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
Matomo Analytics
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Piwik is an open source analytics platform that enables users to measure web and mobile apps as well as intranet portals. It protects the privacy of users through advanced privacy features and its approach to data ownership. Piwik offers On-premises and Cloud deployment options.
Available in over 50 languages, it is fully customisable and vendor-independent. Piwik offers over 70 integrations with Content Management Systems, Ecommerce solutions, Forums as well as other mobile and web platforms.…
$0
Pricing
Hotjar
Matomo Analytics
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
Free download (open source)
$0
Free 30 day trial
$0
limited to 30 days
Essential
$9
number of pageviews (monthly traffic)
Business
$29
number of pageviews (monthly traffic)
Enterprise
$199
your requirements and monthly traffic
Content Optimization Bundle
$579
per installation
Growth Bundle
$1,149
per installation
Premium Bundle
$1,499
per installation
Email Support Subscription
$2,090
per installation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hotjar
Matomo Analytics
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing.
On-premise Edition is free to download and install on one's own servers.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Hotjar
Matomo Analytics
Considered Both Products
Hotjar
Verified User
Director
Chose Hotjar
We evaluated Hotjar and Matomo. Matomo was more of an overhaul from an analytics perspective but offered things like heat maps and visitor recordings which is why we considered it. We also use it for another client. But for what we need, it's nice to start up Hotjar and shut it …
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.
Matomo is a full-fledged website tracking and analytics tool. It offers everything and then a bit more that GA has to offer. I cannot conceive of any situation where this programme would be "less appropriate". You can use it for each and every website and do well with it. The data it provides includes everything you could wish for (country, IP, new user or not, actions taken, goals achieved etc.)
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.
One of Piwik's strengths is the provision of customizable widgets for different bits of analytics data. The ability to add and remove them, change dates and more makes this a flexible way to visualize data.
The visitor log section is also rich, providing date, keywords, actions and more in a single table, which makes it easy to identify your most effective content.
And the visitor actions table includes both bounce rate and time on site, so you can quickly tell which pages have the most engagement.
Data display is a strength for Piwik, as you have access to overview charts while simultaneously being able to drill deeper.
From a user security standpoint it would be useful to provide users the ability to have two-factor authentication. While stats data is not necessarily sensitive in aggregate, some users may feel that certain portions need to be more secure.
It would be nice if there was a tighter integration with the Google search/referrer API so that "keyword not defined" would be replaced more often with the actual keyword that is being used to send a visitor to a site.
An easier branding method, maybe in the form of an API function set, that pulled branding URLs from a set of database fields would be great as well.
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.
At this point, there is not a single conceivable reason as to why we would not renew and continue to use Piwik Analytics. Especially since it is a free program and open source. The product will only get better over time as more people look into it and donate to cause so that development can continue.
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.
Piwik succeeds in presenting me (and my associates and my clients...) large amounts of data in a user friendly way. The interface and functionality can easily be customized. While some enhancements do need technical background (API calls by programming language from the webserver or javascript), others are easy to use (goal / event tracking)
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.
The best thing about the Matomo support is that they have a forum which basically you can find the answer to almost all of your questions and most of the time you don't need to contact them regarding your questions and problems but if you need help they will answer in a reasonable time slots.
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.
We have used Google Analytics before for one of our online tools and we switched to Matomo for the other web applications we have. We did that because Matomo is free but mostly since we wanted us to own the data on these sensitive apps and not share it with third parties. Since we have the data locally, we can now apply machine learning techniques to improve the systems even more.
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.
By using Piwik, we can better identify keywords used to search for the website and by targeting those keywords on search engine advertising (Google, Bing, Yahoo), it helps with conversion and also saves us money by cutting down guess work.
By using Piwik graphs, it helps to save our employees time in creating pie charts and bar charts to present to upper management.
Since Piwik is free to use, there is no reason not to implement it. Most likely, with your website, you will already have access to SQL and hosting package. There is minimal cost to implementing Piwik.
