Hotjar helps you understand how visitors behave and interact with your website. The information you gather with Hotjar helps you make sensible changes to improve the user experience.
With Hotjar you can use heatmaps, user recordings, and surveys to pinpoint problems with your site and test changes to find the best solutions.
It’s a great tool, but it isn’t perfect for everyone. Here’s our take on Hotjar.
How Does Hotjar Compare to its Closest Competitors
Anyone serious about website optimization relies on a variety of tools to make that happen. When it comes to delivering a seamless user experience, Hotjar is just one of the options. Other tools like Crazy Egg, Glassbox, and Fullstory are usually in the consideration mix, too.
All these tools provide valuable and actionable insights. Not all three do it in the same way. Here’s how they stack up against each other.
Crazy Egg vs. Hotjar
Both Crazy Egg and Hotjar focus on user experience analytics. You’ll find some of the same functionality, like heatmaps and scroll maps, on both platforms. But there are key differences.
Crazy Egg comes out ahead when it comes to A/B testing, building that functionality right into the product. You’ll need a third-party integration to A/B test with Hotjar. Crazy Egg also has a popular confetti report tool that lets you categorize site activity by various metrics. Hotjar doesn’t offer anything similar.
Hotjar offers a free forever plan, but it gives you limited access to Hotjar’s full functionality. You need to upgrade to Hotjar’s Growth Plan starting at $95.20 per month to get more features. Crazy Egg offers a free 30-day trial, but after that it will cost you a minimum of $99 each month.
Glassbox vs. Hotjar
Glassbox and Hotjar are similar tools, but focus on slightly different audiences. Hotjar is a decent all-around user analytics platform, aimed at helping everyone at all experience levels, from freelancers and start-ups to small to medium sized businesses. Glassbox takes aim at mature and enterprise level businesses or any organization that needs or wants advanced data analysis power.
Both platforms give you heatmaps and session replays. However, Glassbox dives deep into data analytics with both real-time and predictive functionality. Hotjar offers only real-time analytics, and at a higher level.
Glassbox also delivers advanced customer mapping tools, so you can really dial in to user behavior on a granular level. Hotjar offers basic customer journey analytics, but not nearly at the depth Glassbox does.
Each platform’s approach to pricing reinforces the focus on different audiences. Glassbox doesn’t offer a free trial directly on its website, you’ll have to contact them to set up a demo. Same with pricing. You’ll need to talk to sales to get a customized quote.
Hotjar offers a free forever plan and then a variety of paid plan options, depending on which services you need. All of it is spelled out on the Hotjar website, and you can sign up without talking to a single sales agent.
Fullstory vs. Hotjar
Fullstory is another analytics tool aimed at the more robust needs of enterprise-level organizations or anyone with the need for in-depth analytics across web and mobile applications.
If you’re keen to understand your mobile users journey, Fullstory does a much cleaner job of natively tracking and delivering that data. You can grab some of that data with Hotjar, but it will require heavy lifting from your software development team.
Both Fullstory and Hotjar have incorporated AI into their platforms, but apply it in different ways. Hotjar focuses on helping researchers speed up the process with AI-generated survey questions and synthesizing qualitative responses. Fullstory uses generative AI to highlight key concepts, automatically categorize all user interactions, and deliver automated insights.
Fullstory also has a lot more integrations than Hotjar. Fullstory has hundreds of direct integrations that cover everything from security and privacy to team collaboration and customer success. It also partners with Zapier, giving you access to thousands more business tools.
Hotjar is no slouch when it comes to integrations, pairing with tools like Slack, Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Trello, Asana, and more. It also integrates with Zapier, giving you access to thousands of other apps. But at the end of the day, Fullstory offers more integrations.
Like Glassbox, Fullstory doesn’t put pricing on its website. You’ll have to talk to someone in sales for a customized quote. There’s no free trial, either.
Hotjar: The Good and The Bad
Hotjar makes it easy to gather and understand user experience data, and doesn’t break the bank. For anyone new to user analytics or smaller organizations with modest budgets, Hotjar is an excellent option.
But it does lack top-notch customer support, doesn’t go as deep into analytics as some of its competitors, and tends to slow down site performance. Depending on your needs, there may be better options.
What Hotjar Is Good At
Easy to use
Hotjar’s user interface is self-explanatory and intuitive. Even a beginner can get started quickly and dig into analytics with ease. Easy to use is a refrain read often in user reviews on sites like G2.
