Heap vs. Hotjar

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Heap
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Heap is a web analytics platform captures every user interaction on web iOS with no extra code. The tool allows you to track events and set up funnels to understand user flow and dropoff. It also provides visualization tools to track trends over time.
$0
Up to 10k sessions/month
Hotjar
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing. The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product marketers. Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare September 2021, and is now a Contentsquare brand.
$39
per month 100 daily sessions
Pricing
HeapHotjar
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 10k sessions/month
Growth
Starting at $3,600 annually
Up to 300k sessions/year
Pro
Contact Heap Sales
Custom sessions per month and unlimited projects
Premier
Contact Heap Sales
Custom sessions per month
Hotjar Observe - Plus
$39
per month 100 daily sessions
Hotjar Ask - Plus
$59
per month 250 monthly responses
Hotjar Ask - Business
$79
per month Starting from 500 monthly responses
Hotjar Observe - Business
$99
per month Starting from 500 daily sessions
Hotjar Scale - Business
$213
per month Starting from 500 daily sessions
Hotjar Ask - Scale
Contact Sales
per month unlimited volume
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HeapHotjar
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsHeap pricing is based on session volume. A session is a period of activity from a single user on your app or website. It can include many pageviews or events.Discount available for annual pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HeapHotjar
Best Alternatives
HeapHotjar
Small Businesses
Fullstory
Fullstory
Score 9.1 out of 10
Smartlook
Smartlook
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Whatfix
Whatfix
Score 8.2 out of 10
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Whatfix
Whatfix
Score 8.2 out of 10
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 7.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HeapHotjar
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(0 ratings)
5.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(0 ratings)
9.7
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HeapHotjar
Likelihood to Recommend
Heap is well suited for 1. Capture customer journey with session replay 2. Identify customer behaviour and improve overall customer experience 3. Frequent and quick implementations and modifications 4. Comparative analysis for historical marketing insights Heap is not so well suited, if the aim is to capture only analytics data without any goals to improve upon customer experience / targeting appropriate users based on data tracking.
Read full review
Hotjar is well suite for organizations that want to get a good glimpse into user behavior on their websites. The tool is easily installed through Google Tag Manager, and then users simply select which pages or paths they want the tool to analyze. After a few days, users can start seeing patterns develop, helping them understand what areas of the user journey flow they need to test out and improve. Hotjar is primarily for web-based experiences, not for mobile applications and other non-web digital applications.
Read full review
Pros
  • The Auto Capture function does indeed save quite a bit of time, and being able to build new reports off historical data is really valuable.
  • Interface is really intuitive and user-friendly. Much easier to pick up and use than GA.
  • Building reports out on the fly is really quick and easy, allowing you to give right into all kinds of analyses.
  • The Event Definition screen is really useful, giving a quick glance at the most used events, which you then decide to turn into conversions or goals if you want.
Read full review
  • Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements.
  • Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs.
  • Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out.
  • Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website.
Read full review
Cons
  • I think Heap can improve its onboarding; I would love to see some info that is helpful for someone who isn't in Heap every single day.
  • Sharing dashboards can be tricky, it feels like a huge learning curve that I already have forgotten how to do.
Read full review
  • The video recording feature is very slow to use. I know there is a very powerful process going on (saving your CSS and the DOM movements you make) but anyway it's slow to use.
  • Hotjar itself is heavy and has effects on your load times. This is a very important issue and I hope they're working on that.
  • Adding more segmentation would be nice. For example, being able to connect your API or more information to show relevant polls or feedback buttons to certain users. Aggregated info is hard to process.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Heap helps me understand key data points without fussing with the formatting of a dashboard. It gives me the benefit of data analyzation without the fuss of the formatting - as well as the ease of sharing data collected with my colleagues
Read full review
Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.
Read full review
Usability
Sometimes, Heap has issues reconciling similar selectors, and I have not found the manual tagging system to be the most intuitive, especially when best practices are not used when designing the front-end infrastructure. Even so, it helps that the data is unmodified, and all analytics are done through an interfaced layer, so damage and confusion [are] not permanent.
Read full review
So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
I've never run into any issues with Heap's availability, Heap is always there when I need it. I haven't run into any issues like application errors or unplanned outages during my 2+ years of using Heap. Each and every time I log in to Heap I have a completely functional experience
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Performance
On a scale from 1-10, Heap loads pages fairly quickly. The only time I experience delays is when I am loading a graph with perhaps too many events or filters on the page. But in terms of creating or searching for events or viewing reports, I don't ever experience a lag.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Heap support has allowed us to troubleshoot and test a lot of different items. Their support team is always helpful and friendly, even when we come to them with the most complicated questions. I think this greatly improves the value proposition of the product because their support team is knowledgable and friendly.
Read full review
Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
The implementation was smooth and easy. The Heap team helped us with implementation and it went great! Within a few weeks, we were fully up and running and utilizing the platform to its full capability. This is an additional thing that has made this platform so great and we couldn't recommend it enough.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Heap is better because its easy to use, easy to install. With Heap you just add a snippet of tracking code to your header, instead of having to instrument each event like you do with other tools.
Read full review
Compared to Sprig and Usabilla, Hotjar has robust functionality. Again, as stated earlier, the ability to summarize rage clicks, trigger recordings for a/b experiments, and run intercept surveys on mobile is very useful. Hotjar is also noticeably more intuitive to use than Usabilla, with a cleaner interface and navigation.
Read full review
Scalability
The most challenging part of using Heap in a growing organization is the naming and structure in which reports and dashboards are organized. I work within the marketing department and our Heap leader internally works within the IT/Product department, which makes it challenging because we often don't speak the same language, so the learning curve has been steep without any specific use-case examples to leverage online.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • It has helped us make decisions on what products to scope for our MVP based on the usage data.
  • It's allowed us to measure success with our beta product.
  • It's helped us view our conversion rates in an easy and usable manner.
Read full review
  • Our UX team can now use hard data to back up and validate design decisions that we make. Our role as usability experts is becoming more respected and integral to business objectives because we now have data that can back up our field of study and prove that our roles are demonstrably useful and necessary.
  • HotJar allows our small team of 3 UX designers to get research data as if we were a much larger team. Instead of painstakingly using our time to do guerrilla research, endless user observations, and other types of manual testing, we can now get a significant portion of our data from HotJar.
  • Using HotJar is actually giving our team a sense of excitement and enjoyment in our day-to-day usability work. Instead of seeing UX as a chore, HotJar is making data gathering and analyzing more fun, because we can see tangible results from a much larger pool of user/user-data than we could in the past.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Heap Screenshots

Screenshot of Dashboard in Heap (Use to get Product or User Behavior Insights)Screenshot of Effort Analysis provides the first-ever quantitative measurement of user friction, capturing the difficulty users face when moving through every step of every user flow across the digital experience.Screenshot of Heap Illuminate looks for the most common events between two steps in a funnel and generates a Top Events table that displays how well paths including different events convert to the next step so you can understand how that behavior is helping or hurting conversion.Screenshot of From Top Events you can choose an event and use Path Comparison to fork your funnel and see how the selected behavior impacts conversion downstream.