Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Hotjar

Hotjar

Overview

What is Hotjar?

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Hotjar has proven to be extremely valuable in a variety of use cases. Users have found success in utilizing Hotjar to solicit feedback …
Continue reading

10/10 recommend Hotjar

10 out of 10
July 08, 2022
Incentivized
We currently use Hotjar to gather survey information on our acne line for Aloette.com. We are trying to understand who has and hasn't used …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Hotjar Observe - Plus

$39

Cloud
per month 100 daily sessions

Hotjar Ask - Plus

$59

Cloud
per month 250 monthly responses

Hotjar Ask - Business

$79

Cloud
per month Starting from 500 monthly responses

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.hotjar.com/compare-our-plans

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Product Details

Hotjar Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Mixpanel, Crazy Egg, and Lucky Orange are common alternatives for Hotjar.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.7.

The most common users of Hotjar are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(334)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Hotjar has proven to be extremely valuable in a variety of use cases. Users have found success in utilizing Hotjar to solicit feedback from clients through polls and surveys, allowing them to gain a comprehensive understanding of how design changes affect content consumption. Additionally, marketing services teams have relied on Hotjar's analytics and user behavior insights to review site performance for clients and provide high-level audits during the sales process. The continual user feedback collected by Hotjar has brought immense value to product design and engineering teams, empowering them to make data-driven decisions that improve the overall user experience. Similarly, agencies have leveraged Hotjar's heatmaps and session recordings to track and analyze user behavior on client websites, uncovering valuable insights for optimization initiatives. Growth specialists have also found great value in using Hotjar to analyze user behavior during critical engagements like browsing, lead generation, and checkout. This provides them with invaluable insights into landing page effectiveness and helps identify any technical glitches that may be impacting conversion rates. Furthermore, digital analytics and optimization departments have utilized Hotjar to glean insights for optimization or debugging purposes, enabling them to understand how people react to design or functionality changes in order to drive improvements. Marketing teams have found detailed reports generated by Hotjar particularly useful in identifying user struggles and interactions with different elements on their websites. CRO teams have also benefited from using Hotjar as a way to educate clients about areas of opportunity on their websites. Overall, Hotjar has become an essential tool for tracking visitor behavior, understanding user patterns, identifying areas of improvement, and optimizing website usability and user journeys. Whether it's through heatmaps, scroll maps, video playback, session recordings, or surveys, Hotjar provides users with the data they need to make informed decisions based on real user opinions and behaviors.

Valuable customer insights: Users have found Hotjar to be a valuable tool for gaining quick customer insights. Multiple reviewers mentioned that it provides important data for improving their own software, and some users felt that the product offers a practical way to reveal the online behavior and voice of users.

Effective heat mapping: Hotjar's heat mapping feature was praised by multiple reviewers for its accuracy in representing website traffic and providing accessible data. Some users particularly highlighted its ability to quantify the success of page copy rewrites and identify areas where visitors engage with the content. The visual representations provided by Hotjar's heatmaps were also seen as helpful in understanding user interactions and optimizing website layout.

Useful session recordings: Reviewers have found Hotjar's user session recording feature to be highly useful. Some users described it as a real-life view of users navigating through the website funnel, allowing them to retrace the user journey and identify potential stumbling blocks. The recording features provided by Hotjar were also mentioned as valuable in understanding user behavior, addressing usability issues, and enhancing the overall user experience.

Confusing and Clunky User Interface: Multiple users have expressed frustration with the user interface of Hotjar, describing it as confusing and clunky. They have mentioned that it requires too many clicks to navigate, making it time-consuming and inconvenient to use.

Difficulties in Troubleshooting and Lack of Customer Support: Some users have mentioned difficulties in troubleshooting issues with Hotjar, citing the lack of a direct line for customer support. This absence of immediate assistance can be frustrating for users who encounter problems.

