Crazy Egg vs. Hotjar vs. Optimizely Web Experimentation

+ I strongly believe that this tool helps when a firm has good user count (depends on business model) as most of these tools are data friends. More data - more valuable insights + Best fit if someone who is looking for deeper insights of individual page - Not suggested for very fewer visits of a website. Suggested to improve better visit count

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I think it can serve the whole spectrum of experiences from people who are just getting used to web experimentation. It's really easy to pick up and use. If you're more experienced then it works well because it just gets out of the way and lets you really focus on the experimentation side of things. So yeah, strongly recommend. I think it is well suited both to small businesses and large enterprises as well. I think it's got a really low barrier to entry. It's very easy to integrate on your website and get results quickly. Likewise, if you are a big business, it's incrementally adoptable, so you can start out with one component of optimizing and you can build there and start to build in things like data CMS to augment experimentation as well. So it's got a really strong a pathway to grow your MarTech platform if you're a small company or a big company.

Incentivized

• Provides heatmaps that shows you the elements on your site that are and aren't performing well.
• Provides scrollmaps so you can see how far down a page users are scrolling and which content never gets seen.
• Screenshots show you how your website looks across a variety of different devices.
• Provides a type of clickmap called confetti that enables you visualise clicks by segments - device, new/returning visitors, campaigns and other metrics.

Incentivized

• 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

• The Platform contains drag-and-drop editor options for creating variations, which ease the A/B tests process, as it does not require any coding or development resources.
• Establishing it is so simple that even a non-technical person can do it perfectly.
• It provides real-time results and analytics with robust dashboard access through which you can quickly analyze how different variations perform. With this, your team can easily make data-driven decisions Fastly.

Incentivized

• The largest thing we've struggled with is the Optimizely integration. I've contacted customer service a few times to get it properly setup. Customer Service is always friendly and helpful; they provide clear steps to get it setup. Unfortunately despite clear instructions, they are tedious, and if not completed in the correct order, the integration with Optimizely does not work. My success rate with the integration is less than 55%.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• JavaScript is hard to implement sometimes especially for JQuery elements
• ROI reporting should be part of the overall experimentation reporting
• CMP integration: where we can easily show status of test on the HPT request
• CMS integration
• More widgets like social proof banners, etc.

Incentivized

It's a great tool considering how inexpensive it is. If used correctly and you have a plan for tracking your websites, this tool can make a world of a difference. If you are not going to sit down and take the time to make a plan for how to use this tool, I would say it is not worth your time. Yes, you can look at items on your website that need to be changed, but without a consistent plan, other important items that need changing can be lost in the mix. Make sure you have enough time and energy to invest in this and it will be well worth it

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

I rated this question because at this stage, Optimizely does most everything we need so I don't foresee a need to migrate to a new tool. We have the infrastructure already in place and it is a sizeable lift to pivot to another tool with no guarantee that it will work as good or even better than Optimizely

Incentivized

Crazy Egg is extremely easy to set up and use, and very well done from a user experience standpoint. It is really helpful that I can give stakeholders access to the interface and get them interacting with it with minimal training. The A/B testing is the easiest I have ever used, with minimal performance impact to the website.

Incentivized

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

Optimizely Web Experimentation's visual editor is handy for non-technical or quick iterative testing. When it comes to content changes it's as easy as going into wordpress, clicking around, and then seeing your changes live--what you see is what you get. The preview and approval process for sharing built experiments is also handy for sharing experiments across teams for QA purposes or otherwise.

Incentivized

It's slow to post data, and slow to get a snapshot to finally be active (i.e. not pending). Not intolerable, but would be nice to see data within a couple hours. Often have to wait to the next day.

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

I think support is an area where Crazy Egg is lacking. I would love to have a quarterly check-in with a Crazy Egg rep to understand what kinds of changes have been made to the platform and what is on the horizon. I also think a quick consulting sessions with a rep could be extremely beneficial, as I'm sure there are ways to use the tool that we haven't even thought about yet that would be extremely insightful for our team.

Incentivized

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

They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.

Crazy Egg is the best CRO and LPO tool for performance marketers who have a limited budget!

The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).

It is simple. JavaScript code needs to be added to any pages where you want to run tests. That's it.

In retrospect: - I think I should have stressed more demo's / workshopping with the Optimizely team at the start. I felt too confident during demo stages, and when came time to actually start, I was a bit lost. (The answer is likely I should have had them on-hand for our first install.. they offered but I thought I was OK.) - Really getting an understanding / asking them prior to install of how to make it really work for checkout pages / one that uses dynamic content or user interaction to determine what the UI does. Could have saved some time by addressing this at the beginning, as some things we needed to create on our site for Optimizely to "use" as a trigger for the variation test. - Having a number of planned/hoped-for tests already in-hand before working with Optimizely team. Sharing those thoughts with them would likely have started conversations on additional things we needed to do to make them work (rather than figuring that out during the actual builds). Since I had development time available, I could have added more things to the baseline installation since my developers were already "looking under the hood" of the site.

I will say that I didn't evaluate or select Crazy Egg, it's been a legacy tool that has been at the company before me. Honestly, we're not even sure of all of the features/functionality that we can use. Me, as a UXR, I think there are some other tools that would help me more in gaining visibility into what our users are doing on our website. I've evaluated other tools that are more aligned with UXR. However, if we properly paired it with experimentation, this might be more of a valuable tool for us.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The ability to do A/B testing in Optimizely along with the associated statistical modelling and audience segmentation means it is a much better solution than using something like Google Analytics were a lot more effort is required to identify and isolate the specific data you need to confidently make changes

Incentivized

Its reliability (not scaleability, as the question asks for, sorry) is pretty good but through our testing we know that some clicks do not get recorded. It doesn't bother us a lot because we look at the aggregate of thousands of visits, but we do know it misses things. As for scaleability, it's about right. You really don't want zillions of clicks per snapshot - the screen just turns to 100% dots and you lose the ability to differentiate different screen areas. We find that 25,000 clicks for a page gives us a really good view.

We can use it flexibly across lines of business and have it in use across two departments. We have different use cases and slightly different outcomes, but can unify our results based on impact to the bottom line. Finally, we can generate value from anywhere in the org for any stakeholders as needed.

Incentivized

• Very Positive impact on ROI as it pointed towards some specific flaws of the website. These flaws were removed on a regular basis.
• It constantly helps finetune our website to the requirements of the users. This helps in boosting our business development efforts.
• It helps us to remove or modify the least visited sections of the website. Thus removing the limitations that hamper our growth.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We're able to share definitive annualized revenue projections with our team, showing what would happen if we put a test into Production
• Showing the results of a test on a new page or feature prior to full implementation on a site saves developer time (if a test proves the new element doesn't deliver a significant improvement.
• Making a change via the WYSIWYG interface allows us to see multiple changes without developer intervention.

Incentivized