Navigation is simple, using an icon scheme on the left side of the screen. It is uncluttered and each feature is accessible with a single click. There’s also a “Get Started” option at the top of the page that walks a new user through key features and set up tasks.
In-depth session recording filters
Hotjar offers a variety of filters you can apply to session recordings. With them, you can review everything from the paths a user took to the session information, behavior, and even devices.
This type of filtering helps you quickly pick and choose the most important attributes to help you make sound business decisions.
Informative funnels
Hotjar’s funnels are a quick and easy way to see where users are having difficulty with your website. With a funnel, you can track user interactions from start to finish and see where visitors hit roadblocks. Creating a funnel is not complicated, thanks to Hotjar’s intuitive user interface.
Even if you’re like me and never built a funnel before, you can have one up and running in minutes.
You start by choosing what you want to measure (all sessions, new users, rage clicked, returning users), then build and apply each step with a series of prompts. Once you have everything the way you want it, click “Apply” one last time and your funnel is ready to go.
Funnel performance results are displayed at the bottom of the page in real-time.
Customizable dashboard
Once you install Hotjar, there is a default dashboard available that covers the basics. It is well designed, easy to follow, and provides a solid overview from everything from session info to rage click data and top traffic channels.
You might be happy using the default dashboard “as is.” But if you want more, Hotjar lets you easily create a new dashboard with just a few clicks. There are templates you can use to avoid reinventing the wheel for common metrics, including page issues, performance monitoring, and marketing results. Or, you can create a dashboard from scratch.
Comprehensive heatmaps
Hotjar users really love the platform’s heatmaps. It’s a feature consistently commented on in G2 reviews. Setting up a heatmaps is a breeze using the step-by-step guide provided. Just choose the URL you want to track and data is delivered in seconds.
You can quickly change the data you see by choosing the map type you want to view. Further down the page you get even more relevant stats, like total page clicks, rage clicks, average time on page, and drop-off rate.
Accessible analytics
Hotjar’s Impact feature puts key metrics in one place, accessible by a single click. Impact helps you understand how user behavior is affecting conversions through a series of colorful graphs and charts.
You can track sessions or traffic distribution and break things down even more by looking at new users, returning users, and even rage-clicked elements on your site. Even if you’re brand new to heatmaps, Hotjar makes it easy to get started and understand the data.
Easy to implement user surveys
Gathering user feedback in realtime is simple with Hotjar. In addition to a feedback button you can incorporate onto any website page, you can also use Hotjar’s 42 survey templates to get real time feedback on everything from Net Promoter Score (NPS) and exit intent to usability and product feedback.
The templates walk you through the entire process. You can also lean into Hotjar’s generative AI feature to have survey questions written for you.
Potential Hotjar Drawbacks
Hotjar has its pros, but it is far from perfect. Some of these cons may be a deal-breaker for you.
Challenging installation process: There are three ways to install Hotjar on your website. In order of seemingly easiest to most complex, they are:
- Download the site building-specific plugin from Hotjar’s website
- Find the Hotjar plugin on your site builder’s plugin upload tool
- Manually add Hotjar code into your site’s existing header code
I use self-hosted WordPress as my website builder, but I don’t like to code. So I opted to download Hotjar’s plugin to make things easier. Unfortunately, the ZIP file for WordPress installations did not work. When I tried to upload it to WordPress, I got an error message of “Incompatible archive.”
I then tried the second route of searching in the WordPress plugin library. I did find the Hotjar plugin, but got scared off by several things. One was the number of one-star reviews and review comments. Another was the message that the plugin had not been tested with my version of WordPress (6.6.2). The nail in the coffin was seeing that the plugin had not been updated in over one year. All added up to a big no.
So my only option to get Hotjar up and running on my site was to go the coding route.
Unless you’re comfortable adding code manually to your site–or have a developer available to assist–Hotjar makes things challenging to get started.
Poor customer service: Hotjar has a meager 2.5 rating on TrustPilot. In fact, Hotjar has more one-star ratings than five-star ratings on the site. That is pretty abysmal. Many of the complaints cite poor customer service. This includes the lack of live support options and chatbots that don’t provide helpful information.
Hotjar does have a large resource library, so you can find some good information that way. But if you need help in real-time, you’re out of luck. The only option you have is to submit a support ticket via the online chat function, then wait for someone to get back to you. According to some reviewers, that response never comes.
Given my experience trying to use Hotjar’s installation download, I got to test out Hotjar support first-hand.