Limited Plan Tiers and Restrictions: Users have found the limited plan tiers of Hotjar to be restrictive, particularly in terms of the number of recordings available. This limitation hinders users who need to gather sufficient data for analysis.

Users of Hotjar have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the product. The three most common recommendations are:

  1. Start with the free version: Many users recommend starting with the free version of Hotjar to track visitor activity on website pages. This allows businesses, especially small businesses or new startups, to gather valuable data on user actions and understand customer behavior and interaction on their website.

  2. Use it as part of a larger data strategy: Hotjar is often recommended as a tool that provides great insights and should be used in conjunction with other software tracking tools for result comparison. Users suggest integrating Hotjar into a larger data strategy and utilizing its features to track user actions and improve marketing plans.

  3. Try before you buy: Several users suggest using the trial version of Hotjar to understand its value and determine if it meets their business and marketing needs. They advise spending more time in Hotjar to improve understanding of users and overall marketing strategy before considering the paid plans.

Overall, users find Hotjar to be an easy-to-use and fully functional tool for understanding website visitors and their behavior. While some caution is advised in drawing unbiased conclusions from the data if there aren't many visits, Hotjar is considered a valuable tool for gathering website analytics and customer feedback.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 36)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Chris Gomez, SPHR | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Right now we use Hotjar for a handful of functions. If we need quick insights about a new feature we're building, we'll use the survey option to share our questions with our customers right from within the platform. We also use Hotjar's recordings to better understand what our users are doing and how they are interacting with our product. We've made significant discoveries from just doing that. We also use heatmaps as well, although probably not as effective as we should.
  • Heatmaps provide a really nice overview so you know where to dig deeper into your product.
  • Recording user sessions have been the most useful feature for us.
  • Surveys are a nice and easy way to gain insights from customers.
  • Although surveys are great for quick insights, they look and feel very much like a 3rd party application which I don't like. I wish there was a way to give it a similar look and feel as the rest of our platform to make it "blend" in a bit more.
  • This may just be us, but it's hard to do recordings from our homepage because our users go there to log in. The recordings pick up every interaction, including our own customers which is not helpful in that context. I'm sure there is a way to segment that but we've not been able to do it.
For quick insights, surveys and heat maps are great. There is so much you can learn from using those 2 things. But it will probably lead to more questions than answers. That is where recordings can be incredibly helpful as long as you have the time to go through them and watch. I see Hotjar as the beginning of research and helping us to narrow our focus and solve the biggest problems. In that context, Hotjar excels.
Leandro Chaves | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar to understand users' behavior within a hundred sites and provide them a better experience and also to identify points to improve. Also, there are some of our sites where we ask users to share their opinion so then we can develop better solutions.
  • Creating heat maps
  • Creating click maps
  • Allowing users to share their opinions
  • Sometimes the recordings get stuck and we can't see the full journey of an user
  • The user feed back feature does not really has a good look'n feel
Marketing/UI/UX teams can use it to understand where the key elements of a site should be placed Development teams can use it to develop better websites by understanding what/when/where something is wrong
Namandeep Bhatia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Hotjar since the very initial days to track users' behavior on our website and app. With every new feature release, we get to know about users' drop points and usability metrics. It really helped us in minimizing drops by improvising designs.
  • It really creates very good heatmap of user's clicks.
  • Very detailed analytics available for all CTAs available on your website/app.
  • It even records session of user's interactions.
  • Analyzing huge data accumulated by Hotjar can be improvised by better representation.
  • Learning documents needs to be improvised (help documents in video format are always better).
  • For taking surveys, their competitors have better features.
If you are in the early stage of your product evolution then this is a very good tool. If used properly it can explain to you how users are using your product and you can accordingly adjust UX. Maybe once the product is evolved and accepted by the audience then it might be less required.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar for analyzing both landing pages we need to test for different campaigns, and also for the rest of the website for ongoing measurements. Also, we use the recordings tool to analyze individual behaviors to see if there are any particular roadblocks. And when we need to conduct a quantitative survey we also use the survey tool.
  • Very easy heat maps setup
  • Great for running quantitative surveys
  • Combined with individual recording of website visits
  • Pricing model is a bit of a hassle
  • Would like to see more integrations to have a really complex look at the data
  • There used to be more free features as for some small projects you did not need the paid plan in the past...
I love the easy setup via a tag manager. Even some not really tech-oriented people in my company had almost no problem setting it up. Which is a great use for SMB clients/companies that just need some basic measurements to see where they are at. You can have it easily set up on your website and start collecting data within an hour.
July 06, 2022

