Hotjar vs. Parse.ly

Hotjar

Hotjar

361 Reviews and Ratings

Parse.ly

Parse.ly

130 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Hotjar	Score 7.8 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
Parse.ly	Score 7.8 out of 10	N/A	Parse.ly is a content optimization platform for online publishers. It provides in-depth analytics and helps maximize the performance of the digital content. It features a dashboard geared for editorial and business staff and an API that can be used by a product team to create personalized or contextual experiences on a website.	N/A

Pricing

Hotjar

Parse.ly

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

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Hotjar	Parse.ly
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Required

Additional Details

Discount available for annual pricing.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Hotjar	Parse.ly
Considered Both Products	Hotjar Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar Hotjar is the only tool like this that I've used. It is easy to use and beneficial. I would recommend it to anyone looking for this kind of tool. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar In my opinion, Hotjar is much easier to set up and use than Microsoft Clarity Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar For surveys, I think Hotjar is better than Maze by a mile. The functionality is directly embedded in the SaaS or webapp which is a major plus. Qualtrics is a survey powerhouse with many more functionalities for surveys as well as reports, but I think Hotjar has better UX and … Incentivized Helpful? AW Alice Wang Lead UX Researcher Chose Hotjar Compared to Sprig and Usabilla, Hotjar has robust functionality. Again, as stated earlier, the ability to summarize rage clicks, trigger recordings for a/b experiments, and run intercept surveys on mobile is very useful. Hotjar is also noticeably more intuitive to use than … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar The fact that it has a trial period in which you can fully try each feature of the platform. The fact that is very intuitive for us to understand each feedback given by the users and to interpret how they move and what they observe on the pages we need to test. Incentivized Helpful? Alex Richards Chief Information Officer & Co-Founder Chose Hotjar For us, Hotjar was really simple to implement and the user interface is really easy to use and get accustomed to. Some of the other products we evaluated didn't have as rich features and were way overpriced which made us choose Hotjar. Also, Hotjar allows you to capture … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar There was not something specific negative that we noticed in the other products, hotjar came in the discussion through a referral from one of our colleagues, was covering all the tickboxes that we had set and decided to move forwards with it Incentivized Helpful? Leandro Chaves Desenvolvedor de software Chose Hotjar Whatever software does, Hotjar does better. Integration and setup are really fast and you can have data to analyze in a few minutes. Also, the support team is very dedicated and there's a lot of documentation and examples you can follow. Incentivized Helpful? Namandeep Bhatia Co Founder & Chief Technology Officer Chose Hotjar There are overlaps of a few features, but session recording is a unique feature of Hotjar. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar I have not used any other services and only used Hotjar so I cannot say how this service compares to others in their vertical. I have used Survey Monkey and I have found that their survey templates do not match that of Hotjar's. I also think that the reporting/tracking is more … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar Hotjar was significantly cheaper for us, and they’ve been brilliant at honouring their legacy pricing model which is much cheaper up until recently. We find that Hotjar also offers a wider range of tools that we would otherwise need to pay more for elsewhere like surveys. The … Incentivized Helpful? Akhil Gupta Senior Software Engineer Chose Hotjar Cmparing with other products in the same vertical, we found the UX UI for Hotjar the best. It is easier to integrate with and has lot many more features as compared to its nearest competitors. We fount the product to be robust and accurate with lot of customizable options to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar I liked the Hotjar User interface a little more and it seemed a little bit easier to set up. For some users with just the basic needs smart look was overly complicated. whereas in Hotjar everything you need is in one simple easy-to-view dashboard. Also, it offered more free … Incentivized Helpful? Jasper van der Zwaan Mgr. Web Optimization Chose Hotjar I test drove Lucky Orange and decided to keep Hotjar as the UI is easier to use. The competitor had no compelling features vs the ones offered by Hotjar. I also found the standard sound effects in Lucky Orange very overbearing and obnoxious. