Hotjar vs VWO | TrustRadius

What users are saying about

Score 8.6 out of 10

Based on 302 reviews and ratings

Score 8.3 out of 10

Based on 186 reviews and ratings

Feature Set Ratings

Testing and Experimentation

Hotjar

Feature Set Not Supported

N/A

7.6

VWO

76%

VWO ranks higher in 11/11 features

a/b experiment testing

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

82%

1 Rating

Split URL testing

N/A

0 Ratings

9.1

91%

1 Rating

Multivariate testing

N/A

0 Ratings

8.8

88%

8 Ratings

Multi-page/funnel testing

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

2 Ratings

Cross-browser testing

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

82%

1 Rating

Test significance

N/A

0 Ratings

7.3

73%

1 Rating

Visual / WYSIWYG editor

N/A

0 Ratings

7.3

73%

1 Rating

Advanced code editor

N/A

0 Ratings

9.1

91%

1 Rating

Visitor recordings

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

1 Rating

Preview mode

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

1 Rating

Test duration calculator

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

1 Rating

Audience Segmentation & Targeting

Hotjar

Feature Set Not Supported

N/A

8.2

VWO

82%

VWO ranks higher in 4/4 features

Standard visitor segmentation

N/A

0 Ratings

9.1

91%

1 Rating

Behavioral visitor segmentation

N/A

0 Ratings

7.3

73%

1 Rating

Traffic allocation control

N/A

0 Ratings

9.1

91%

1 Rating

Website personalization

N/A

0 Ratings

7.3

73%

1 Rating

Results and Analysis

Hotjar

Feature Set Not Supported

N/A

7.0

VWO

70%

VWO ranks higher in 8/8 features

Heatmap tool

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

1 Rating

Click analytics

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

1 Rating

Scroll maps

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

64%

1 Rating

Conversion tracking

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

82%

1 Rating

Goal tracking

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

82%

1 Rating

Test reporting

N/A

0 Ratings

7.3

73%

1 Rating

Results segmentation

N/A

0 Ratings

5.5

55%

1 Rating

Experiments results dashboard

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

82%

1 Rating

Attribute Ratings

Hotjar is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
VWO is rated higher in 1 area: Likelihood to Renew

Hotjar

88%

104 Ratings

8.5

VWO

85%

105 Ratings

Hotjar

51%

2 Ratings

8.7

VWO

87%

20 Ratings

Hotjar

96%

6 Ratings

8.2

VWO

82%

2 Ratings

Hotjar

N/A

0 Ratings

9.1

VWO

91%

6 Ratings

Hotjar

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

VWO

82%

2 Ratings

Hotjar

96%

4 Ratings

9.1

VWO

91%

8 Ratings

Hotjar

N/A

0 Ratings

6.4

VWO

64%

1 Rating

Hotjar

N/A

0 Ratings

9.1

VWO

91%

6 Ratings

Hotjar

N/A

0 Ratings

8.2

VWO

82%

1 Rating

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.

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Sarah O'Donnell

UX & CRO Executive

Epiphany SearchMarketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees

View all 104 answers on this topic

VWO has a strong support team willing to help provide answers to questions during the setup process. During setup, we had some questions regarding implementation across a significant number of sites and they were able to ease dev team concerns and provide detailed best practices to streamline integration.
Some of the initial results of a few of the initial tests raised some questions internally. We setup a call and were able to quickly address the questions and find some opportunities to leverage moving forward.
I discovered a bug within the UI that lead to some questions internally. I was able to report it and the problem was fixed rather quickly and their team followed up with a thank you for reporting it and to report the issue was now resolved.