Hotjar review

Jasper van der Zwaan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar for heat-mapping new landing pages and observing current pages to identify opportunities for improvement on our webpages and campaign landing pages. We also use the feedback tool from time to time to gauge usability of our client portals and landing pages with lead forms.
  • Heat mapping
  • Page behavioural recordings
  • Feedback widgets
  • Larger amount of recordings
  • Display user recordings in simulated viewports i.e. iPad, Galaxy, iPhone, etc.
  • Different heatmap views
Hotjar is a very useful tool to analyze new and current web pages through heat mapping. The recording feature provides even more in-depth insights on user behavior on webpages and lead forms. The feedback widget tool is also very helpful for quick deployment of such widgets on any page without utilizing internal development resources.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We were looking for a tool to have a subjective analysis of our website like heat maps, session recordings etc. These are critical for us as product team to see how the website is being used and how can we bring about changes to increase engagement and conversions. Business problems like lower conversions, higher acquisition costs due to high bounce rate etc were burning issues which were able to pinpoint to certain problem areas using Hotjar and thus being incremental improvements.
  • Session recordings
  • Heatmaps
  • User feedbacks
  • Sometime heatmaps are a little off the actual design
  • UX could be a little better for session replays
  • Would love to see frustration and rage clicks
Hotjar is best suited for scenarios when you want to have a high level look of a page performance by checking the heat maps. It helps in identifying the order of the widgets on the page and what is keeping the users engaged. Since it is relative it saves a lot of time which otherwise have to be done by putting and analysing a lot of click events separately.

