Hawkeye vs iTrace

Hawkeye is an eye-tracking tool for examining how people look at websites, images, and prototypes. It is software-based and does not need dedicated eye-tracking hardware, though its iPhone and iPad app requires a TrueDepth camera. Users can test websites and images without code changes, and the tool supports prototypes made with InVision, Marvel, and Sketch. Results show where participants looked and for how long through heat maps, screen recordings, and focus-point diagrams. Hawkeye can aggregate results across testers and provide statistics for individual interface elements. CSV exports include eye position, UI element, and touch data. Participants can be invited by text message using their phone numbers. Calibration centers the user's head, verifies calibration, and reports a five-star rating and accuracy estimate. Sign-in is available with Slack or Google, and company Slack teammates are automatically added to the same team. The free plan includes one project and five sessions; the Starter Plan costs $39.99 per month, billed monthly. Hawkeye runs on iPhone, iPad, and the web.

iTrace is a free, MIT-licensed toolkit for analyzing webcam eye-tracking data, with a scientific core built on NumPy and SciPy. It computes gaze in degrees of visual angle and detects fixations, saccades, and microsaccades using I-VT, I-DT, and Engbert–Kliegl methods. Pupil tools include blink detection and interpolation, preprocessing, and eye-crop segmentation measured in pixels or relative to iris size. Affine screen-space calibration reports calibration error and gaze-quality measures. The command-line tool analyzes gaze CSV files and exports JSON reports. Optional webcam capture uses OpenCV and MediaPipe, and optional interfaces include a local HTML app using FastAPI and WebSockets and a Streamlit dashboard. Live workflows can export derived gaze, pupil, and capture CSVs. By default, the workflow does not save raw eye video or persisted eye-crop images, though live viewing may send a temporary JPEG crop to a browser over a local WebSocket. The project says its checks use synthetic ground truth rather than real eye-tracking data or a reference device. Webcam pupil size is a relative proxy, not a measurement in millimetres.