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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…

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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 …
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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 …
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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

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Pricing

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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
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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).
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Comparisons

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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 27)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is used with the purpose of collecting continual user feedback, which is important for any product to listen to the user's voice, especially to pain points. This capture of user sentiment over time, in recurring surveys or video recordings, is crucial for teammates who work in product, design, or engineering to make decisions on how to innovate their product for a better user experience.
  • Remove assumptions by providing in the moment, contextual insights.
  • Tracks user sentiment over time.
  • Ability to quickly and easily launch an intercept survey.
  • Link up hotjar recordings to a particular a/b experiment or event trigger for specific feedback.
  • Difficult to troubleshoot Hotjar issues since there is no line to call.
  • Limited plan tiers restrict the number of recordings available.
  • Multiple workspaces can be created for one website which can be redundant.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to understand how users behave within a wireframe/mockup. The service provides a Heatmap: it allows to see what captures users' attention. It allows observing movements, u-turns, and rage clicks. But most importantly it gives us back Feedback so that we can hear what users actually think about each of our pages.
  • Provide heatmaps
  • Provide recordings of the sessions
  • Provide feedback from users
  • More user friendly heatmaps
  • Longer lasting heatmaps
  • Incomplete tracking
Combining polls and heatmaps with a/b testing tools allows me to pick apart exactly why a specific optimization on a page is working and understand any consequences of a user experiencing a new change compared to a user who did not. We run many different campaigns and often like to experiment with A/B tests to ensure that we are doing everything we can to optimize our conversions. By using Hotjar, we are able to get insights that we simply cannot get elsewhere
Alex Richards | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar at our organization to better understand user behavior on our website and we've also used it within our application too. It's great that we can see what the user see and what they are doing and where they are going so we can improve the usability/user journeys. If your looking to make your user's life easier/increase engagement then Hotjar is definitely a tool you should consider.
  • Heatmaps - see where your users mouse is pointing
  • Capturing feedback from the users
  • Being able to see what the user see's
  • Easy to implement
  • Customize the dashboard view - allow re-ordering of the widgets or hide widgets that aren't being used.
  • Sometimes when you navigate and you press the back button nothing happens and you need to use the nav on the page but then you have to make a few clicks to get back where you were.
  • Would be good to have integrations with ticketing platforms like JIRA, Github, and Bugherd in case you come across a bug you can easily raise a work ticket
If your looking to improve the user experience on your website/web app then Hotjar is definitely worth you considering. We have used this product on our website and web app for quite a while and it's great to be able to view where a user is on the page, where they're mouse is moving and when they're scrolling etc. It's helped us gain a better insight into user behavior that's allowed us to make improvements to our site and web app.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar to track user behaviour on our website in order to streamline the overall user journey on our site. Hotjar allows us to see what the user is doing and where they encounter any possible "roadblocks" in their interaction with our website. Based on the results, we can carry out optimisations to the content layout and call-to-action incentives where needed.
  • Heatmaps give us a visual representation of the user journey
  • Recordings allow us to re-trace the user journey, allowing us to see where any potential stumbling blocks occur
  • The live user feedback tool is a very cool option
  • The admin interface is clean and sleek
  • Direct integration with Google Analytics would be a cool option in order to correlate user behaviour to website traffic stats
  • An option to view the Get Started Guide again would be great
  • A mobile version of the dashboard would assist in viewing stats on the go
Hotjar is well suited to start analysing user behaviour if you need to optimise your website or blog to maximise conversions of your call-to-actions. This is particularly effective when you notice a change in user interaction with your website. You can analyse possible shortcomings and take the required actions accordingly. They have a free plan as well to get started which is a bonus.
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.
Mohamed Saied | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Hotjar as it gives us a lot of insights about user behavior on specific pages of our website via its awesome heatmaps. It's a super handy tool for optimizing your content page and landing pages. I always use it along with other a/b testing tools for CRO tasks.
  • Generating heatmaps to track users' behavior on your online platform.
  • The ability to share screen recordings.
  • Improve the UI and UX of our platform.
  • Glitchy screenshots that occurs frequently.
  • The inability to view the user's screen recording instantly. You need to wait for a 30-day window.
I use Hotjar in almost all our a/b experiments. It provides unparalleled insights about your user like where they like to click on your specific page if they like your CTAs or not, and what parts of your page they like more. What I like most about Hotjar is its easy setup process that takes only 5 minutes and the plethora of apps that it can integrate with. The performance needs to be more user-friendly and they adjust their pricing scheme as now there're many apps that provide almost the same functionality for free like the heatmaps options in the Bing webmasters tool. However, Hotjar is still the best overall in this area up to now.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 the products as well as offering a discount to anyone who participates in the survey and enters their email. We utilize these insights to inform our overall marketing decisions on our acne line.
  • Reporting
  • Survey Set Up
  • UX and UI
  • Expand product offering
  • Customize design
  • More survey template options
Hotjar has been incredibly well suited for surveys to gather customer data and insights. The user experience is very easy and intuitive. I think we could definitely develop additional surveys for other product categories to inform our new product development strategy as well as gather insights from our customers on overall site usability and experience.
Akhil Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is used as a product experience insights platform in Small Market business market.It enables to deliver outstanding digital experience for its custoers. After its acquisition by ContentSquare, they have enabled newer features which make it even more pleasurable to use like understanding people's behavior online, interaction with the product, and obstances which they are dealing with.
  • provide product insights
  • showcase people behavior online
  • help identify customer obstacels
  • better user experience
  • provide public API for people to make it easier to integrate
Hotjar is well suited when you have a scheduled rollout planned for your product and want to test new features. You can integrate with features and get great insights on how the people are integrating with the product. It helps you to identify behavior anamoly and also determine where people are getting stuck.
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.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Hotjar for various pages where we see issues with the conversion. It is mainly used by the marketing and UX/tech team. Sometimes the designers also look at it to understand which images do the users find more attractive. It is an excellent tool to gather learnings where Google Analytics fails to give you results.
  • Heatmaps are great to understand which areas of the page are relevant for the user
  • Heatmaps also reveal how far the users scroll
  • Video recordings of user sessions can help in understanding the user thinking & issues they run into
  • Summary for video recordings are required. Too many videos to screen through
  • Come up with a solution for the app tracking
Hotjar is a cheap but very effective tool that I would recommend for every marketeer to use. It is great to understand what issues could your users be facing and helps the UX & design team to come up with a page that caters to users' needs. Great for testing new features on the website and see how users respond to it.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is being used by Marketing, Clients Operations and Product Departments. We use practically all the functions of it: website analytics, collecting feedbacks and conducting polls. We uncover user insights, track customer satisfaction, ask the questions to understand deep customers' pains and gains. It is also used to understand whether a certain initiative worked or not.
  • Heatmaps
  • Division into mobile, desktop and tablet versions
  • Click, move and scroll maps
  • Screen recordings
  • There is a pretty functional free version
  • Polls and surveys
  • Make an organization dashboard. Not a separate site dashboard.
  • Add some user stories and best practices into the website interface.
  • Add some expert recommendations on using Hotjar collected data.
Hotjar is great if you need to quickly:
  • find out users' behavior
  • find out what is more important on a webpage for a user
  • ask a question
  • find out if a user was satisfied
Hotjar is less or not appropriate to:
  • analyze website traffic - it is not a Google Analytics replacement
  • conduct A/B testing, split testing
  • make decisions on how to rebuild a website's content if you have no experience in product and/or marketing
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.
Karla Singson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Hotjar to track the quality of traffic coming into our website and use that data to make important marketing decisions. It was really great because it provided us objective insight on what the next step is in terms of what to do with our promotions, and it also helped dispel common knee-jerk reactions on certain items that may be irrelevant to our website visitors, who are, ultimately, our prospects.
  • It's an accurate representation of traffic.
  • It is fast.
  • It is accessible data.
  • Maybe more flexibility on the free features.
  • Chat support that will help understand the service better while using it, probably.
  • App version.
I would say Hotjar is best suited for small and medium enterprises who are starting out in digital marketing. It presents data in a non-intimidating, efficient way, so it's great to guide decisions in terms of marketing. Another good use for it is to analyze certain offers and behaviors of people who visit your website, who are most likely your warmest leads at a specific time.
January 18, 2020

