Hotjar vs. VWO vs. Whatfix

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 works better for either small or big companies because small companies can start with the free plan which is very decent and has everything they need. Also for big companies who get the best paid plans they get a lot of premium functionalities, the insight module, outstanding reports. But for medium size companies who can only afford the basic paid plan, it may not be the best tool as it is very limited. For example, they cannot analize a/b tests for new and ruturning visitors, neither based on the users device category.

Incentivized

Currently, we are only using Whatfix with Salesforce but are in the process of implementing on other systems. It is an excellent tool to organize and provide in-app access to training materials already created. It excels at providing guidance about tasks users don't complete often and, therefore, forget what they were trained about the process. The only sort of system it might not work well is one that provides its own robust in-app assistance. More than one type of tip icon being displayed, for instance, could be confusing.

• 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

• VWO is pretty easy to implement on websites and doesn't require a heavy technology lift
• The VWO interface is pretty intuitive and let's non-technical users make variants for testing
• The VWO reporting dashboard is excellent for determining statistical significance and understanding whether differences in conversion rates are meaningful or not

Incentivized

• Whatfix is a vendor that listens to their client, understands their business challenges, and works with them to achieve their goals.
• Feature enhancements are released every quarter, often with significant functionality improvements.
• The support and engineering teams are outstanding - responsive, helpful and nothing is ever too much trouble. Literally, second-to-none!

• 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 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).

Incentivized

• The possibility to select content/widgets at the time for "push to production" (some we would like to p2p for one single content, that is not possible at the moment).
• I wish the filters in the dashboard would stay when you choose a content, currently you have to filter again and again.
• In the analytics area, I would like the system to remember this for a certain time window after selecting the start date.

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

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

[We feel like] even though Whatfix has its flaws, we are impressed by the speed of development [and] their openness about their future improvements, [but] most important their proactive customer service and customer success team. Whatfix acts more like a partner than a supplier of a 3rd party tool, and we welcome that experience.

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

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.

While they've made a lot of improvements in the last year, there are still challenges with walkthroughs and how beacons can be created. They are aware of these limitations and are actively soliciting customer feedback to help them remedy these shortcomings.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Sometimes there is a delay to showcase all whatfix elements

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

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.

Whatfix is THE best vendor I've ever worked with when it comes to supporting their customers. The support team is friendly, helpful and always willing to listen to your suggestions and ideas. This also applies to the Engineering team who I've spent several hours on calls with debugging a few of the more challenging scenarios we have in place. Nothing is ever too much trouble for Whatfix and they are truly best-in-class when it comes to their support model.

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.

Incentivized

While helpful, the feedback from our employee was, that [they felt] the training was very high-level - sometimes confusing. It would be great to have some kind of sandbox environment for new users to train certain scenarios.

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.

Incentivized

Although Whatfix make the process relatively straightforward (they will provide Group Policy Scripts to install a Google Chrome extension specific to your organisation) its important to ensure your network deployment teams (if you have more than one) understand their role and what they need to do to test deployment once they undertaken the work.

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

There are significant differences in each platform when it comes to Optimizely and vwo. From a functionality and performance perspective they each have their pros and cons. It is important to go through the feature sets of each and ensure the solution you select will work specifically with your business objectives and conversion rate optimization goals

Incentivized

There is no comparison - Whatfix is the clear winner with us from the very beginning. As Whatfix continues to grow and innovate their product, engage with it's customers on a level beyond any I have every seen. They work as Partners with us, their teams from bottom to top are incredible - Customer Service, Collaboration Teams, Innovation, Sales, Success Mangers and everyone I missed are incredible. One team in particular I want to call out for there outstanding service, care and innovation to help us launch one of our systems is the Professional Services Team. Ganish, Joel, and everyone else who has been on our calls and worked behind the scenes to hit our incredible tight deadline in August - KUDOs for a job well done, You ROCK, THANK YOU words cannot describe how great you guys have been with us on this project, but on all of them. Whatfix's team definitely understands, the customer is first, they align with our values and we will continue to grow with them

Incentivized

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.

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

• 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

Incentivized

• Reduced Training Costs: By cutting traditional training time by 40%, Whatfix has saved significant resources while increasing learning efficiency.
• Improved User Productivity: Faster onboarding and fewer errors have led to a 25% improvement in user performance metrics, directly contributing to operational efficiency.
• Decreased Support Requests: Self-service guidance has reduced support tickets by 30%, freeing up teams to focus on strategic initiatives and cutting support costs.