Dovetail, headquartered in Sydney, aims to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. Dovetail states they empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative research platform.
$0
per month
Hotjar
Score 8.1 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
Dovetail
Hotjar
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Professional
$15
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
per year
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
Dovetail
Hotjar
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount available for annual billing on the Professional plan.
Dovetail outperforms in qualitative research analysis by offering advanced tagging transcription and centralized insights. I think notion is good for large or complex documentation but Dovetail is nice for qualitative documentation. Maze is better for usabilty testing , …
See 1st question answer for my use case, I went into depth there for the specific use cases we have. For less appropriate (touched on this earlier) the final report is not great in dovetail. The formatting options are not great and does not look professional because of the lack of customization and layouts. For my customer we wouldn't be able to present that data as it's constructed. So we have to copy and paste all the quotes and insights to a word doc. That's ok but then it means if we want to use Dovetail as a repository of data we have to then re-import a pdf of the report into the project page.
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.
The tagging, linking, and repository features make it simple to maintain a living library of knowledge, ensuring past work is never lost.
Dovetail enables our researchers and non-research partners to engage more directly with findings, fostering a stronger culture of evidence-based decision-making.
Dovetail makes it simple to track engagement metrics with research insights proving overall ROI.
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.
We should have a trust indicator for our insights, as it is difficult to quickly determine when they are trustworthy or not.
Chatbot analysis within different data, I mostly use it with a small sample and replicate the process instead of using the chatbot for more global analysis.
Insight creation, the format is not always really engaging, and you can't really create a presentation from it. It does not align with some stakeholder expectations and requires us to redo the work.
Because we are really happy with the tool and it’s capabilities at the moment. The price increase is the main issue we can have but the features are getting better and better. It really saves a lot of time for our team and allow us to collaborate more efficiently with certain stakeholders that often did not réalise how much research we conduct. Now they can just have a look to it by themself!
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.
Very organized and user-friendly; however, the editing capabilities for the analysis report/insight doc could use some work. There was a recent update also causing it to be harder to find the in-project search bar and where to switch from the highlight list and highlight board view, which made the experience more challenging, especially since I was sharing my screen. Not only did it catch me off guard that it changed, but stakeholders and I were trying (on-call) to figure out how to access it and couldn't. After the call, I did more digging and finally found it, but that was after a bit of time. Outside of this and the editing for insight reports, I feel like the usability is actually very well thought out and effective.
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.
Regarding performance, I would say it’s satisfactory. Adding data and transcriptions is really fast and efficient, and can be done in the background, so I’m never hindered by these aspects. However, all the new AI-generated features are still somewhat slow to run. It’s nothing major, but it should improve in the future.
My customer success manager is very responsive and has always been able to answer my questions and resolve issues quickly. The collaboration is smooth, so I have no complaints in that regard.
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.
The training went very well, and we co-built it to really address our needs. I also think it was beneficial to have feedback coming from someone other than myself (since I manage the tool), as it helped reinforce the points I wanted to highlight. The team’s feedback on the training was very positive.
Dovetail is the most stakeholder-friendly research tool we've used. Its visual insights, highlight reels, and intuitive interface make it easy for non-researchers to understand and act on customer feedback. Stakeholders can engage directly without needing deep training, making it ideal for cross-functional teams. Compared to other tools, Dovetail offers the best balance of depth for researchers and clarity for decision-makers.
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.
Management is quite straightforward; it’s easy to change access if certain stakeholders need to use it. The repository features are accessible to all teams, making it a good entry point into the tool. The more people use it, the more powerful the tool becomes, so it seems truly scalable to me. The limits are more financial, in terms of accessing additional features.
Researchers and designers now spend less time digging through scattered notes or redoing similar studies. Centralizing everything in Dovetail has significantly reduced the time needed to prepare synthesis reports, align stakeholders, or onboard new teammates into past research.
With Dovetail, user insights are no longer abstract or anecdotal—they're traceable, searchable, and backed by real quotes. Product teams feel more confident making roadmap decisions based on what users actually need, not assumptions.
Dovetail has encouraged more non-designers to engage with user feedback directly. This democratization of insights helps align everyone around real user problems, which ultimately leads to better product-market fit and faster iteration loops.
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.