Awesome company and app

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our product team uses Hotjar to review product usage of our web app, home page, and help center. We use it to collect feedback and integrate with our Zendesk help desk.
  • Always enhancing their product
  • Great embeddable widgets
  • Customize type of widget, such as into a modal
  • Add more features offered by competitors
Hotjar is great for user session recordings, collecting user feedback, and running in app surveys. Not great for in app walk-throughs.
Mark Linkhorst | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We implemented HotJar into our website with a recent revision to our BigCommerce template moving from a free template to a paid version to increase traffic. 420EDC is basically a one man show, we have help from some other folks for SEO & photography content. HotJar allows us to record the traffic on our website which is what I primarily use the application primarily. There are other features Heatmaps, funnels & forms which I have not had a chance to implement or research as the recordings really show what is going on. This literally takes the guesswork out of traffic. It allows for visuals of problems customers experience in searches with bad URLs and shows what the website looks like across whatever platform/device the customer is using from their perspective. Numbers don't come through, so your customers' credit card information is secure from 3rd parties.
  • Records traffic
  • Generates heatmaps from traffic
  • Allows forms to be implemented into the website for marketing research
  • I use the paid plus plan as we don't have enough traffic for the bigger upgrade just yet. I had some confusion as to how many videos would be recorded and HotJar was quick to provide details that were still a little vague. They could come up with some better terminology to prevent this type of confusion and with a better description of the plans offered and what they really provide.
  • I used the Basic Plan which was free until it maxed out. I was under the impression I would have to pay for the business plan which is $99 per month. The Plus Plan is almost hidden which is $49 and the perfect fit for my needs currently. Make this easier to find.
  • Auto playback on recordings should stop after 5 or 10 recordings just to make sure someone is still watching. Distractions happen so it would be nice to have a better way of watching 5 or 10 recordings in an auto-mode.
The ability to see what your traffic is doing is key for us. You can find dead URLs and fix them easily. You can see what your customer is seeing first hand and you can edit your website should see you where a customer has become confused or where you have a typo or error that needs to be corrected to make the traffic move as expected. You can watch the replays in .5x speed, 1x speed, 2x speed or 4x speed so you can slow down when you need to or speed up through the longer recordings. Gaps can also be skipped which I recommend checking the box on.

