Glossary
What is session replay?
Session replay records what a user did in your web or mobile app and plays it back later, so you can see what happened instead of guessing from numbers.
Updated · 1 min read
Session replay is a recording of one user's interactions with an application, stored as data rather than video, that a reviewer can play back later to see what that person saw and did.
Why it matters
Analytics can tell you that users abandon checkout on the address step. Replay shows you the person who tried four times to submit a form that never responded. Support tickets, bug reports and conversion questions all get shorter when you can watch the session instead of reconstructing it from logs.
Replay is not video. A web recording captures the DOM and the changes to it, and a mobile recording captures the element tree, so the playback is text you can search, mask and translate. See what is session replay for a longer walkthrough.
How AnyReplay handles it
The web SDK wraps rrweb and ships at 34.8 KB gzip with a 45 KB budget enforced in CI. The React Native SDK records the committed element tree instead of screenshots, so both platforms produce recordings with real text. Because the text is real, a reviewer can watch any session in their own language through session translation, and passwords and payment fields are never recorded, whatever the configuration says. Events leave the page in chunks of 200 events or every 5 seconds, whichever comes first.