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
UserTesting
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
UserTesting helps UX researchers, designers, product teams, and marketers gather actionable insights through research, testing, and feedback. With a network of real people ready to share their perspectives, UserTesting enables organizations to make customer-first decisions at scale.
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.
When working with general market customers. For example, a person between the ages of 30 and 60 who has a checking account and a mortgage with their primary bank, as long as they don't get too specific about a particular bank.
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.
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.
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.
I'm actually trying to get a license for my current job at my current company (recently moved to a new company). I gave it this rating because I am about to go to our executive to ask that we purchase it! I know that there will be value because we are forecasting a high volume of research next year
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.
It can be difficult to organize our tests and go back and find information. I think the AI tools are helping and will help with this, but for now it is time consuming to sort through all of the tests and information and then synthesize it and share it with others. It just takes a lot of time.
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.
I've used the "power hour," as I think it's called. This really helped me gain a greater understanding of my specific needs and wants from the platform. This excellent service points to the excellent relationship UserTesting provides its clients. I would recommend this service to any of my colleagues.
From a technical perspective, the implementation was extremely smooth. Most of the change management / implementation hurdles were clearing use of the tool through our various security, legal, and information privacy teams. Once these concerns were addressed (UserTesting.com was very helpful in providing all the needed documentation), the implementation process was very simple and we were able to get going right away.
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.
UserTesting is probably the most polished with the largest tester pool, fastest turnaround, and great tools for both moderated and unmoderated tests. Userlytics is a solid alternative, especially for the budget-conscious. It supports usability testing on lots of devices, and you can do both moderated and unmoderated sessions. The UI isn’t as seamless as UserTesting’s, but it gets the job done and it's pretty flexible in terms of study setup and participant targeting. Trymata is the most basic, but it’s relatively straightforward and affordable. You still get session recordings and written responses, but lacks dashboard polish or advanced features. It’s great for smaller teams or one-off tests.
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.
We can build tests and gather the insights from those tests to validate our products at a breakneck pace.
By quickly validating our assumptions, we can adjust or refine our designs to ensure the final results are more user-focused.
Recently, by testing and comparing two different flows for a form, we were able to create the right solution that gave us better leads compared to the former form. This results in better leads, better data about the user, and better support at the end for this user.