Hotjar might not be a best tool to create business funnels and see the business metrics as it more focused on the subjective analysis.
Markus Kapferer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar helps us to understand users' needs. We use mainly surveys, recordings, and heatmaps. The insights we get from there are one of our basic pillars in our UX/UI optimization process. It works for us and was very easy to implement. Our partner agencies and our in-house team members use Hotjar regularly.
  • session recordings
  • heatmaps
  • surveys
  • more options for surveys
  • more standard questions and answers in more languages
We do not use the whole functionality yet, but the areas that are most used and helpful for us are: * session recordings: this functionality helps us to identify problems on our website. We discover issues that we didn't expect. So we can see if users understand messaging and functionality in our online store. * surveys: this feature helps us to get insights directly from our customers. We tend to ask what they miss or how they like a new product. * heat maps are helpful if it's about identifying the most recognized areas on a website. So we identify areas where we should invest more time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I specifically use the heat maps and other data to help me understand how my users are interacting with my website and it helps me understand where I can make changes, for example on my sales page or on one of my blogs. Once I understand how they use it then I make the change and record it again.
  • Heat maps
  • Recordings
  • Feedback
  • Session recordings could have better filtering options
  • Lack of integration with certain parts of my software
So I have a sales page where I’m selling a low ticket option at the top of my funnel. I use Hotjar to record people who land on my sales page and also heat maps. This allows me to understand how my users interact with my sales page, where they scroll, whether they go to the checkout, where they leave, and more.
Willy Bilaro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is primarily used by the marketing team, though there are instances where this can be shared with the technology team when investigating how a user experiences a problem or issue on the website. The recordings help solve issues like front-end issues, or UX by indicating interactions with a form field, for example. It provides you with a detailed report on where a visitor is struggling to move forward by looking at how they interact with the different elements on the site. You could really go very detailed in the investigation.
  • User interaction with the website, specially those with multi-step forms.
  • Collecting realtime feedback while a user is using your website.
  • Filtering through thousands of interactions is now easier and faster, you can save those filters for repeated use.
  • Form Tracking: still needs improvement to support angular forms.
  • Funnel support on single page application.
  • 360 degree reports: Maybe an integrated report of heat-map, funnel and form tracking.
Easy to implement, even for non-techy users. A ready out of the box type of solution where implementation is done via GTM. Security is one of its focuses as well. By default, any PII is automatically masked. The user doesn't have to worry about any changes that need to be done on their websites. For any type of website or scale, Hotjar is already suitable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar to improve the user experience on our website. We primarily use the confetti mapping tool, but the user action recordings and heat mapping are also useful. We have used Hotjar for over two years and it continues to deliver actionable insights on scroll rates, click-through rates, engagement rates, etc. The ability to watch user interactions and have the clicks highlighted is also tremendously insightful.
  • Map how website users interact with various pages on our site
  • Arrange navigation to be as intuitive as possible
  • See recordings of real users on our website
  • Gauge what content is meaningful and what is wasted
  • More robust A/B testing features would be nice
  • Better exportable reporting would be great - the jpg confetti mapping, for example is not very easy to use
Hotjar is great if you are trying to make minor tweaks to your website (ex. navigation order). It is not great if you want to rebuild your website from the ground up or if you don't know how to make use of the data. If you have hypotheses to test, Hotjar is a great tool to use to see whether or not your assumptions are accurate.
Carlos Ibarra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The use of Hotjar is vital to analyze landing pages and user experience. It also helps you understand what your customers are doing, which content engages them most often on these pages - for example: if one specific passage appears more than others do then that might mean there should be an extra emphasis placed upon it when writing new copy or messages in future pushes from our team! The heat map reveals where people spend their time interacting with the site so this information could very well help us identify certain areas worth focusing marketing efforts; All of these features helps us to generate more conversions for our clients.
  • Heatmaps in desktop layouts
  • User recordings
  • Heatmaps in mobile layouts
  • Billing for Agencies
  • Sample size for user heatmaps
  • Sample size for recordings
I recommend Hotjar as a ten rating because it's very easy to use, and has an intuitive user interface. The heatmaps are also pretty self-explanatory so you can easily see what actions your audience is performing on each page of the site or app that leaves them with no question about how people interact within their experience from start (or end) until completion--whether they're clicking around aimlessly looking at products while waiting in line somewhere. I recommend Hotjar as a 10 rating because it is very easy to use, has plugins for Google Tag Manager and WordPress which makes implementing tracking code simple. Lastly, I like that I can give access alike anyone else - even those not yet an employee or client of mine.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is a powerful tool. You can see how the users are responding to your webpage. The heat map is a great feature to see how the users navigate, where they click, scroll and drop off. This data is used for further testing and optimizing.
  • Heat Map
  • Recordings
  • Instant feedback
  • Test many pages once
  • Save the recordings on the tool until you delete
Hotjar is well suited for testing the landing/ web pages and, to make sure your users are converting and taking desired actions. This data helps to make changes to the page and template to improve results.
September 28, 2021

Easy to use, valuable tool

Becky Jewell Laughton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for heat mapping our web app. It helps us know where customers are navigating and clicking on various areas of our web app (we have a mobile app in addition to the web app)
  • Heatmapping
  • Layout/navigation
  • Behavior recordings
  • Heatmapping over time, or time graphs
It's useful for installing on a website, web app, or an eCommerce site to know where customers or users are navigating to, what they are clicking, and if new products or new releases are performing as anticipated or not as anticipated. Very easy to use. I think it would be appropriate for any web app, and maybe less appropriate for out-of-the-box eCommerce sites where a team cannot affect UI very easily. It's good if you can move quickly on your own UI.
Aline Gonçalves Rodrigues | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Hotjar has been used to support the analysis of user experience on websites and landing pages. In this way, we can show customers, in a visual way, the difficulties and problems that we encounter on their websites.

