Smartlook will show you the session where someone typed their email, hovered over submit, and bailed. What it won't do is save that email and send it to your CRM.
That gap is the whole problem. Over 80% of people who start a form never finish it, according to WPForms' own data. Your replay tool can play you the funeral. It can't bring the lead back.
If you came to Smartlook for session replay and heatmaps and then realized you also need to recover abandoned form entries — not just watch them happen — you need a different tool. Here's how to pick one, and what to expect.
Why Smartlook falls short for lead recovery
Smartlook (now owned by Cisco) is a solid behavior analytics tool. Session replays, heatmaps, funnels. The basics work.
But there are three gaps that marketing teams keep hitting:
1. Event-based tracking means you only see what you tagged. Contentsquare's teardown of Smartlook nailed this: "you'll spend way more time on setup and combing through data than shipping changes that move KPIs." If you forgot to tag a field, you won't know people abandoned on it.
2. No partial form capture. Session replay shows you the keystrokes. It does not persist the email address that was typed into field one before the user closed the tab. That data is replay-only. You cannot email a replay.
3. No built-in recovery workflow. Even if you reconstruct the abandoned email from a replay (which is tedious and won't scale past ten leads a week), Smartlook doesn't push it anywhere. No CRM sync. No follow-up automation.
The teams who notice these gaps are usually the ones running paid traffic to a demo form or a contact form. They're spending $40 a click to get people to a form that 80%+ never submit, and they have zero way to follow up.
What "built-in form abandonment recovery" actually means
There's a specific feature to look for, and it's different from session replay or form analytics.
Real lead recovery means: when a user types their email (or phone, or name) into a form field and leaves without submitting, that partial entry is captured and stored. You get the lead. You can email them. You can push them to HubSpot or Salesforce.
This is very different from:
- Session replay alone — you can watch the abandonment but can't act on it
- Form analytics — tells you which field people drop off on, but doesn't save the data they typed
- Heatmaps — tells you what they clicked, not what they wrote
You need all three to diagnose why forms lose leads. But to recover the ones you've already lost, you need partial-entry capture as a first-class feature.
The shortlist of Smartlook alternatives
Most Smartlook alternative roundups (Crazy Egg, Contentsquare, etc.) recommend the same four tools: Mouseflow, PostHog, LogRocket, and Contentsquare. They're all fine at replay. None of them have partial form capture as a built-in product feature — it's either a missing feature or a tagged-event workaround you have to build yourself.
Your real options break into three categories:
Replay-first tools
Mouseflow, Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity. Good at what they do. Zero lead recovery.
Enterprise experience platforms
FullStory, Contentsquare, Glassbox. Autocapture is great, AI surfaces what matters, and you'll pay $25K+ a year for it. Still no partial form capture out of the box.
Recovery-first tools
WPForms (WordPress-only, requires Pro + addon), and CloseTrace — which combines session replay, heatmaps, funnels, and partial-entry lead recovery in one tracker.
Why CloseTrace is the Smartlook alternative most form-heavy teams pick
CloseTrace was built around one idea: session replay is evidence, but the lead is the asset. So capture the lead first, then let the replay explain why they bailed.
Concretely, here's what the single tracker script does:
- Captures keystrokes in form fields in real time — so if a user types "sarah@acme.com" into the email field and closes the tab, you have sarah@acme.com. Not a replay of it. The actual string.
- Pushes the abandoned entry to your CRM or email tool — so a follow-up sequence fires automatically.
- Links the session replay to the abandoned lead — so your sales team can watch the 90 seconds before the drop-off and know what objection to handle.
- Runs the usual heatmap and funnel analysis — so you still get the diagnostic side.
The math is blunt. If your form gets 1,000 visitors a month and 80% abandon, that's 800 lost leads. Even if you only recover 10% with a follow-up email, that's 80 extra conversations a month from traffic you already paid for.
One warning about privacy
Partial form capture means you're storing PII before the user hits submit. That has GDPR implications — specifically around consent and legitimate interest. Any tool you pick (CloseTrace included) should let you:
- Exclude specific fields (passwords, credit cards, SSN) from capture
- Respect consent banners
- Purge abandoned entries after a set retention window
- Mask PII in session replays
If the tool you're evaluating doesn't let you configure all four, walk away. This is the feature that gets companies fined.
The practical takeaway
If you only need to watch sessions and debug UX, any Smartlook alternative works — pick on price. Microsoft Clarity is free, Hotjar is cheap, PostHog is open-source.
If you're running paid traffic to a form and losing 80% of it, replay alone is a diagnostic tool, not a revenue tool. You need partial-entry capture wired directly into your follow-up stack. Most Smartlook alternatives don't have this. A few do.
Start by measuring what you're actually losing. Look at your form's unique-visitor-to-submission ratio. If the gap is more than 60%, the ROI on lead recovery usually beats the ROI on another round of A/B testing the headline.