---
source_url: "https://www.debugbear.com/software/best-real-user-monitoring-tools"
title: "Best Real User Monitoring Tools: A 2026 Comparison | DebugBear"
mirrored_at: 2026-08-04T13:03:08.111Z
host: www.debugbear.com
cited_in_42a: true
mirror_canonical: "https://index.42a.ai/www.debugbear.com/software/best-real-user-monitoring-tools"
---

> **Original source:** https://www.debugbear.com/software/best-real-user-monitoring-tools

Web performance monitoring is key for maintaining a fast, reliable website. [Real User Monitoring](https://www.debugbear.com/docs/what-is-real-user-monitoring) (RUM) tools track how actual visitors experience your site, while [synthetic monitoring](https://www.debugbear.com/docs/synthetic-website-monitoring) simulates user interactions in controlled environments.

This guide compares a number of RUM solutions. We evaluate some key features and limitations to help you choose the right tool.

## DebugBear[​](#debugbear "Direct link to DebugBear")

[DebugBear](https://www.debugbear.com/) is a web performance monitoring service that tracks Core Web Vitals, site speed metrics, and user experience data to help optimize website performance and SEO rankings.

It has a particular focus on Google's Core Web Vitals metrics, providing detailed debug data for Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint.

![DebugBear real user monitoring dashboard](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/47af4a5e195f27d79fca8307fbee3df0.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Real user monitoring across entire websites
-   Reporting on what elements cause slow INP interactions
-   Automatic alerts for performance regressions
-   Track user engagement and business impact
-   Support for [synthetic testing](https://www.debugbear.com/software/best-synthetic-monitoring-tools) and data from Google's [Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX)](https://www.debugbear.com/google-crux-monitoring)

The real user monitoring dashboard on DebugBear provides an overview of Core Web Vitals across your site and for your most popular pages.

You can also see how performance varies across the world and how your page speed has changed over time.

Here's a dashboard specific to the Largest Contentful Paint metric, showing a distribution of visitor experiences as well as analysis of what the largest content element is and what's causing rendering delays.

![DebugBear real user Core Web Vitals dashboard](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/6c3a6e3836dda3bba99fc10a76e0b637.png)

On the Interaction to Next Paint metric dashboard you can see what types of interaction delays happen on your website and what scripts are causing those delays.

![DebugBear Interaction to Next Paint dashboard](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/fca30b46381acac843c97092dd0aa9cd.png)

To [debug INP](https://www.debugbear.com/docs/rum/fix-inp-issues) it's also important to know what page interactions are slow. In the INP Elements dashboard you can see how often users interact with different elements and what the performance is for those interactions.

![DebugBear Interaction to Next Paint target element](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/65a9544d6ee433af0f8fb8cf9d305b49.png)

When looking at individual visits with slow interactions you can check:

-   What page element the user interacted with
-   What specific scripts ran during the interaction
-   Why those scripts were running

![INP debug data in DebugBear](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/e4eb7d07cc5d883cccf27cc3cfc0e575.png)

### Pros[​](#pros "Direct link to Pros")

-   Detailed performance metrics for Core Web Vitals, and more
-   Intuitive high-level dashboards
-   A [wizard](https://www.debugbear.com/changelog/may-2024-release-notes#a-new-optimize-tab) to guide you through locating, investigating, and fixing performance issues
-   Advanced segmentation functionality based on device data and custom tags
-   API integration and support for custom metrics

### Cons[​](#cons "Direct link to Cons")

-   Mainly focused on frontend performance

Core Web Vitals Monitoring

Synthetic Tests · Real User Monitoring · Google CrUX data

## SpeedCurve[​](#speedcurve "Direct link to SpeedCurve")

SpeedCurve monitors website performance through real user monitoring (RUM), helping to identify and fix speed issues that affect user experience.

![SpeedCurve home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/272353b5a6edd816df51df2660820905.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-1 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Tracks 100+ performance metrics including Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse scores, and custom metrics
-   Provides competitor benchmarking capabilities
-   Integrates with CI/CD workflows through API and performance budgets
-   Offers real-time alerts for performance threshold violations

### Pros[​](#pros-1 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Easy to understand visualizations and charts, all in a clear user interface
-   Compare performance between your website changes, with their Deployments integration
-   Includes a Lighthouse report

Real user monitoring visualization of page views for a monitored site within SpeedCurve:

![SpeedCurve page view map](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/4849875656557e70ceb1bc7950012531.png)

While the available data is sometimes presented in its raw form, you at least have access to the underlying performance data to understand why a metric may be poorly performing.

