How much does FullStory cost in 2026?

FullStory does not publish list pricing. It offers a free tier with 30,000 sessions per month, but all paid tiers (Business, Advanced, Enterprise) require a custom sales quote. Market data from Vendr puts the median annual contract at roughly $27,504, while SpendHound's 2026 dataset shows average SMB spend near $29,803 per year and average enterprise spend near $80,472 per year, with large deployments reaching $80,000 to $200,000-plus annually.

Does FullStory require talking to sales to get pricing?

Yes, for every paid tier. FullStory's pricing page only offers a free tier with published limits (30,000 sessions/month, 12 months retention, up to 10 users); Business, Advanced, and Enterprise plans all route to a "Request pricing & demo" form rather than showing a rate card.

Does FullStory calculate CAC and ROAS from ad spend?

Not natively. FullStory can sync session and CRM data into a marketing stack and pass signals to a CDP, but it is not a dedicated attribution platform. It doesn't ingest Facebook or Google ad spend directly or calculate CAC/ROAS out of the box, so teams typically pair it with a separate attribution tool to close that loop.

Is Arktis cheaper than FullStory?

For most small to mid-size e-commerce teams, yes. Arktis's highest self-serve tier, Scale, is $349/month (about $4,200/year) and includes unlimited tracked users, session recordings, attribution, and API access. FullStory's entry-level enterprise deployments (50,000-100,000 sessions/month) commonly run $10,000 to $25,000 annually before any negotiation.

Has FullStory faced privacy or legal issues?

Yes. FullStory has faced multiple wiretapping-style lawsuits, including Hasson v. FullStory in the Third Circuit, alleging its session replay technology recorded user interactions without adequate consent under state wiretap statutes. FullStory has prevailed in several cases on jurisdictional grounds, but litigation over session replay consent has continued across multiple circuits.

Can I switch from FullStory to Arktis without a big migration project?

Yes. Arktis installs with a single script tag and starts tracking pageviews, sessions, and conversions immediately, with ad platform and Shopify connections handled through OAuth in the dashboard. There's no sales call or implementation engineer required to get started.

Arktis vs FullStory: Pricing, Attribution & Setup Compared

FullStory built the category with best-in-class session replay, but its pricing lives behind a sales team and its attribution tools stop at the CRM handoff. Here's how it stacks up against Arktis's self-serve, e-commerce-first platform.

If you've ever tried to find out what FullStory actually costs, you already know the problem: there's no number on the pricing page, just a "Request pricing & demo" button. FullStory has spent over a decade building one of the most polished session replay and Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platforms on the market, and for large enterprise UX teams it's genuinely good at what it does. But for an e-commerce brand trying to connect ad spend to session behavior to actual revenue, FullStory's enterprise-sales model and behavior-only focus can be more friction than it's worth. This comparison looks at where FullStory earns its reputation, where its pricing and attribution gaps show up, and how Arktis handles the same problems with self-serve pricing and built-in ad attribution.

The Quick Verdict

FullStory is a mature, well-built session recording and product analytics platform with genuinely strong tooling for large UX and product teams, and it earned a Leader placement in the 2026 Forrester Wave for digital analytics. Where it falls short for smaller e-commerce teams is cost transparency and marketing attribution: pricing is entirely quote-based with no published tiers, and while FullStory can sync session data to a CRM or CDP, it doesn't natively calculate CAC or ROAS from ad platform spend the way a purpose-built attribution tool does. Arktis trades some of FullStory's UX-research depth for transparent self-serve pricing and native Facebook Ads and Shopify attribution built into the base product. Which one wins depends on whether your primary use case is enterprise UX research or e-commerce growth analytics.

Feature Comparison

Privacy and Compliance

FullStory offers masking, redaction, and permission controls to help teams stay compliant when recording sessions, and these tools are genuinely robust at the enterprise tier. That said, the company has faced repeated wiretapping-style litigation over the years, including Hasson v. FullStory in the Third Circuit and related suits alleging session replay technology intercepted user data without adequate consent under state wiretap statutes. FullStory has prevailed in several of these cases on jurisdictional grounds, but the pattern of litigation reflects a broader industry risk with session replay tools that record every click and keystroke by default.

Arktis is built privacy-first from the ground up: consent is captured before any recording starts, sensitive form fields are masked automatically, and the tracker only activates its full recording pipeline after a visitor opts in. Because Arktis's core product is attribution and journey analytics rather than pixel-perfect UX replay, the amount of raw behavioral data collected and retained is smaller by design, which reduces both compliance exposure and storage cost.

Session Recordings

Session replay is FullStory's original product and its deepest strength. It captures granular DOM-level detail, including tabbed browsing across multiple windows, heatmaps, and rage-click detection, all reconstructed from logged events rather than video capture. For teams doing dedicated UX research at scale, this level of fidelity is hard to beat.

Arktis includes session recordings as part of its Growth and Scale plans, using the open-source rrweb library to capture DOM mutations with configurable sample rates and a 30-minute default cap per session. It won't match FullStory's tabbed-browsing visibility or its most advanced UX research tooling, but it's more than sufficient for the core use case Arktis customers care about: watching what a visitor did right before they converted or dropped off.