It is currently being used almost exclusively by the CRO department.

Hotjar helps us with website interaction and engagement issues. Thus providing insights that can justify improvements.

  • Generation of scroll heatmaps
  • Recordings of user interactions
  • Generation of clicks heatmaps
  • Good image quality of downloads
  • AMP sites/pages
  • Interface of incoming feedback
  • React sites

Suitable -Measure the quality of user interactions. On content sites, it is very useful to know how far they are reading. It is also useful to know which elements users are clicking on, without the need to tag them.

Less suitable - For less static sites that contain lots of interactions like carousels, menu and search.

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar allows us to see heat maps of where actual users on the site click, scroll, and move the cursor. Hotjar also gives us recordings, so we can watch users in their journey through the site. We also use Hotjar to gather survey/poll responses on various sections of the site from time to time.
  • Polls on the site
  • User Journey Recordings
  • Heat maps
  • Isolating elements clicked on for faster/deeper analysis
  • Taking a full group sample, rather than just a portion of the audience selected (for more accurate and extensive data)
I would suggest, or have suggested, using Hotjar when someone wants to understand what users click on on a certain page, what their eye is drawn to, what their detailed journey is from that point forward, or when someone wants to gather basic (poll) data.
Thomas Pittman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for heat map tracking for both clicks and scrolling. This information is used in identifying user experience problems and improvements. We also use the recorded sessions to track and identify usability issues with the site and how to improve the website. We then feed all this information into design iterations.
  • Heat map tracking for website clicks.
  • Heat map tracking for scrolling.
  • Recorded life user sessions for UX improvements.
  • Visitor analytics and tracking segmentation.
  • Easier filtering on recorded sessions.
  • Reporting interface with custom reports.
Perfect for any company that constantly strives to improve the usability of their website and to run constant AB testing of new page designs.
Duane Thompson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is the all-in-one tool that we have connected to our website to acquire customer feedback and analyze their behavior through surveys, heatmaps and session recordings. A/B testing has been very helpful in identifying pages that are underperforming, identifying key user segments to develop optimized marketing strategies. We get to see what visitors are doing instead of guessing.
  • Recording visitor sessions and seeing where they are clicking
  • Identifying areas/steps where customers are dropping off
  • Collection of feedback from specific site visitors to hear out their thoughts
  • If there is a way we can download session recordings, that can be really helpful
Hotjar has robust features that are useful in collecting customer feedback and way to hear the customer thoughts directly and instantly. Using Hotjar uncovers vital information that is used to improve user experience by examining what users are interested about and seeing what actually they are seeing on our site.
Carl Pieri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is being used to see where on the pages we publish that visitors are engaging with our content. We also use Hotjar to put surveys on pages and to gain feedback about our content, pages, offerings, etc. Hotjar allows us to better see where people are confused on a page or what information they find useful.
  • Heat tracking
  • Surveys
  • Activity tracking
  • The interface is a bit clunky and requires too many button clicks
  • The "simple URL" matching was a little confusing at first; I'd add an inline descriptor
  • It's sometimes hard to tell if Hotjar is measuring all traffic to a given page
If you have websites with lots of content on pages but are really unsure what content the users find valuable, this product will be very helpful for you. It allows you to see what content people click and hover over, which allows you to see if certain content is being leveraged/read or if it is being completely ignored by visitors.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar for driving web design, user experience and digital marketing decisions. Seeing how people interact with your web content is crucial in understanding how you can improve your strategy. We use both heat maps and visitor recordings to understand and identify road blocks in the user journey. It's an incredibly useful tool for digital strategies.
  • Heat Maps
  • Visitor Recordings
  • Data Segmentation
If you're looking for software that can provide good insights on your website experience or the way users are actually navigating your site, using features or engaging with content, Hotjar is a great piece of software to have in your arsenal. Page segmentation is useful for focusing on things like landing pages to improve conversions.
