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
VWO
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
VWO is an A/B testing and conversion optimization platform that enables growing businesses to conduct qualitative and quantitative visitor research, build an experimentation roadmap and run continuous experiments on their digital properties. With its 5 capabilities Plan, Track, Test, Analyze, and Target, it brings the entire CRO (conversion rate optimization) process at one place. VWO helps online businesses follow the process- and data-driven conversion…
$99
per month
Pricing
Hotjar
VWO
Editions & Modules
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
Subscription
$99.00
per month
TESTING
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The classic VWO A/B testing solution
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Get a Demo
The all-in-one platform for all your optimization needs
ENTERPRISE
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Customized solution with advanced AB testing and conversion optimization capabilities
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hotjar
VWO
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Hotjar
VWO
Features
Hotjar
VWO
Testing and Experimentation
Comparison of Testing and Experimentation features of Product A and Product B
Hotjar
-
Ratings
VWO
7.5
Ratings
9% below category average
a/b experiment testing
00 Ratings
8.20 Ratings
Split URL testing
00 Ratings
9.10 Ratings
Multivariate testing
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Multi-page/funnel testing
00 Ratings
6.40 Ratings
Cross-browser testing
00 Ratings
8.20 Ratings
Test significance
00 Ratings
7.30 Ratings
Visual / WYSIWYG editor
00 Ratings
7.30 Ratings
Advanced code editor
00 Ratings
9.10 Ratings
Visitor recordings
00 Ratings
6.40 Ratings
Preview mode
00 Ratings
6.40 Ratings
Test duration calculator
00 Ratings
6.40 Ratings
Audience Segmentation & Targeting
Comparison of Audience Segmentation & Targeting features of Product A and Product B
Hotjar
-
Ratings
VWO
8.2
Ratings
4% below category average
Standard visitor segmentation
00 Ratings
9.10 Ratings
Behavioral visitor segmentation
00 Ratings
7.30 Ratings
Traffic allocation control
00 Ratings
9.10 Ratings
Website personalization
00 Ratings
7.30 Ratings
Results and Analysis
Comparison of Results and Analysis features of Product A and Product B
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.
Our marketing team does a lot of creative testing around messaging and imagery. VWO is well suited for this type of testing and can yield great results if you define your conversion goals correctly. However, when we have tried to do more substantial/advanced changes through VWO (such as re-positioning content or modifying elements in a form), we have had some challenges and not been able to get the desired tests working correctly.
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.
VWO has a strong support team willing to help provide answers to questions during the setup process. During setup, we had some questions regarding implementation across a significant number of sites and they were able to ease dev team concerns and provide detailed best practices to streamline integration.
Some of the initial results of a few of the initial tests raised some questions internally. We setup a call and were able to quickly address the questions and find some opportunities to leverage moving forward.
I discovered a bug within the UI that lead to some questions internally. I was able to report it and the problem was fixed rather quickly and their team followed up with a thank you for reporting it and to report the issue was now resolved.
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.
The heatmaps within A/B tests are overlayed on the live website. Unfortunately, these don't work properly when scrolling down the site.
I am missing an overview of all my custom conversions. I can only see a list of frequently used goals while setting up an A/B test, which may or may not include all custom conversions.
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.
Visual Website Optimizer is a easy to use and powerful tool for testing web pages. We use it to test lead generation websites to increase the number of people that complete a form. Before we decided to go with Visual Website Optimizer we did research into other options and found Visual Website Optimizer to be one of the best.
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.
Overall VWO is quite good with general user usability, and every person who has had to take up the mantle of using the tool itself has found it manageable. However there is definitely some room for improvement - again, perhaps this is particularly the case because we are running a large number of tests in a number of different languages (and markets, and countries!) which requires a lot of upkeep.
VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.
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.
While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.
Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.
Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.
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.
VWO is by far the easiest tool to use among all experimentation tools. It is like the experimentation tool for dummies and works as well as the others. A highlight would be the reports on every test because compared to the others, in VWO is way much easier to understand the metrics and the test performance.
The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.
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.
Our clients have seen significant increases in engagement and conversion rates through changes we recommended after using VWO to test our hypotheses.
Our clients and internal teams have appreciated the level of granular detail available within the platform, as more information leads to more reliable optimization suggestions.