Attribution and Ad Spend Tracking

This is where the two platforms diverge most. FullStory can sync session and CRM data into a marketing analytics stack and pass signals to a CDP, but it isn't a dedicated attribution tracking tool. It doesn't natively ingest Facebook or Google ad spend, calculate CAC or ROAS, or match fbclid/gclid click IDs to conversions out of the box. Teams typically pair it with a separate attribution or CDP tool to close that loop.

Arktis was built around this exact gap. The platform natively connects to Facebook Ads (with Google Ads and TikTok planned), captures click IDs at the session level, and runs multi-touch attribution to calculate true CAC and ROAS per campaign, not modeled or estimated figures. Combined with the Shopify integration, Arktis can attribute actual order revenue, not just conversion events, back to the specific campaign that drove it. For an e-commerce team asking "which campaign actually paid for itself," this is a built-in capability rather than a third-party add-on.

Pricing at Scale

FullStory's pricing model is entirely custom quotes gated behind a sales conversation, with three main paid tiers (Business, Advanced, Enterprise) and no published rate card. According to Vendr's 2026 purchase data, the median annual FullStory contract sits around $27,504, while SpendHound's 2026 dataset puts average SMB spend at roughly $29,803 per year and average enterprise spend at $80,472 per year, with enterprise deployments handling over a million sessions a month (especially with mobile SDKs added) commonly running $80,000 to $200,000-plus annually.

Arktis publishes every tier on its pricing page and requires no sales call to sign up. A visitor can self-serve from the free tier straight through to the highest plan without ever talking to a salesperson, which matters for growing e-commerce teams that don't want to negotiate a multi-year enterprise contract to get basic attribution data.

AI and Automation

FullStory has invested in StoryAI, an add-on that surfaces friction points and summarizes session patterns for UX and product teams, generally sold as an optional module on top of a paid plan. It's aimed at helping researchers triage large volumes of recordings faster.

Arktis takes a different approach with its AI agents, which are built to act on customer journey data directly, monitoring transactions, flagging anomalies, and surfacing insights without a human needing to dig through a dashboard first. Rather than summarizing replay footage, Arktis's AI layer sits closer to the attribution and conversion data, connecting behavior to revenue outcomes automatically.

Ease of Setup

Getting FullStory live typically means going through a sales conversation to pick a tier and session volume commitment before deploying the tracking snippet, then configuring masking rules and integrations with the help of a customer success contact.

Arktis installs with a single script tag, similar to Google Analytics, and starts tracking pageviews, sessions, and conversions immediately. Ad platform and Shopify connections are OAuth flows inside the product dashboard, no sales call or implementation engineer required.

Pricing Comparison

FullStory

FullStory offers a free "FullstoryFree" tier with 30,000 sessions per month and 12 months of data retention for teams of up to 10 users. Beyond that, all paid tiers, Business, Advanced, and Enterprise, require contacting sales for a custom quote. Based on 2026 market data, small deployments (50,000 to 100,000 sessions per month) typically run $10,000 to $25,000 annually, mid-market deployments (250,000 to 500,000 sessions per month) run $30,000 to $70,000 annually, and enterprise deployments with mobile SDKs commonly reach $80,000 to $200,000-plus annually. Discounts of 20 to 35 percent off the initial quote are common when negotiating volume commitments or multi-year terms.

Arktis

Arktis publishes transparent, self-serve pricing with no sales call required. The free tier includes 1,000 sessions per month forever. Iceberg Starter is $49 per month for up to 50,000 monthly tracked users. Growth is $149 per month for up to 250,000 monthly tracked users and adds session recordings and custom attribution. Scale is $349 per month for unlimited users, raw data export, and full API access. A team that would pay $10,000 or more per year for FullStory's entry-level tier can run Arktis's Scale plan, with attribution and recordings included, for under $4,200 a year.

When to Choose FullStory

FullStory makes sense for large enterprise product and UX research teams with dedicated budget for a sales-negotiated contract, teams that need the deepest possible session replay fidelity including tabbed browsing and advanced heatmaps, organizations already standardized on a separate CDP or attribution stack that FullStory can feed session data into, and companies where a formal procurement process and vendor security review are already part of the buying motion regardless of tool.

When to Choose Arktis

Arktis fits e-commerce brands and growth teams that want to see pricing upfront and start tracking without a sales call, marketers who need native Facebook Ads and Shopify attribution rather than a third-party add-on to calculate CAC and ROAS, smaller teams that don't have budget for a five or six-figure annual analytics contract, and anyone who wants session recordings, conversion tracking, and AI-driven journey monitoring in one product instead of stitching together a replay tool and a separate attribution platform.

The Bottom Line

FullStory earned its market position with genuinely strong session replay technology and a decade of enterprise UX research credibility, and for large teams with the budget and procurement patience for a custom contract, it remains a solid choice. But its sales-gated pricing and lack of native ad attribution create real friction for e-commerce teams that just want to know which campaigns are working.

Arktis was built for that gap: transparent pricing you can see without a demo call, and attribution, session recordings, and AI agents that work together out of the box. Switching over means dropping in one script tag and connecting your ad accounts, no migration project required.