Ramón Carmona Medina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In Bussi one of main conversion tool is our landing page, we consider a conversion a download. Usually paid campaigns will deliver high conversion leads to several landing pages and from there we have to make the best effort to convert a lead into a Download. Here is where Hotjar becomes one of our more interesting tools since we can track exactly the behavior of potential leads from the moment they enter the page to the moment they complete a goal or they leave the session, all the information gathered for Hotjar will feedback our UX team and web designers so they can improve the conversion rate.
  • Track all the user journey from the moment ir arrives to the website until the moment they download or leave the page
  • Detect and understand what elements from the website are helping us or stopping us from converting users
  • To show real feedback to our UX/UI team in order to make important decisions about the web designs and implement clear call to actions
  • When you put embedded javas cripts or iframes like 3rd party forms it usually doesn't render the form in hotjar so it becomes complex to determine what works and what it doesn't work in this 3rd party forms.
  • More daily sessions for paid plans even though 500 daily sessions seems a lot you will get surprised when your site generates more and following plans have a bigger gap between price and sessions.
  • At the beginning it might be a little confusing to implement but nothing that devs can't handle.
If there is a tool for real time behavior monitoring that we can recommend is Hotjar and as said before if you have use of case where you need to constantly improve User Experience or you need to improve the conversion rate of your particular objectives then HotJar is the tool to go. On the other hand is you just need to know how many users enter the site and don't care that much about actions inside you site then a simple web analytics is more than enough
Zach Ettelman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As the director of a marketing services team, we leveraged Hotjar to review site analytics and user behavior for all of our clients that came to us for a website project. We would also use Hotjar in the sales process to provide a high-level audit to our prospective client. Hotjar is used for our own marketing websites, our client sites, and was also used to help in product-related projects.
  • Quick and easy installation via Google Tag Manager.
  • Intuitive, easy-to-use user interface makes adding tags extremely easy and quick.
  • Hotjar provides heat mapping and user session recording to see how users interact with your website.
  • 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.
Hotjar is well suite for organizations that want to get a good glimpse into user behavior on their websites. The tool is easily installed through Google Tag Manager, and then users simply select which pages or paths they want the tool to analyze. After a few days, users can start seeing patterns develop, helping them understand what areas of the user journey flow they need to test out and improve. Hotjar is primarily for web-based experiences, not for mobile applications and other non-web digital applications.
Veronika Baranovska | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is a new tool that we've recently started using to better understand our user journeys, both on our website and our product. More recently, we upgraded our accounts to get more data so that our findings have statistical significance when it comes to testing different types of page designs and implementing improvements. With Hotjar, we mostly use their heat mapping tools and screen recordings.
  • The heat mapping tools in Hotjar are outstanding. By knowing how far our website visitors explore the pages, we have been able to quantify how successful a page copy rewrite has been by merely proving many more people now engaged with the rest of the page!
  • The ability to record videos of how our website users interact with key pages has helped us reduce friction and, ultimately, increase our conversion rates.
  • Feedback polls have been useful for our product/development team when releasing new features and collecting feedback about their experiences.
  • The funnels feature could be improved. I've found this to be largely inconsistent when comparing to data we get from the funnels we build in Google Analytics.
  • The feedback polls and incoming feedback surveys could look a little nicer. I'd then be more inclined to use them on our website to see if our visitors, as well as leads, are enjoying their experience.
  • It would be great if the heatmaps on blog home pages could tell me more about which new articles are more popular (every time we add a new blog, the order changes, so new articles replace old ones).
If you're at the stage where you'd like to pursue CRO (conversion rate optimization) and improve UX (user experience) for your website visitors, then Hotjar is one of the tools you should have in your toolkit! Here are a few ways we use Hotjar that has been useful:
  • Set up heatmaps on crucial conversion pages on your website (if you're in SaaS, that's your /pricing or /features page).
  • Create a space where you can record your findings (we use a project management tool to do this, but you can create a Google Doc if you wish).
  • With the heat maps, track the data about the fold, how far people scroll, # of clicks, and others.
  • Come up with tests/experiments to run on a bi-weekly basis, and record them in the same space.
  • Then, compare your data from two weeks before with the current averages, make observations.
  • Rinse and repeat until you've exhausted test ideas! :)