![SpeedCurve page view detail](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/f29951dc824c6d28597031b860fa2bb7.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-1 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Lack of detail in performance metrics making it difficult to track down the root cause of performance issues
-   Limited functionality coupled with a simplistic interface

## Datadog[​](#datadog "Direct link to Datadog")

Datadog is a RUM and synthetic monitoring service that can track and analyze how users interact with web applications in real-time.

![Datadog home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/8e3b944cdb206daaee11fd79e0ff5ca8.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-2 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Monitors core web vitals and load times across web applications
-   Tracks user sessions with replay capability and error tracking
-   Collects custom metrics and user behavioral data
-   Correlates frontend issues with backend traces and logs

### Pros[​](#pros-2 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Watch video recordings of the web browsing experience of your users
-   Comprehensive set of monitoring features within the Datadog ecosystem
-   Helpful tool to record website interactions that you want tested on a regular basis

Real user monitoring within Datadog shows the exact steps a user took in their session:

![DataDog session event list](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/d334861e59f9bba7cf64546976dfc72f.png)

Real user monitoring captures the largest contentful paint metric over time. [LCP is a Core Web Vitals metric](https://www.debugbear.com/docs/metrics/largest-contentful-paint).

![DataDog web vitals data](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/cb10efd602308d21f792a6817be6a14a.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-2 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Setup can be confusing as you are requested to install their software (“agent”) to track data during onboarding

## Pingdom[​](#pingdom "Direct link to Pingdom")

[Pingdom](https://www.debugbear.com/software/pingdom-speed-test) is a website monitoring service that includes a real user monitoring offering that tracks end-user interactions and performance metrics on websites, priced starting at $10 per month.

![Pingdom homepage](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/8786b8d6ff7bd26fef5d08804900a50f.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-3 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Geographic tracking of user activity with live mapping
-   Performance metrics including load time, time to first byte, and Apdex score
-   Browser, device, and platform-specific analytics
-   Customizable performance threshold alerts
-   Historical trend analysis and comparison
-   Deployment via single code snippet

### Pros[​](#pros-3 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Offers an interaction recorder to capture interactions, and then run those recordings as tests
-   Offers a built-in Uptime status page that you can share with users

Real user monitoring dashboard

![Pingdom RUM dashboard](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/febaadbfef4360155a279a7acc630d58.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-3 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Limited web performance monitoring data available
-   For the performance metrics which are available, there’s limited breakdown, making it hard to debug performance regressions

## New Relic[​](#new-relic "Direct link to New Relic")

New Relic is a suite of monitoring tools, including a synthetic monitoring service and a real user monitoring service that tracks and analyzes web application performance from the end-user's perspective through browser-side data collection.

![New relic home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/0eb6687e211f461b46e9a8b74f843793.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-4 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Core web vitals tracking (LCP, INP, CLS) for SEO optimization
-   Error rate monitoring with deployment correlation
-   Geographic usage patterns and device-specific performance metrics
-   Browser-specific performance tracking and troubleshooting
-   Backend service connection through distributed tracing
-   Real-time alerting for performance indicators

### Pros[​](#pros-4 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Offers a comprehensive monitoring solution for your website and infrastructure
-   Shows video recordings of user sessions so you can connect certain logs and performance milestones with what was happening on the page
-   Useful as a general analytics platform, offering page view data with filtering capabilities
-   Interesting “New Relic AI” feature where you can ask AI questions about the data you see on a dashboard

These Core Web Vitals metrics come from real users, as part of a Real User Monitoring feature.

![New Relic Core Web Vitals data](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/d87c29c0a37df62a553c8f719ad9c050.png)

The real user monitoring feature saves user interactions to your dashboard, so you can watch them later to diagnose issues.

![New Relic user interaction diagnosis](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/1aa61878935358489fca0d3d8a2bb4c3.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-4 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Doesn’t offer granular insights into certain data, such as Core Web Vitals
-   Complex user interface can make it difficult to find the information you need

## Request Metrics[​](#request-metrics "Direct link to Request Metrics")

Request Metrics is primarily a RUM service that tracks website performance metrics and Core Web Vitals to identify speed issues affecting actual users. It also has some synthetic monitoring capabilities.

