Session Recording vs Session Replay: The Difference

Session recording is the capture step: collecting a user's page state and interactions as data while they browse. Session replay is the reconstruction step: rebuilding that data into a watchable playback. Between those two steps sits the production data platform—ingest, storage, indexing, privacy controls, retention, and delivery—which is often the largest operational part of the system. In everyday usage the terms are interchangeable; the useful evaluation question is who provides and operates all three layers.

Why do two terms exist for one thing?#

Because the workflow has two halves and each half named the whole. "Recording" describes it from the browser's side and "replay" from the viewer's side. rrweb's house usage is simple: record and replay are the two verbs, the recording is the artifact, and the replay is what you watch. Product capabilities depend on the underlying capture and delivery system.

Which distinction matters?#

How the session is captured: as structured data or as video. DOM-based tools (rrweb and everything built on it) record an event stream: the page's structure once, then every change and interaction as typed events. Video-based approaches capture pixels. The consequences run through everything downstream:

	DOM event stream	Video
Size per session	Tens to hundreds of KB	Tens to hundreds of MB
Searchable content	Directly searchable as structured data	Searchable with vision or OCR tooling
Privacy	Maskable at capture	Depends on capture and post-processing controls
Programmatic analysis	Native event access	Requires a vision or OCR pipeline
Fidelity limits	Canvas, cross-origin iframes need care	Captures anything on screen

Video is useful when pixel-level coverage matters, including surfaces that need additional configuration in DOM capture. DOM event streams are typically smaller and easier to search, mask, and analyze programmatically, which is why many replay products use them.

How should this affect your evaluation?#

Treat the label as secondary and evaluate the complete system. Ask how capture works, what is masked before transmission, how batches are retried and deduplicated, where recordings are indexed and retained, how deletion is verified, which APIs expose the data, and who operates ingest and replay. The open rrweb library provides capture and playback. rrweb Cloud provides the managed production layer between them, including ingest, storage, indexing, deduplication, PII filtering, APIs, and replay serving. The tools comparison covers other excellent workflow-focused products, while self-hosted session replay explains the difference between a local demonstration and production.

FAQ#

Is there a difference between session recording and session replay?#

Technically yes: recording is capturing a session as data in the browser, replay is reconstructing that data into a watchable playback. In everyday usage the terms are interchangeable, and tools use whichever their marketing prefers. The distinction worth checking is how a tool captures: DOM events or video.

Is session replay the same as screen recording?#

Screen recording captures pixels as video. DOM-based session replay captures structured events describing the page and its changes, then rebuilds the session. Structured events are typically much smaller, directly searchable, maskable at capture time, and available for programmatic analysis. Video offers pixel-level coverage and can be analyzed through vision or OCR tooling.

Which term should I search when comparing tools?#

Search both terms, since vendors use them interchangeably. Evaluate the capture mechanism, privacy controls, production data layer, APIs, and operational ownership. Our open source guide and tools comparison cover those criteria regardless of the term a platform uses.