Hotjar vs. UserTesting

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

It's the best for A/B tests or tests where you need a broad audience. If you don't need a real niche audience (that you should recruit then rather yourself), then you can rely on UserTesting. It's good because it's so quick, almost instant, it takes about 10 minutes on average before I can start reviewing and documenting sessions.

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

• Taking notes with video clips. I can take notes while I am watching a session and I can create clips of UX issues or bugs occurring. This really helps when I share them with other teams.
• Exporting all your notes. I analyze all usability tests by exporting my notes from UserTesting. I wish I could bulk export multiple tests though.
• Setting up demographics. This helps me reach out to users who are similar to our audience.
• Setting up screeners. Some studies require specific audiences (using a specific tool etc.), by setting screeners I can make sure I reached the correct audience.

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

• The organization of the work spaces/dashboards could use some work.
• I don't feel as supported as I used to from a customer success perspective. I used to have dedicated, go-to professionals to reach out to about my account who knew my project context, account history, etc. Recently we've been pushed into general support pools, and it doesn't feel like my account gets any personalized attention anymore.
• I would like to see a more refined experience for collaborators - the test plans I share with them are plain text/hard to read.
• Would be nice to be able to conduct focus groups using this tool.

Incentivized

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'm very happy with my experience of the product and the level of service and learning resources they provide. If the service becomes more expensive than it currently is then we might not be able to justify additional cost - but this is theoretical. I would recommend UserTesting and would ideally renew our contract.

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

User Testing is very easy to use. You first select the profile of your participants. This is as simple as checking on checkboxes and creating some questions to target the right market and user. You may also just send the tests to your own customers with a simple link. After selecting your audience, you just need to drag and drop the tasks and set them up. You're always guided throughout the process and if you're missing something, the user testing platform will let you know. Really simple stuff.

Incentivized

Never encountered any problems

Incentivized

Perfectly fine. Never had any problems.

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

Taking a long time

When we had issues or questions, it often took a long time to receive a response from the support team. This delayed our testing and caused frustration for our team.

Not helpful in our specific questions

When we did receive a response, it often did not fully address our specific questions or issues. This made it difficult to resolve problems or move forward with our testing.

Incentivized

From a technical perspective, the implementation was extremely smooth. Most of the change management / implementation hurdles were clearing use of the tool through our various security, legal, and information privacy teams. Once these concerns were addressed (UserTesting.com was very helpful in providing all the needed documentation), the implementation process was very simple and we were able to get going right away.

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

UserTesting allows for a quicker recruiting process for our studies. Additionally, UserTesting has more unmoderated research features and capabilities. I think that their payment model is also easier than UserInterviews. We typically user UserTesting for reaching our hard to reach segments and recruiting prospective users not already within our product user population.

Incentivized

The package we have limits the number of people who can set up tests. This prevents us from scaling the use of the platform.

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

• Cost savings of over $100K as we dont involve our research vendors as much as we used to do in the past
• Better tested experience get out in the market quickly even when we don't have enough time available with our researchers; our designers who are well-trained on usertesting.com can test out quickly

Incentivized