Appcues vs. Hotjar

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Appcues
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Appcues is online software for creating in-product experiences such as user onboarding, feature announcements, etc. without writing any code. (The vendor believes it's the non-technical people who oftentimes have the best information about a software user's needs and desires.) The goal of using Appcues is to improve product engagement within the user's own customer base.
$299
per month/billed monthly
Hotjar
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
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
Pricing
AppcuesHotjar
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$299
per month/billed monthly
Growth
$879
per month/billed annually
Enterprise
Contact sales team
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
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppcuesHotjar
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppcuesHotjar
Considered Both Products
Appcues

No answer on this topic

Hotjar
Chose Hotjar
The price is great, and the features are just what we needed. We like Hotjar because we can get user feedback and watch user sessions to improve our web app faster.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
AppcuesHotjar
Small Businesses
ChurnZero
ChurnZero
Score 8.9 out of 10
Smartlook
Smartlook
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Whatfix
Whatfix
Score 9.4 out of 10
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Whatfix
Whatfix
Score 9.4 out of 10
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppcuesHotjar
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(7 ratings)
9.8
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
5.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(4 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppcuesHotjar
Likelihood to Recommend
Appcues
It is well suited for SaaS products or services that have a highly complex user interface. Through Appcues, you can ensure that people discover all the existing and new features and make them understand the value of your product as soon as possible to address the evergreen issue of churn. But if your user interface is really messed up, you should change the product itself instead of using a tool like Appcues to explain everything on the screen.
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Contentsquare
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.
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Pros
Appcues
  • As a whole, Appcues is very easy to use.
  • You can build templates to easily style future modal windows and tooltips.
  • They have great customer service! Any time I've had a question our support rep always gets back to me with solutions.
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Contentsquare
  • 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
Appcues
  • We were extremely surprised that there are not any Appcues used in Appcues. The app is pretty easy to use, once you figure out how to use it. There were not any type of tutorials when we logged in that quickly walked through how to setup a flow.
  • Appcues has lots of support articles, however they are almost so numerous that it was hard to find simple onboarding documentation that we found useful.
  • The different tooltips and product actions are great, but being able to customize the different cues a little bit more by changing sizes and aspect ratios could be an improvement.
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Contentsquare
  • 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
Appcues
No answers on this topic
Contentsquare
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.
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Usability
Appcues
No answers on this topic
Contentsquare
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.
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Support Rating
Appcues
No answers on this topic
Contentsquare
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Appcues
It has a much, much better user interface, better customer care, and of course better pricing. This along with the fact that they were very accommodating for our use case ensured we went ahead with Appcues.
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Contentsquare
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.
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Return on Investment
Appcues
  • Appcues has allowed us to quickly deploy user help features that target specific users, audiences, even customers with very little effort.
  • Appcues has helped gain user traction by providing helpful tooltips, tours, and other rich content, reducing the first-time user learning curve.
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Contentsquare
  • 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.
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