Hotjar vs. Usabilla (discontinued)

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

If we could select 0/10 we would... We would not recommend anyone using this product as it excludes a very important user group, disabled users. If you use this product you will be failing ADA and WCAG 2.1 (EU Directive for public sector websites and mobile apps). In my opinion, you will be vulnerable to lawsuits.

• 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.

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• Reporting - well designed, clear to all users regardless of level of knowledge.
• Two options for feedback - passive and active (pop-ups).
• Clean UI & easy to use platform.

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• 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

• It doesn't gather users from all user groups, it's exclusive to non-disabled users - users with disabilities using assistive technology are not able to access or use the platform
• There are extensive colour contrast issues with the platform, making it difficult to use by users with low vision
• Usabilla is not accessible to keyboard users (as well as users on other assistive technology) - when the modal is expanded, the background is still focusable
• The touch target sizes of the links and buttons are not accessible - it's very difficult to close out of the modal when on mobile, or if a user had a mobility disability and was using a mouse

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.

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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.

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The interface to configure the questionary is quite easy to use. It helps to give autonomy to marketing teams. Once the initial setup is made (integrating a basic javascript code on your website), you can easily deploy any questionary on any page of your website. Usabilla is a very flexible tool overall.

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

I haven't contacted support yet to solve a particular issue. I do have an account manager at Usabilla that I talk to in order to introduce the software to my team but this is just to run over the basic functionality in a live demo setting. The ability to talk to a real person over video call is a benefit though.

Incentivized

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

I have Hotjar, Sprig, and Usabilla in my workplace. Usabilla unfortunately has the most limited feature set of the 3 options. The difficulty of administering a Usabilla survey on mobile is a big blocker for my projects. Sprig and Hotjar both allow mobile and allow video recordings (either of a user's screen or a user's webcam for impromptu interviews).

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

• The positive impact of Usabilla has been being able to measure and respond quickly to our customers' feedback so that we can resolve issues quicker or make enhancements faster.
• We have also been able to manage and track our NPS scores and correlate these scores to our overall business performance to make sure that our customers' views of our products and processes and in line with our internal understanding and success of the business.
• Additionally, the Usabilla team has been willing to provide us with training and ideas on how to use the tool better which has helped our team think more strategically and be more connected to the experiences our customers are having on our web properties.

Incentivized