Hotjar vs. Survicate

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.

Incentivized

Sruveys with more complex flows/logis - especially when you want to link results back to specific users to be able to do more-in-depth analysis of results

• 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.

Incentivized

• IMO, the strengths of feedback lite is what it is called for - 'lite"... it is basic, simple, and easy to set up and use.
• Especially should be mention that it is easy to set up, and you can have it working in less than a few hours.
• Reliable - I don't remember even one "problem" or an issue we experienced with it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• In my opinion, inconsistent and visually unappealing survey visuals (e.g., NPS and cSAT questions look completely different from each other, creating a disjointed visual experience)
• Poor customer service (in my experience, issue resolution can take weeks)
• Lack of clarity around API & other technical capabilities requiring engineering assistance
• Very limited maximum response limit per month

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Only if we will really consider other features, we might end up with an alternative tool. if will continue the business process as it is, I don't anticipate migrating to another product

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In my experience, implementation was very drawn out and overly complicated (needed lots of engineering help from both sides), visual interface both within the tool and surveys shown in-app is unappealing and sometimes misleading, and making sure the right users are being targeted for any given survey sometimes requires more babysitting than ideal.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Survicate offers quick in-product support, via chat ( not a chatbot ) that responds in minutes, not hours. For all customers. This is definitely something I don't see in some of the tools we use. Secondly, as a highest-package customer we're receiving insightful tips, and recommendations from our Customer Success Manager, who knows our use-cases really well and knows how Survicate can best address them. We even have a Slack channel, where we can get help in no-time

Setup was simple. One-time installation for our website and inside the product. We used Google Tag Manager to implement Survicate. So within 2 hours, we were able to run surveys, and also all attributes and events were passed to Survicate, so that we were able to use them to trigger surveys

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.

Incentivized

Survicate is great at allowing us to poll users in-app and quickly analyzing results for distribution amongst the organization. However, its surveying capabilities are limited, visual interfaces are all over the place, which risks damaging the site's overall visual appeal, and customer service for anything beyond basic questions is very slow.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Being able to automatically identify topics from open-text responses significantly reduced amount of manual work on our end. Hours saved on weekly basis.
• One-time quick installation reduced the potential amount of development time required to either build surveys, or update them on our own.
• We find these surveys to be a good alternative to lengthy questionnaires, or deep interviews. They're super quick to launch, and generate insights almost instantly. Money and time may be saved on user interviews, and incentives to take questionnaires.