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Kevin McLallen

Real Estate, 51-200 employees

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Cons

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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Zach Ettelman

Director, Digital Innovation

Kin + CartaMarketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees

View all 104 answers on this topic

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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Joseph Collins

Account Supervisor

Digital CurrentMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

View all 105 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

Starting Price

$0 2k pageviews/per day

Hotjar Editions & Modules

Edition

Basic	$0¹
Plus	39.00²
Business	$99³

2k pageviews/per day
10k pageviews per day/per month
20k pageviews per day/per month

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

Starting Price

$49 per month

VWO Editions & Modules

Edition

TESTING	Get a Demo¹
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION	Get a Demo²
ENTERPRISE	Get a Demo³
Subscription	$99.00⁴

The classic VWO A/B testing solution
The all-in-one platform for all your optimization needs
Customized solution with advanced AB testing and conversion optimization capabilities
per month

Additional Pricing Details

—

Likelihood to Renew

Hotjar 5.1

Based on 2 answers

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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Patrick Eng

Marketing Technologist

Direct Development, Inc.Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

VWO 8.7

Based on 20 answers

It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers

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Tom Kerwin

Head of User Experience

streetlife.comInternet, 11-50 employees

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Usability

Hotjar 9.6

Based on 6 answers

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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Halima Satheya

Digital Optimisation Lead

Pets at HomeRetail, 10,001+ employees

View all 6 answers on this topic

VWO 8.2

Based on 2 answers

I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

5001-10,000 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

Reliability and Availability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

VWO 9.1

Based on 6 answers

I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Facilities Services Company, 51-200 employees

View all 6 answers on this topic

Performance

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

VWO 8.2

Based on 2 answers

VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Facilities Services Company, 51-200 employees

View all 2 answers on this topic

Support Rating

Hotjar 9.6

Based on 4 answers

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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Zach Ettelman

Director, Digital Innovation

Kin + CartaMarketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees

View all 4 answers on this topic

VWO 9.1

Based on 8 answers

While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

5001-10,000 employees

View all 8 answers on this topic

Online Training

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

VWO 6.4

Based on 1 answer

Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Facilities Services Company, 51-200 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

VWO 9.1

Based on 6 answers

Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.

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Verified User

Professional in Marketing

Events Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

View all 6 answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

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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Verified User

Employee in Other

Computer Software Company, 201-500 employees

View all 104 answers on this topic

I used Google Optimize when it had just launched. It was therefore not yet a competitor to VWO. I haven't used it in roughly half a year time, so a lot has probably changed.I still use Hotjar for certain features that VWO offers, but which I think function better in Hotjar. I for instance prefer the Hotjar heatmaps, because I can elect to ignore certain elements on the webpage, such as a cookie consent pop up. A simple difference which makes me like Hotjar recordings more is that I can view a recording and click next, rather than going back to the overview and selecting the next recording.

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Michel Zurkirchen

Content manager

Fontem Ventures B.V.Tobacco, 201-500 employees

View all 105 answers on this topic

Scalability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

VWO 8.2

Based on 1 answer

The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Facilities Services Company, 51-200 employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

Return on Investment

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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Santiago Valdés

Cofounder / Marketing, Growth, Technology, Experience

VestuáRetail, 11-50 employees

View all 104 answers on this topic

The ability to offer a CRO service is greatly enhanced by VWO, as it allows us to run tests for clients
The editor means to some extent we don't need much developer resource to run the tests, lowering costs of doing so

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Verified User

Analyst in Other

Marketing and Advertising Company, 51-200 employees

View all 105 answers on this topic

Screenshots

—

See Both VWO Screenshots

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

a/b experiment testing

Split URL testing

Multivariate testing

Multi-page/funnel testing

Cross-browser testing

Test significance

Visual / WYSIWYG editor

Advanced code editor

Visitor recordings

Preview mode

Test duration calculator

Hotjar

VWO

Standard visitor segmentation

Behavioral visitor segmentation

Traffic allocation control

Website personalization

Hotjar

VWO

Heatmap tool

Click analytics

Scroll maps

Conversion tracking

Goal tracking

Test reporting

Results segmentation

Experiments results dashboard

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Hotjar

VWO

Likelihood to Recommend

Hotjar

VWO

Pros

Hotjar

VWO

Cons

Hotjar

VWO

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Starting Price

Hotjar Editions & Modules

Edition

Additional Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Starting Price

VWO Editions & Modules

Edition

Additional Pricing Details

Likelihood to Renew

Hotjar

VWO