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar Hotjar was relatively more known to the team and they had past experience as well with the tool which made the adoption relatively easier. As such we didn’t find a lot of difference between the two tools when it comes fulfilling our use cases so for us specifically both were … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar They have a user-friendly website and product and the accuracy of the feature and also more development feature Incentivized Helpful? Markus Kapferer Head of E-Commerce Chose Hotjar We used different tools but Hotjar combines several functionalities in one tool. So we used and are still using SurveyMonkey for bigger Surveys but it's handy to also have a tool where we can create short single questions surveys. We selected Hotjar because it is a good … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar Hotjar is the full deal and provides fantastic functionality and options for me to track my users on my website. The other software is good but I personally feel Hotjar is the best for purposes. I know it’s a little pricey, but if you use it right, it will ultimately help you … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar HotJars UX is much better Crazy egg has a bit more capabilities I.E. A/B testing. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar Hotjar has more robust functionality than CrazyEgg. Optimizely is a little more advanced and more expensive than what we needed. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Hotjar Google Analytics is a much more robust platform than Hotjar, but works great as a complement to Google Analytics - in other words, it was a matter of choosing both, not either/or. While there are workarounds for them on Google Analytics, heatmaps and screen recordings are much … Incentivized Helpful? Carlos Ibarra Director Operaciones Chose Hotjar Hotjar is better at taking screenshots from landing pages which help us better visualize clicks, scroll and mouse movements. With Hotjar, we can better see what users are doing on our landing pages. This way you'll have a much more accurate picture of how people arrive at … Incentivized Helpful? Camilo Honorato Analista de Marketing Chose Hotjar The thing is I never used another tool like Hotjar before All my website analysis I made with Google Products before (Analytics, Tag Manager, Data Studio, etc..) But Hotjar really helps a lot to understand what my website means to my potential customers and even more, It allows … Incentivized Helpful? Becky Jewell Laughton Director of Customer Happiness Chose Hotjar I've really liked Hotjar for our web app and haven't had a need to look for other products. We've used Hotjar for three years and it gets us the answers we need for our web app UI changes or releases. I've really enjoyed using it. Incentivized Helpful? SF Steve Feher Area Mentor Chose Hotjar I just find Hotjar to be simpler, cleaner, easier, and more flexible. Lucky Orange was a tool that another client of my had installed and, while it 'worked' and did similar things, I found that Hotjar was simpler. I don't know if there are cost differences between the two … Incentivized Helpful?	Parse.ly Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly provides clearer insights into what stories are performing strongly in real time. Its interface is more user-friendly and it is easy to compare different time periods, titles or author statistics. Chartbeat had a website overlay to show where readers are going on site, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly excels in providing detailed insights into how users are interacting with specific pieces of content, allowing us to make data-driven decisions about content strategy and optimization. Its real-time reporting also provides us with immediate feedback on the … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Faster feedback and quicker visualization than what Google provides. However, it obviously can't get as specific or in-depth as Google Analytics Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly N/a Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Doesn't come with an integrated overlay like Chartbeat, but is more intuitive (just) than GA. Seems more accurate and detailed than Chartbeat but less than GA. It's my go-to for day-to-day traffic engagement but monthly I'm more likely to look at in-house GA-generated reports. