Best User Activity Monitoring Software in 2024

What Is User Activity Monitoring Software?

User activity monitoring software or UAM software helps in tracking and monitoring the behaviors of end users on networks, devices, and other IT resources. UAM software helps in detecting intentional and unintentional insider threats and stops them from making any impact. This software helps organizations with the monitoring of employee activity, user configuration, VPN activity, and user-level access of the firewalls. It plays an important role in bandwidth management and the analysis of network security 

How Does User Activity Monitoring Software Work?

User monitoring software tracks and monitors user activities as per a company’s policies and blocks activities that are fishy or risky, whether intentional or unintentional. UAM software is not just used for tracking network security but also for monitoring other types of user activities on a system, application, or data. For example, it tracks web browsing actions by individual employees to identify if they are accessing anything sensitive or unauthorized

The software adopts different methods like session recording, screenshot capturing, keystroke logging, inspection of network packets and Kernel monitoring to monitor users’ activities as per an organization’s policies

What's the Purpose of User Activity Monitoring Software?

Software to monitor user activity are widely used by organizations to monitor the activities of their employees on their systems to ensure optimum bandwidth utilization and network security. This software tracks any suspicious or unauthorized activity that can hamper the employees’ productivity or data security. It is a critical tool to invest in if you don’t want to put your organization at risk

Who Uses User Activity Monitoring Software?

User activity monitoring software is often preferred by big enterprises with distributed workforces across multiple locations, which are difficult to monitor physically. It ensures data security in a corporate network by tracking and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information. Apart from that, it also enables you to identify different sites, applications, and data access by users and the way they interact with these platforms. The software provides authorized access to the stakeholders and abides by all data security and privacy regulations

Difference Between User Activity Monitoring Software and Employee Monitoring Software

These two terms are often used frequently in the workspace. However, the difference between user activity monitoring software (UAM software) and employee monitoring software primarily lies in terms of their use cases. While the user behavior monitoring software is focused more on detecting network-security-related threats, employee monitoring software tracks activities that impact the overall productivity and output of employees

Key Features of User Activity Monitoring Software

The key features of end-user monitoring software include session recording, keystroke logging, file and screenshot capturing, attendance tracking, and inspection of network packets. Let’s discuss these features in detail

• Website and App Monitoring: This is done for every employee to ensure that their web browsing and application usage are in sync with organizational goals and policies. The software categorizes different applications and websites as productive/unproductive and sends alerts as soon as an employee visits an unproductive page
• Email Monitoring: It tracks all emails in terms of their text content and attachments to detect any attempts at data exfiltration. The software also ensures that all incoming and outgoing emails are in compliance with the company laws
• Web File & Printed Document Tracking: Along with tracking the physical document printing, the software also monitors web files during their creation, access control, uploads, downloads and deletion. This helps in monitoring the movement of files within your organization and their usage by employees
• Keystroke Logger: Keystroke logger is about tracking the keyboard and keystroke commands made by every employee. This is critical to detect user activities accurately and prevent any malicious actions
• Instant Messaging Monitoring: It tracks instant messages shared by employees on different web and app platforms for communication. This feature provides an ideal way to monitor the engagement and sentiment of employees and ensure the utmost security and compliance
• Online Meeting Monitoring: Online meeting or video conference monitoring analyses the productive hours of an employee during such sessions. It provides details about the participants, meeting duration, apps and websites used, etc
• Remote Desktop Monitoring & Control: This feature allows IT administrators to access the desktop of any remote employee if there are any instances of malicious activity. This way, companies can ensure better security even in remote workspaces

What are the Benefits of User Activity Monitoring Software?

UAM software helps organizations in reducing cyber security risks and tracking the productivity of employees and potential issues. Here’re some of the significant benefits of user activity monitoring software:

• Better Employee Efficiency: User activity tracking often leads to increased productivity. When employees know that they are being monitored, they are less likely to spend time and resources on personal or unnecessary tasks during work hours. For example, they will spend less time on social media for personal use and focus more on the tasks at handHowever, there are instances where employees were offended by their employers for being monitored. You can avoid this situation by discussing the employee monitoring policies at the time of onboarding and explaining their positive impact
• Improved Network Security: UAM software tracks user activity to detect any abnormal behavior in terms of cybersecurity. This will help prevent incidences of data breach and ensure the security of proprietary information. Any unauthorized access to data by employees, whether intentional or unintentional, can be detected by employers. Even malicious attempts by employees to upload malware or ransomware to devices and networks can be tracked and prevented
• Legal Compliance: UAM solutions help in maintaining legal compliance and protect your organization against any litigation issues. This is quite significant in industries like financial services and banking where there are stringent guidelines for information sharing. With real-time monitoring of user behavior, businesses in these industries can ensure compliance with laws and regulations
• Optimized Time & Resource Management: According to a report, employees in the US spend around 2.9 hours on non-work activities during the work hours, every day. This costs businesses a significant amount of money and reduces productivity. However, the efficient tracking of user activities will ensure higher performance and profitability for businesses

Factors to Consider When Buying User Activity Monitoring Software

These are the factors to consider (along with the features and pricing) when you are evaluating different software to monitor user activity:

• Number of People in Your Organization: If you are a startup with less than 50 employees, user activity monitoring can be done manually or with any free software program. You don’t need to get into complex implementations and training processes. However, large organizations cannot manually track the activity of employees located across different locations
• Installation: If any software is easy to install, it will most likely be easy to use also. Select the best user activity monitoring software that requires minimal technical knowledge at your end for installation and usage
• Easy User Interface: The whole idea of getting network user monitoring software is to quickly and easily track the activities of your distributed workforce. Its dashboard should be simple and let you track user activities as per different metrics in just a glance
• Customer Support: The vendor should reply promptly to your concerns, else using the software would get tricky. This is an important factor in ensuring uninterrupted usage of the software
• Data Privacy: The software must abide by different compliance laws and ensure that the privacy of employees and their data is not compromised in any scenario. It must adopt robust security measures to keep your business-critical data safe

List of the Top User Activity Monitoring Tools

Here's the list of the best tools to track user activity along with their features and pricing:

Remote User Monitoring Software	Key Features	Pricing
Spyic	WhatsApp Spy, Snapchat Spy, Spy on SMS, Tracking through GPS Location	$9.99/month for android devices
Monitask	Time Tracking, Clock In & Clock Out, Employee Attendance Tracking, Computer Monitoring	Pro plan at ₹496/month per user
Insightful	Screen Monitoring, Activity Monitoring, Productivity Monitoring, Time & Attendance	$6/ month per employee
ActiveTrak	Application & Website Usage, Workload Management, Productivity Reports, Impact Analysis	Free plan available | Essentials Plan starts at Rs 540 per user/per month
Veriato	Insider Risk Management, Workplace Investigation, Audits & Compliance, Remote Employee Monitoring	Vision Plan at $179 per user billed annually
Controlio	Activities Tracking, Sessions Tracking, Keystrokes,Snapshots	Cloud Plan at $7.99 per user per month
Hubstaff	Time Tracking, Reporting and Analytics, Workforce Management, Employee Experience Management	Starter Plan at $4/ user / month