Likelihood to Recommend From my experience, I believe that Vision Critical offers the best software to manage an insights community. They are great to work with, and my opinion has only improved over time. However, that doesn't mean it is the best survey software overall. If someone simply needs to program and distribute surveys, this may or may not be the right solution. There are some other really great survey tools on the market that are competitively priced and offer very intuitive interfaces (like Qualtrics). If you are going to recruit people to answer surveys or provide feedback on an ongoing basis (re-contacting and engaging with the same people repeatedly), though, Vision Critical would be my #1 recommendation.
Read full review Hotjar is good for a first pass at understanding user sentiment or locating potential usability issues. There are features such as "rage clicked" which shows recordings or instances when a user rage clicked or had an issue with your site. Hotjar has also been helpful to launch intercept surveys on mobile, desktop, and app, which not all competitor software allow. Hotjar recordings are fun to watch. "Watching Hotjar like Netflix" is a favorite pastime at work.
Read full review Pros The team is helpful in creating complicated survey logic The team is accommodating in creating interfaces that suit our desired look The team keeps in regular contact in order to effectively manage our requests and goals Read full review 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. Read full review Cons The functionality when creating a new questionnaire is rather clunky, particularly when there are a few conditional factors in the logical flow; being able to see those factors and how they apply with some sort of other logical layout would really help when creating a longer survey. There are quite a few steps that aren't intuitive when launching a survey, for instance all the various dates (launch date, reserve date, survey date, etc etc etc). If there were a description field if you hovered above labeled areas of sections that explained what this field was for that would really help It doesn't help either that the entire site is grey; it's a cold environment to be in for a long time, and the simple design makes it seem more clunky than it probably really is. Read full review Hotjar is primarily used for web-based experiences. Not that easy to use on mobile apps. I'd love to see Hotjar integrated with Google Analytics for an even deeper view. Hotjar is primarily used by smaller organizations...pricing can get steep quickly for larger organizations. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Vision Critical often requires you to dump the data to a statistical program. I hate that step. You waste time, and improve the chance of data being lost, or changed.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability I think there is a ton of room to improve, in things as simple as aesthetics and other areas of logical flow when it comes to creating and then launching a survey, as well as providing descriptors for what each field is referencing. For instance, there are like 5 date fields to be filled out, but no button near them that says "this date will determine _________" and I am not about to go back into the training module, which was confusing enough to FIND, let alone work through to find just ONE answer.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating Absolutely fantastic support team. Willing to help you online through vast collection of how-to guides and resources, online via chatbox, or over the phone. Even though we were in different time zones, they were always available. Very helpful and knowledgeable
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Vision Critical is more appealing visually but no where near as complex or robust. Vision Critical is also much more expensive though.
Read full review HotJar was selected for a few reasons:
Video Capture - HotJars video capture of user sessions is nothing short of amazing. It is so useful (not to mention cool) to see, in real time, how users interact with our software. It makes our jobs so much easier and more enjoyable to get this type of d User Surveys - The ease and flexibility of surveys we can make available on our website are an awesome tool to get additional data. Simple implementation - Adding a very small amount of code to our website gives us the ability to use all of HotJars features without having to touch our code again. Read full review Return on Investment Our use of Vision Critical's software has allowed us to dramatically increase the amount of research that we do, at a much lower cost. Since there is no incremental cost for each survey we field, we can ask many questions we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Our use of an insights community has also sped up the research process, allowing us to write, program, field and report on a survey within only a few days. Because of the two advantages listed above, we have been able to listen closer to our customers' opinions. Read full review We have fixed many issues, for example, checkout usability problems with the video recording feature. You can catch bugs and get an overall idea of how a particular page is working. Polls have helped us pair intent with the video sessions, so we can understand better why certain users answered different things. You get greedy and try to ask everything but that won't work. Keep it simple and it will give you small but important insights. Read full review ScreenShots