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly I have not used or evaluated any other platforms similar to Parse.ly. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly is way better because of how much more user-friendly and intuitive it is. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly is the most comprehensive interface and system. Incentivized Helpful? LW Latrice Williams Reporter Chose Parse.ly I have not tried other products that are similar. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Have nothing similar to compare it with. Incentivized Helpful? Mark Chiles Senior Vice President, Digital & Chief Digital Officer Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly gives a more detailed look into how content is performing, versus the overall site metrics provided by Google Analytics. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Firstly, I didn't make the business decision to use Parse.ly. I'm just an employee using it. However, the first thing you notice is the change in appearance. Parse.ly's dashboard looks far more complicated than Chartbeat's and the black, white, and green theme [are] not as … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Google Analytics and DashThis Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly has very rich products and market use in media for content analytics. [The] dashboard provides [a] holistic view on the overall site visitor's information and what needs improvements. [The] dashboard is divided based on sections, author, posts, pages, etc., on the site … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Adobe Analytics is our organization's "official" data source and provides a much more in-depth feature set and customizable reporting tool. It's much less user-friendly than Parse.ly but can provide more detailed reporting. Google Analytics is used by my organization as a … Incentivized Helpful? Jonathan Miltimore Managing Editor Chose Parse.ly I used Google Analytics for years. I loved it and still love it. Google Analytics isn't as robust as Parse.ly and doesn't have some of the same capabilities, nor do I trust the data as much. But Google Analytics is still really good, and it's free. If I were at a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly is far more user-friendly than Google Analytics, which feels like a developer's tool by comparison. Parse.ly feels like it is designed for ease of access and use. While analyzing trends is more difficult in Google Analytics, it is straightforward in Parse.ly. Google … Incentivized Helpful? Iris Hong Reporter Chose Parse.ly I've used other web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Baidu Analytics, and SiteCatalyst. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly I use then in tandem; where Parse.ly lacks, I go over to Google Analytics and vice versa. Sometimes I need to look deeper at referral sources and that is where Parse.ly isn't as strong, especially if I am looking at a bigger set of content. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly We used Chartbeat, which wasn’t as user friendly. Incentivized Helpful? AH Alex Hughes Editor Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly works better than Google Analytics. This is mainly due to its simplicity whereas Google Analytics can quickly become quite complicated with a lot of moving parts. Parse.ly, on the other hand, is quick to learn and understand while also providing a lot of information. Incentivized Helpful? Alice Marshall eCommerce Staff Writer Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly offers a more friendly user experience, with better ease in navigating the software. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly is easier to use and more self-explanatory than Google Analytics. The site essentially explains itself upon visiting it. Chartbeat was quite good but I believe Parse.ly provides more granular details on web traffic and gives the user more insights into how and why … Incentivized Helpful? Omar Raya León Technical Writer Chose Parse.ly Parse.ly is easier to track and to understand for me than the features that Google Analytics offers. Nonetheless, graphics seems to be more complex in Google's environment, which [I feel] can be a weakness for Parse.ly in the case of Data Analysts. Although, both are used in … Incentivized Helpful? KW Kevin Wu Principal Analyst Chose Parse.ly It captures reader time spent much more accurately. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Hotjar

