---
title: "Session Replay"
canonical_url: https://ampl.webclat.com/glossary/session-replay
description: "Session replay reconstructs individual user sessions as watchable recreations of clicks, scrolls, and navigation - the qualitative companion to event analytics."
source: Webclat | Amplitude Solutions (official Amplitude partner, independent consultancy)
---

# Session Replay

**Definition:** Session replay reconstructs an individual user's session as a watchable recreation of their clicks, scrolls, inputs, and navigation. Where event analytics tells you 38% of users abandoned a step, replay shows you individual users hesitating, mis-clicking, or fighting a broken control on that step - the qualitative why behind the quantitative what.

## When is session replay actually useful?

Three moments: diagnosing a funnel step that quantitative data flags but can't explain, reproducing bug reports ('watch exactly what the user did'), and validating new-flow launches in the first days. The teams that get value treat replay as a drill-down from charts, not a channel to browse - which requires the replay tool to be connected to the event taxonomy.

## What are the privacy obligations?

Replay captures user interactions, so it inherits every privacy obligation your analytics has, plus masking: text inputs, personal data, and payment fields must be masked at capture (not at playback), replay must respect consent state, and retention windows should be deliberate. Amplitude's plans include replay volume by tier - 10K sessions monthly on the free plan at the time of writing.

## FAQ

### Does session replay slow down a website?

Modern replay SDKs record DOM mutations rather than video and batch uploads asynchronously, so overhead is modest - but 'modest' is not 'zero,' and misconfiguration (recording everything for everyone) costs both performance and money. Sample sensibly.

In practice: Wiring replay into the event taxonomy - so any chart can answer 'show me one' - is part of our AI enablement service. (https://ampl.webclat.com/services/amplitude-ai-enablement)