Hotjar vs. Kissmetrics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Kissmetrics
Score 9.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kissmetrics is a customer engagement automation platform. This solution includes behavioral analytics, segmentation, and email campaign automation.
$150
per month
Pricing
HotjarKissmetrics
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
Growth
$500
Monthly Tracked People
Power
$850
Monthly Tracked People
Enterprise
Custom
Monthly Tracked People
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HotjarKissmetrics
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee$1,500 per installation
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing.What are Monthly Tracked People? Monthly Tracked People are unique visitors that engage in an Event on your website or with your product, that gets tracked by you in Kissmetrics. Monthly Tracked People can be anonymous or identified.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HotjarKissmetrics
Considered Both Products
Hotjar

No answer on this topic

Kissmetrics
Chose Kissmetrics
It has some unique features when compared to Squarespace and Hotjar.
1. Multiple Site Management 2. Keyword Tracking, and 3. Campaign Management. User video tracking is not possible in Kissmetrics, but Hotjar provides it for free and paid subscribers.
Chose Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics fills a very specific marketing void for our organization; however, we find it more useful when it is integrated with our other data solutions. For many organizations Kissmetrics won't be the only data analysis tool since it doesn't do everything great; however, for …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
HotjarKissmetrics
Small Businesses
Smartlook
Smartlook
Score 8.5 out of 10
StatCounter
StatCounter
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.6 out of 10
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HotjarKissmetrics
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(101 ratings)
8.9
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.1
(2 ratings)
7.4
(27 ratings)
Usability
9.7
(6 ratings)
7.1
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(6 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(4 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(7 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HotjarKissmetrics
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Kissmetrics
[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.
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Pros
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.
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Kissmetrics
  • The more events you track and properties you send along, the more you can see how specific users use your product/service. The user based timeline gives you a perfect start point to get in touch with users, because you can see where they get stuck.
  • Tracking your traffic sources and how they influence conversions is awesome. You can get a perfect view of how much a traffic source contributes to revenue.
  • Funnel reports give you more insights into micro and macro conversion steps and give you actionable data to work with.
  • Customer support!
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Cons
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.
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Kissmetrics
  • Installing.... yes this is also a negative. While you can install and have the program running in minutes, if you use Unbounce, the form tracking process is quite complicated!
  • Updates... I feel like the product updates have slowed a lot lately. Thankfully, the product functionality is so amazing that it hasn't impeded the use of it. However, it is still disappointing to see less frequent software updates.
  • Occasionally clunky UI... there are a few reports that are really easy to mess up and leave you scratching your head on why it isn't showing you any data.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Kissmetrics
Price sensitivity and the different choices that now exist in the Analytics industry. I think it makes sense for us sometime this year to rethink our analytics strategy to see how we may leverage the best of GA (which has included lots of new features and updates the past years_, Kiss and other tools as need be
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Usability
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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Kissmetrics
Right after login, you'll get to a dashboard which shows you a quick view on how your business is doing across the events you are tracking. There is no need to dig deeper than that unless you want to, in which case it's very easy to do so just by clicking on the metric on which you want more information. The interface is very intuitive.
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Reliability and Availability
Contentsquare
No answers on this topic
Kissmetrics
The application was very rarely down; during the period we used the application, I can think of only two or three occasions in which the site was down. Notably, at no time was the the performance of our own site compromised as a result.
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Performance
Contentsquare
No answers on this topic
Kissmetrics
Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.
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Support Rating
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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Kissmetrics
Our front-line product support person (Mika) is great. She is responsive and great to work with.

However, the data accuracy issue described earlier is the reason for the low score here. This issue was escalated from front-line to support to level 2 technical support and then it disappeared into a black hole. Escalations, in general, do not go well. We get no response for days, or I have to chase things down. This is not acceptable. Marketing metrics are critically important to me and I need answers quickly. I cannot afford to wait around for days / weeks for a response.

Just to be clear, these comments only apply to escalated support issues.
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In-Person Training
Contentsquare
No answers on this topic
Kissmetrics
Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.
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Online Training
Contentsquare
No answers on this topic
Kissmetrics
I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.
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Implementation Rating
Contentsquare
No answers on this topic
Kissmetrics
In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that
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Alternatives Considered
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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Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a next-level step up for people who are used to getting their tracking and reporting from Google Analytics or Shopify's CMS. While HubSpot arguably has a better user interface, Kissmetrics certainly has the power and usability necessary to track important conversion data and help you make better marketing decisions.
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Return on Investment
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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Kissmetrics
  • Unfortunately for this client (small business) the cost of Kissmetrics was just too prohibitive. But it's obvious that for a larger company that can afford it, the data would be invaluable to gain more insight in how to gain more active users and orders for a funnel.
  • The data provided really increases an understanding of how best to provide the right experience for the users...happy users equals increase in ROI.
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ScreenShots

Kissmetrics Screenshots

Screenshot of Kissmetrics Activity Report is a part of our report suite called AnalyzeScreenshot of Kissmetrics Populations allow your to track your most important segment over timeScreenshot of Kissmetrics Campaigns allow you to engage your user with automated behavior-based emails when it is most effective