Parse.ly

Web Analytics

Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
	Hotjar - Ratings	Parse.ly 7.6 Ratings 6% below category average
Lead Conversion Tracking	00 Ratings	6.20 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement	00 Ratings	6.70 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting	00 Ratings	8.30 Ratings
Pageview Tracking	00 Ratings	8.20 Ratings
Event Tracking	00 Ratings	7.80 Ratings
Reporting in real-time	00 Ratings	8.40 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking	00 Ratings	7.60 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards	00 Ratings	7.60 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Hotjar	Parse.ly
Small Businesses	Smartlook Score 8.8 out of 10	StatCounter Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Siteimprove Score 9.1 out of 10	Optimal Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Contentsquare Score 7.4 out of 10	Optimal Score 9.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Hotjar	Parse.ly
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (0 ratings)	7.8 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	5.1 (0 ratings)	8.7 (0 ratings)
Usability	9.7 (0 ratings)	7.7 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	9.6 (0 ratings)	7.8 (0 ratings)
Ease of integration	9.0 (0 ratings)	- (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Hotjar	Parse.ly
Likelihood to Recommend	Hotjar is well suite for organizations that want to get a good glimpse into user behavior on their websites. The tool is easily installed through Google Tag Manager, and then users simply select which pages or paths they want the tool to analyze. After a few days, users can start seeing patterns develop, helping them understand what areas of the user journey flow they need to test out and improve. Hotjar is primarily for web-based experiences, not for mobile applications and other non-web digital applications. Incentivized Zach Ettelman Director, Digital Innovation Read full review	For people working in online media, or digital content creators, the platform could help them understand their audience and allow them to interact with them in a user-friendly way. Since the digital media industry is booming, Parse.ly can allow the user and the content creators to meet each other's demands and reduce redundancies and bombard the users with unnecessary content. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	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 Sarah O'Donnell UX & CRO Executive Read full review	Real-time metrics are great and help us decide what content to follow up on. Audience segmenting is key, helps us determine where we're strong and where we're not. Historical metrics are also helpful in helping us see what readers come back to overtime, which drives decisions about what content to devote more resources to producing. Incentivized AC Andrew Capps Reporter Read full review
Cons	The video recording feature is very slow to use. I know there is a very powerful process going on (saving your CSS and the DOM movements you make) but anyway it's slow to use. Hotjar itself is heavy and has effects on your load times. This is a very important issue and I hope they're working on that. Adding more segmentation would be nice. For example, being able to connect your API or more information to show relevant polls or feedback buttons to certain users. Aggregated info is hard to process. Incentivized Santiago Valdés Cofounder / Marketing, Growth, Technology, Experience Read full review	Traffic source. I would like to be able to find the exact social media page a view comes from. Now I can only tell which platform. I would like to be able to compare traffic more than one year ago. Now I'm limited to one year. Some more customization of reports (or maybe more training). Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	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 Patrick Eng Marketing Technologist Read full review	Cost is always a factor when considering any renewal, so we will always see how that compares to other offerings, but we have been pleased with the functionality from Parse.ly. Importantly, it has engaged news teams, and writers can easily assess their own performance--it is not just a management tool. This wider take-up makes it more likely that we would renew. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	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 Halima Satheya Digital Optimisation Lead Read full review	The Parse.ly platform is very user-friendly and easy to use. User management is simple, and reporting setup only takes a few minutes. They provide very helpful documentation for implementing the scripts on your site and have great customer support to help with custom development such as implementing their content recommendation engine. Incentivized Mark Chiles Senior Vice President, Digital & Chief Digital Officer Read full review
Support Rating	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 Zach Ettelman Director, Digital Innovation Read full review	Seems to be more bugs than I encounter in Google Analytics, but Parse.ly is always very quick to answer my questions or fix something. It seems like most of my issues are due to communications around my requests being outside of the package we pay for with this tool (i.e., only two years of data). Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Compared to Sprig and Usabilla, Hotjar has robust functionality. Again, as stated earlier, the ability to summarize rage clicks, trigger recordings for a/b experiments, and run intercept surveys on mobile is very useful. Hotjar is also noticeably more intuitive to use than Usabilla, with a cleaner interface and navigation. Incentivized AW Alice Wang Lead UX Researcher Read full review	Parse.ly excels in providing detailed insights into how users are interacting with specific pieces of content, allowing us to make data-driven decisions about content strategy and optimization. Its real-time reporting also provides us with immediate feedback on the effectiveness of content changes, which is particularly important for content-heavy sites that need to iterate quickly. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Our UX team can now use hard data to back up and validate design decisions that we make. Our role as usability experts is becoming more respected and integral to business objectives because we now have data that can back up our field of study and prove that our roles are demonstrably useful and necessary. HotJar allows our small team of 3 UX designers to get research data as if we were a much larger team. Instead of painstakingly using our time to do guerrilla research, endless user observations, and other types of manual testing, we can now get a significant portion of our data from HotJar. Using HotJar is actually giving our team a sense of excitement and enjoyment in our day-to-day usability work. Instead of seeing UX as a chore, HotJar is making data gathering and analyzing more fun, because we can see tangible results from a much larger pool of user/user-data than we could in the past. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Sometimes in meetings our editorial director will point out stories that didn't perform well. To us, that means readers don't really care about the topic, so we'll pivot away from writing about that in the future. That might not be "business objectives" though. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots		Parse.ly Screenshots