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
Smartlook
Score 8.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels. Data is seen on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This is to support clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers,…
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Pricing
Hotjar
Smartlook
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
Pro
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Free
Free forever
per month 3000 sessions
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hotjar
Smartlook
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing.
All Smartlook packages support both web and mobile app platforms.
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.
Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.
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.
Events -- but I think this is something that we could improve ourselves in our system.
Create some suggestions for funnels and heatmaps.
Give general insights for a certain period of time, e.g. from Oct. 7th to 12th, 75 users left the checkout step and 60% of them left due to a payment issue. IDK just bringing some ideas!
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.
As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.
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.
Smartlook is very intuitive and simple for an average programmer (I don't know if it will be as simple for a normal user). We have never had to resort to looking for information on the web or ask for help for something we didn't understand or didn't work as expected.
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 am always very happy when a company offers the option to use online chat, as I do not like to call customer support and writing an email is just too slow and cumbersome. I did not even expect a reply right away, yet it took the customer support team less than a minute to respond to my problem.
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.
Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some custom dashboards.
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 have increased the conversion rate from the beginning till now with 120%.
We redesigned our landing pages and decreased the bounce rate by 41%.
We rethinked and redesigned our menu structure and internal site linking to increase the time users spent on our site based on the data we got from Smartlook analysis.
