Hotjar vs VWO

• User session video capture - HotJar allows us to conduct usability testing as if we were sitting behind a user, interacting with our web software. Although we don't get audio, we can see exactly how a user interacts and moves around our software. We can see clicks, mouse movements, time spent during any given activity, and more. And best of all, the video timeline gives us timestamps/markers where major interactions happened, allowing us to find those interactions quickly.
• Hot spot heat maps - Just like any good analytics tool, HotJar provides great colored heat maps of how frequently users clicked/interacted on different parts of our web page. This gives us a quick, at-a-glance idea of what our users are focusing on.
• Dynamic user surveys - Sometimes pure interaction data is not enough to get the info we need. Luckily, HotJar gives us the ability to create dynamically-driven surveys on our web app. These surveys can be change without needing to re-deploy our entire application - they can be updated through the HotJar tool.

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• When designing A/B variations I can choose to either use the visual editor or to make the changes using code. I particularly like using jQuery.
• VWO offers the ability to keep long term track of the performance of your goals.
• I can easily identify recordings of users that dropped out of a funnel and watch those.
• There is live chat to get support, with great response times and which is very helpful.
• You are forced to create observations and hypotheses when creating a test, which is a great way to make sure that you are actually testing something worthwhile.
• You can group tests together so that you can rule out interaction effects between tests that you are running at the same time.

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• 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.

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• The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).

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• User Testing Alternative - Instead of hiring UX testers, we can leverage our actual customers to determine how they use our website. This has helped frame website redesign discussions on several occasions.
• Landing Page Design - We've designed our landing pages based on user feedback from heatmaps we've gathered from Hotjar. Understanding where to place CTAs and other pieces based on user interaction has helped us streamline our landing page design.
• Device Usage - Part of the data provided by Hotjar includes which device a user is visiting from. This helps us understand how mobile users work differently than desktop users.

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• We've been able to roll out new design patterns with confidence that short term revenue is not negatively effected.
• We've had more wins than losses, as the company is just ramping up a testing strategy. We know percentage of wins will go down as we optimize, but VWO has been vital on making calculated steps along the way.

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