Hotjar vs. Matomo Analytics

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

Matomo is a full-fledged website tracking and analytics tool. It offers everything and then a bit more that GA has to offer. I cannot conceive of any situation where this programme would be "less appropriate". You can use it for each and every website and do well with it. The data it provides includes everything you could wish for (country, IP, new user or not, actions taken, goals achieved etc.)

• 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

• Default Admin dashboard provides a ton of very useful information that is easily maneuvered around with "click-n-drag" to meet your preferences
• Provides some very valuable granular insights by default without needing to do additional customizations
• Breaks down insights into categories, then sub-categories which allow you to really drill down
• Compiles and presents the data in a nice, visually friendly way

• 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

• Their support is extremely bad with slow replies
• Their interface and UI looks like something from 2010
• It is only 20% of the web page that is usable and there is zero to no help as to how you use their platform
• The website has lots of bugs that leads to that you often not get accurate analytics

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

Piwik makes it easy to see which social networks are most effective for you, and the mobile data is great too. Add to this the depth of data and excellent reporting, and you have several reasons to give Piwik a try

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

Piwik succeeds in presenting me (and my associates and my clients...) large amounts of data in a user friendly way. The interface and functionality can easily be customized. While some enhancements do need technical background (API calls by programming language from the webserver or javascript), others are easy to use (goal / event tracking)

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

The best thing about the Matomo support is that they have a forum which basically you can find the answer to almost all of your questions and most of the time you don't need to contact them regarding your questions and problems but if you need help they will answer in a reasonable time slots.

Incentivized

Only one hiccup when we were using a beta installation. Other than that, smooth sailing.

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

Matomo Analytics offers the best of both worlds: detailed website analytics and the ability to be privacy-minded and compliant with data privacy regulations, up to and including GDPR. This allows for effective risk management, while also making compliance easy. And it doesn't block marketing from making data-driven decisions to optimize our marketing over time.

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 ROI in terms of user impact and usage in our beta test has proven to be excellent. In comparison to our AWstats system that was tracking stats based on the htaccess logs, Piwik gives the customer the ability to see stats on an almost realtime basis versus a day behind due to file processing.
• Lead conversion is definitely easier with a robust system like Piwik. Trying to hunt down leads using a straight up htaccess logs polling system is much more difficult for non-technical users.
• Customer service calls have dropped since the stats data is now stored in a MySQL backend rather than flat files. With a database driven system efficiency has improved with respect to response time from a customer perspective by well over 150%.