P.S. I'd also recommend setting up the recordings on key pages - this feature is most useful for product teams, BUT, by seeing where people click (when there's no link) and how they move through the page, you can make quick adjustments to help your website visitors discover more useful content.
Cory Runk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar for almost all of our clients, including ourselves. This tool helps make strategic and intelligent recommendations for our website projects.
  • Provides in-depth information on what the website user is actually doing.
  • Provides context to data like Google Analytics. Ex. The home page has 100 clicks but low time on the page. Hotjar can show exactly what the users are doing on the homepage.
  • Price. It's extremely affordable for the power it has.
  • Navigating complex functionality on websites. Often, it doesn't know how to read certain elements that appear on the page.
  • Recovering deleted heat maps or recordings.
Hotjar is well-suited for anyone who manages a website. Period. If you want in-depth analytics on the user experience of your website, you're going to want Hotjar.
Sarah O'Donnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar within our agency on our client's websites. We mostly use if for heat mapping and session recordings. It is a good place to start if you are want to know what your users are doing on your website, and it is a good visual aid.
  • 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.
  • Hotjar doesn't always render correctly. For instance, on heatmaps, not all elements will show, as it takes a snapshot of the first user's screen, and if elements haven't loaded, it does not show for any of your heatmap data.
  • There is no way to exclude URLs when watching session recordings; for instance, if you specifically don't want to see users who are looking at careers, you have to skip through the videos manually.
  • Hotjar has the ability to track forms; what fields users are completing, how long it takes, where do users abandon the form etc. Although this is highly dependant on how the form is built on the site, so it doesn't work for all forms.
Hotjar is suitable for tracking data. If you know a certain page isn't being visited on a site, Hotjar may provide extra insight into how many users are clicking CTAs to that page for instance. So Hotjar is a good tool to know the 'why' if something is going wrong on your website.

Hotjar is less appropriate for use on its own; it should be used in conjunction with other data. This is because it can be unreliable. For instance, a heatmap may be unreliable if it hasn't rendered correctly.
Andrew Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is being used to do both quantitative and qualitative analysis of our marketing site. It helps us answer the question of "how are people using our site?" in ways we cannot assume. It's Recording and Heatmap features help us see how people are using the site, and surveys give us the ability to gather feedback quickly. We use the surveys on our support site for the team to evaluate the effectiveness of individual articles.
  • Recordings are easy to watch and gather insights.
  • Heatmaps are easy to set up and have a very simple interface to browse through.
  • Setting up surveys is very intuitive.
  • The free plan is very generous if you just want to try it out.
  • Results can be a bit cumbersome to parse through, especially if you have a lot of survey feedback. It'd be nice to have additional ways to sort and filter feedback.
  • It's somewhat annoying to have to preemptively set up heat maps. It takes active participation while other tools allow you to autorun your allowance across the site to be able to bring up the data on demand. This is preferable.
  • The visual feedback tool doesn't seem like it'd get the right type of feedback. Maybe for a team without designers, it might, but having people give design feedback on your site doesn't usually have the best results.
Very well suited for small teams. It's very very affordable and provides a lot of quality tools that I've spent a lot more for on other platforms. These can give you invaluable insights if you take some time to go through the tools and see how you can use them. If you have a small UX budget, this plus Google Analytics can be a great combo.
Return to navigation