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
Maze
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Maze is a rapid user testing platform from Maze.design in Paris, designed to give users actionable user insights, in a matter of hours. The vendor states that with it, users can test remotely, autonomously, and collaboratively.
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.
Suited for: - I think that this software is a must-have for any experience or product designer that needs validation from any audience - Designers that rapidly prototype with Figma - Designers looking to establish an inexpensive way to deliver on user testing Less appropriate for: - If you are looking for a survey replacement this is probably not for you even though it does that quite well, simply due to the cost. Google Forms would be a more fiscal choice. - Marketing visual designers who are adept at visual builder tools (WebFlow, Divi, Elementor, etc) with A/B testing ability would probably find other products more valuable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When looking for tools that could help us understand our customers better, we needed something that would be easy to use, had the functionality and flexibility of running multiple types of tests and exercises, and allowed our team to be able to do these tests quickly. Only Maze could really tick all the above boxes.
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.