I went the support ticket submission route. It was a surprisingly painful process to slog through. In what I can only describe as some serious gatekeeping, Hotjar requires you to fill out multiple fields in the online chat window, which in itself is annoying. Then, the AI chatbot required me to re-enter my URL three times before it recognized it as valid. The same URL, typed in three times, exactly the same.
I persevered and eventually submitted my request. But overall, it was a very frustrating experience trying to get help with Hotjar. Frustrating enough to get me to dust off my coding skills and install Hotjar myself with no plugin assistance.
I did eventually receive an email from support the day after I submitted my ticket. By then, though, I had resolved my original problem. Hotjar support also sent a follow-up email two days later when I didn’t respond to the first message.
Resource Hog: Things look a little brighter for Hotjar over on G2 and Capterra, where the brand has ratings of 4.3 and 4.7 stars, respectively. But one recurring comment shows up throughout the mostly positive ratings–once you install the tracking code, Hotjar slows down your site.
Slow load times are a problem for any website. It negatively impacts Google’s ranking and annoys site visitors. The tools you use to optimize your site should not also be creating new problems to fix.
Hotjar Pricing, Plans, and Add-Ons
Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare in 2021. Since then, Hotjar’s pricing has gone through significant transformation. Not in a good way, according to numerous customer reviews on TrustPilot, G2, and Capterra. Escalating costs and confusing plan options are often noted. The latter is justified.
Hotjar breaks down its services into three buckets. Within each bucket, you can choose from different plan levels and pay by the month or annually. When you choose to pay annually, there is a 20 percent savings.
Once you choose a paid plan, then you need to choose how many daily sessions you want. Plan pricing increases as session number increases. The prices below are based on 500 daily sessions.
Observe: heatmaps and user recordings
- Basic plan – free forever – includes automatic data capture, unlimited heatmaps, ability to filter and segment data
- Business plan – $99 per month or $960 annually – adds custom integrations, events API, identify API, plus frustration and confusion signals
- Scale plan – $213 per month or $2,052 annually – adds funnels, trends, console tracking (errors), SAML SSO, Hotjar API, dedicated customer success manager and priority support (only for plans with 4,000 daily sessions or more)
Ask – surveys and feedback
- Basic plan – free forever – includes three surveys and three feedback widgets, Hotjar AI for surveys, 40+ predefined languages, unlimited questions for surveys, 40+ survey templates, filter responses
- Plus plan – $59 per month or $576 annually – adds unlimited surveys and feedback widgets, events API
- Business plan – $79 per month or $768 annually – adds AI-powered sentiment analysis, identify API, customized branding (no Hotjar logo), survey performance analysis, custom-built integrations
- Scale plan – $159 per month or $1,536 annually – adds Hotjar API, webhooks, SAML SSO, dedicated customer success manager and priority support (only for plans with 4,000 daily sessions or more)
Engage – user interviews
- Basic plan – free forever – three interviews per month (your own network), one spectator, 30 minute maximum duration for each interview, two week recording retention
- Plus plan – $50 monthly or $492 annually – adds 36 interview per year from the Hotjar participant pool, unlimited interviews from your own network, 30 minute maximum duration for each interview, participant rewards of up to $52, one co-moderator per interview, two spectators per interview, two year recording retention
- Business plan – $572 monthly or $5,496 annually – adds up to 144 interviews per year from the Hotjar pool, unlimited interviews from your own network, 90 minute maximum duration for each interview, participant rewards of up to $156, two co-moderators per interview, four spectators per interview, automated transcriptions, clip and download recording
- Scale plan – priced on request – adds up to 240 interviews per year from the Hotjar pool, unlimited interviews from your own network, 120 minute maximum interview duration, four co-moderators per interview, 10 spectators per interview, SAML SSO, dedicated customer success manager
If you opt for an Engage plan, you automatically get access to both the Observe and Ask plan functionality at that same level.
But wait, there’s more.
Hotjar also lets you customize your plan by choosing from the different options in the Observe and Ask buckets. You can also pay either monthly or annually, with the same 20 percent discount when you pay annually.
Is Hotjar Right for You?
Once you get past the challenging installation process, Hotjar is a solid tool–especially for anyone new to heatmaps, user surveys, or website visitor analytics in general. Hotjar is very intuitive to use once it’s up and running, and the way it lays out data is crystal clear. While it may slow your site down, if you’re running a low-volume site and have enough resources behind the scenes, the speed ding is likely negligible.
However, if you’re a large or enterprise-level organization, you may find Hotjar’s lack of in-depth analytics an issue. There are better tools on the market, like Glassbox and Fullstory, that will give you the deep-dive analytics power needed.