![Request metrics home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/e42801fa3ddea7bb398af1f45349835a.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-5 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Real-time performance monitoring of page loads and user interactions
-   Automatic URL pattern detection and page grouping
-   Resource waterfall analysis to identify slow-loading assets
-   Core Web Vitals tracking for SEO optimization
-   Third-party script impact analysis
-   Regional performance tracking by country
-   No-code trial option with performance scanning

### Pros[​](#pros-5 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Useful features for debugging Core Web Vitals metrics, such as Interaction to Next Paint Analysis
-   Powerful session explorer feature, showing the exact steps the user took in the website journey
-   A simple and friendly dashboard interface for understanding your website performance metrics

The real user monitoring feature of Request Metrics captures statistics of your users' experience:

![Request Metrics metric overview](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/9b5ff583459201c7db5d5d588be12394.png)

Lots of helpful metrics and data are captured from real user sessions:

![Request Metrics page view summary](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/5c9062716a41dd3b1816c958f98ade55.png)

When monitoring real user interactions, snippets of code are shown for interaction elements:

![Request Metrics page view details](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/510ae3e2c6a493dd3873402e05f8bf96.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-5 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Many important features are locked behind certain pricing plans, and may require a subscription upgrade

## Solarwinds[​](#solarwinds "Direct link to Solarwinds")

SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides real-time monitoring of web application performance and user experience, combining website metrics with application performance monitoring.

![Solarwinds home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/ca7ab86b98d440a2e10f1217f7997ffa.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-6 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Real-time tracking of page speed, uptime metrics, and user experience by region, device, and browser
-   Integration with [APM](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/types-of-monitoring#application-performance-monitoring-apm) for combined client-side and server-side monitoring
-   Performance analysis through customizable alerts and Apdex satisfaction ratings
-   Root cause identification through transaction traces and database query analysis
-   Single interface monitoring of end-user experience, application servers, infrastructure, and databases

### Pros[​](#pros-6 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Offers useful transaction monitoring to help check user journeys are working as expected
-   Offers a comprehensive monitoring ecosystem for logging throughout your application, infrastructure and database
-   Includes many reporting and filtering capabilities, helping you to analyze data in a way that makes sense to you

Web performance metrics coming from the Real User Monitoring feature.

![Solarwinds web vitals dashboard](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/b0a060fdadec0bbbe528aa8ffe0af840.png)

Applying filtering capabilities helps narrow down performance issues, for users in certain geographic areas for example.

![Solarwinds RUM filter](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/cec7d2926a5b54e31ca2fdd981a11c42.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-6 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Complex user interface and dashboard can make finding certain information difficult
-   Limited insight into performance metrics, making it difficult to diagnose problems and identify the root cause of issues
-   Interaction to Next Paint, a Core Web Vitals metric, is unavailable

## Atatus[​](#atatus "Direct link to Atatus")

A monitoring solution that tracks end-user experience and frontend performance metrics for web applications in real-time.

![Atatus home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/7e18a5a264eba964ac9ce02b0a1f0372.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-7 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Web vitals monitoring (FID, LCP, FCP, INP, TTFB, CLS)
-   Page load performance tracking with resource waterfall analysis
-   Single page application (SPA) route change monitoring
-   AJAX performance tracking
-   JavaScript error detection and diagnosis
-   User session replay and journey mapping
-   Deployment impact measurement

### Pros[​](#pros-7 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Useful analytics dashboards to help you understand overall website usage
-   Includes a deployment tracking feature to link code changes to regressions
-   Good breakdown of network-related statistics

Where available and applicable, the Real User Monitoring feature logs useful performance metrics for individual user sessions.

![Atatus session summary](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/264ac05bf2cc55ca46f58ebf2496367f.png)

You can also view percentiles for combined real user visits.

![Atatus RUM dashboard](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/3fac37227da2abf142c947f7e5d35e59.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-7 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Little detail for certain performance metrics, like Core Web Vitals, making it difficult to investigate and diagnose poor performance scores

## Sentry[​](#sentry "Direct link to Sentry")

Sentry is an error tracking and real user monitoring service that helps developers identify and fix performance issues in web applications by tracking user experience metrics and tracing slow requests.

![Sentry homepage](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/99f8f8fbc815ebcc0d7dcb4a89475318.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-8 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Tracks web vitals and browser performance metrics
-   Traces frontend performance issues to backend calls
-   Provides performance insights based on actual user impact
-   Integrates error tracking with performance monitoring
-   Supports [Next.js](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/nextjs-performance) and other web frameworks
-   Alerts developers to latency issues affecting users

### Pros[​](#pros-8 "Direct link to Pros")

-   A well-known developer tool in the monitoring space
-   Offers powerful error and performance tracking functionality, on both the frontend and backend of your web application
-   Displays video recordings of user sessions which embed performance milestones and web application errors so you can understand what the user was doing during a certain milestone

Sentry’s real user monitoring presents web performance data in their dashboard:

![Sentry Core Web Vitals data](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/cc668ea3f769f085a435d0499f72f2ca.png)

You can record user sessions with Sentry’s JavaScript code, and then watch those sessions in the Sentry dashboard.

