exclude, because a replay of a real session otherwise contains whatever a person typed.[2]
How it relates to other PostHog products[edit]
| Product | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Product analytics | Supplies the number. Replay supplies the reason. |
| Error tracking | Each exception links to the replay of the session that threw it. |
| Experiments | Replays can be filtered to one variant, to see how the variants differ in use. |
| Surveys | A survey response links to the session that produced it. |
Because all of these sit on one event stream, no export step connects them.
See also
References
External links
This page was last modified on October 2, 2026.
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