![Sentry session recording](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/0ffbe4009920b930a275fab2460e955c.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-8 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Web Vitals monitoring is locked behind a Business or Enterprise plan

## Raygun[​](#raygun "Direct link to Raygun")

Raygun Real User Monitoring is a front-end performance monitoring service that tracks and analyzes how users interact with websites and applications in real-time.

![Raygun home page](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/b297ff8daacec8f777ecae6cc64ed294.png)

### Key Features[​](#key-features-9 "Direct link to Key Features")

-   Performance metrics tracking across DNS, latency, SSL, server, and transfer times
-   Core Web Vitals monitoring with user segmentation by location, browser, and device
-   Integration with error monitoring and crash reporting tools
-   Support for JavaScript, Angular, Xamarin, React, iOS, and Android
-   Individual user session tracking with page-level diagnostics

### Pros[​](#pros-9 "Direct link to Pros")

-   Marks metrics with a helpful “user satisfaction” score
-   Offers application monitoring, so you can log data from the frontend and backend of your application
-   Lets you link commits and deployments on their dashboard so you can understand what changes caused regressions

You can get a high-level overview of real user sessions on your website.

![Raygun session info](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/fd7a8abb78364c9ab73e0be6a976fb77.png)

Raygun’s real user monitoring feature lets you dive into individual user sessions to understand exactly what their experience is like.

![Raygun user visit detail](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/e46d3b4878a04e9e27b6aca3a6dfde48.png)

### Cons[​](#cons-9 "Direct link to Cons")

-   Limited performance debugging capabilities, hard to diagnose the root cause of a poor performance metric
-   Custom timings are locked behind the team or business plans

## How to choose a real user monitoring tool[​](#how-to-choose-a-real-user-monitoring-tool "Direct link to How to choose a real user monitoring tool")

When choosing a real user website monitoring service there are a few factors to consider:

-   Core Web Vitals support
-   Ease of use
-   Detailed page view data
-   Support for business metrics

### Core Web Vitals support[​](#core-web-vitals-support "Direct link to Core Web Vitals support")

Does the tool support all three Core Web Vitals, including Google's new Interaction to Next Paint metric? What debug data is provided to analyze the user experience and optimize the web vitals metrics?

### Ease of use[​](#ease-of-use "Direct link to Ease of use")

Real user data is often complex and hard to analyze. A good RUM tool will guide you through the data, point out problems on your website and help you identify what's causing them. That then puts you and your development team into a position where you can successfully improve your website speed.

### Detailed page view data[​](#detailed-page-view-data "Direct link to Detailed page view data")

Looking at an [individual page view](https://www.debugbear.com/docs/rum/experiences) tells you how one real person experienced your website. While aggregated data is often difficult to interpret, data for individual visits is much simpler.

But can you actually understand why someone had the experience they had? With detailed RUM data you can see exactly what happened when someone visited your website and how their device and network speed impacted their experience. You can also use technical reporting like timelines and request waterfalls to find out what you need to do to make your website faster.

### Support for business metrics[​](#support-for-business-metrics "Direct link to Support for business metrics")

RUM tools report a wide range of metrics. Some are purely technical, some provide insight on user experience, and others can tell you how your website performance is impacting your business. For example, you can track bounce or [conversion rates](https://www.debugbear.com/docs/rum/conversion-tracking).

![Conversion rate tracking with real user data](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/0bdc0fa0a9a335593f5c337bdd757536.png)

### Performance reporting for single-page applications[​](#performance-reporting-for-single-page-applications "Direct link to Performance reporting for single-page applications")

Single-page applications are different from traditional websites, as they remain open for a long time as user navigate between pages.

To [monitor single-page app performance](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/single-page-application-monitoring), check if the tool tracks [soft navigation](https://www.debugbear.com/blog/soft-navigations) route changes and can send multiple page view events for a single visit.

## Get started with real user monitoring for your website[​](#get-started-with-real-user-monitoring-for-your-website "Direct link to Get started with real user monitoring for your website")

There are lots of monitoring tools out there. Most of them offer a free trial, so you can see how well they work for your use case.

Ready to get started? Sign up for [DebugBear](https://www.debugbear.com/) to get a detailed analysis of your website and see how fast it is for real users.

![Illustration of website monitoring](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/57001785e35454b95f43aa4f3bf6f857.png)![Illustration of website monitoring](https://www.debugbear.com/dimg/b2c0ae7a8dfbc4b18ba827a334c5c1af.png)

## Monitor Page Speed & Core Web Vitals

### DebugBear monitoring includes:

-   In-depth Page Speed Reports
-   Automated Recommendations
-   Real User Analytics Data