We don't record traffic under 30 seconds which is a nice feature of HotJar as there isn't much to learn from customers dropping by and off that fast. So this is a scenario we recommend new users set up on the basic plan so you aren't wasting your recordings on drive-by traffic.
Sheryl Biesman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar to understand the user experience on our website, to test new features, to run surveys and to study heatmapping. Primarily we set recordings of user sessions that we study to give us directional information about how people are interacting with our brand.
  • Records user sessions.
  • Allows for specific webpage research.
  • Pop-up surveys on specific pages.
  • It would be great to have the option of audio feedback about the website.
Hotjar is a simple to use tool that provides invaluable research into how users are interacting with your website. It allows you to a/b test new features and functions and understand very quickly what is working and what isn’t by watching the recordings of each user session. It is super easy to set up and capture in and it is priced reasonably. There is no reason everyone shouldn’t use Hotjar!
Santiago Valdés | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for two things: understand how people react to changes in our design or functionality, and to understand intent (or try to deduce it) with polls. It is mainly used by the marketing team, and we use the video recording feature a lot, and the polls too. We used the feedback button but it's a bit annoying that you can't choose were to show it. It just pops up everywhere and on mobile that might be a bit confusing and annoying.
  • Video recording works very well. You choose which pages to record (based on many factors) and records appear very quick. This is the most useful feature for us. Of course you can't understand intent completely, but certainly there are usability things that will popup quickly.
  • Polls work well too. We have an eCommerce site so we ask different questions in many places, and it has proven to be helpful. You need a certain volume and also beware that it's annoying or confusing for some users. But considering that cost, it might be worthwhile when it's about an important page.
  • Heatmaps works well but they aren't that useful. Yes, the scroll % of people is nice but not as actionable as the other features.
  • 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.
For what you pay ($29 in our case) this is an amazing tool and I've seen huge and very small companies use it, so seems like scalability is not an issue at all. If you want to learn more about usability or intent from your customers, this is for you. If you think this will give you all the answers you need.... forget it. This is quantitative research but needs to be heavily paired with qualitative research if you want to understand where the main issues arise.

This can get you to understand the easy first 70% of the problem (which is a lot.) The other 30% requires the same effort but more specific tools and more qualitative research.
J.P. VanderLinden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar in our AdOps department to analyze user behavior on websites that we are running campaigns too. Our Growth Specialists install Hotjar, then use the heatmaps and user recordings to inform us about how users are interacting with the website during browsing, lead generation, checkout and other engagement. We also use Hotjar information to evaluate how effective landing pages are and whether there are any technical glitches we need to address, especially for mobile devices.
  • User recordings are the most useful feature of Hotjar - they separate the tool from competitors by allowing an anecdotal, real-life view of users working their way through your website funnel.
  • The ability to deploy polls and surveys is a great feature to level up information gathering. Simple questions around intent/goals, objections or demographics can add color to your understanding of visitors and flesh out personas.
  • A core component of Hotjar is heatmaps. The fact that these heatmaps are segmented by device and offer click, mouse movement AND scroll tracking are crucial to understanding user interaction on web pages in aggregate. This is especially valuable on landing pages.
  • The Hotjar user recording feature sometimes glitches up and doesn't render CSS properly, which can lead to a recording of low value when you can't understand what's stopping a user.
  • User recordings have a lot of attached metadata such as country, device, operating system or day/time - however, not all of these pieces of metadata are usable in segmentation. Most notably, it would be useful to filter by recordings NOT from a certain set of countries, to eliminate or target internal users.
  • Funnel tracking is a good idea in theory, but in practice, I've found it to be inaccurate and misleading, due to the way that HotJar processes the data it receives at each step.
For user behavior analysis on a website, whether it be e-commerce, lead-generation or SaaS, Hotjar is a fantastic solution. Tracking individual landing page interaction (scroll depth, mouse clicks), recording user behavior on mobile devices, or initiating polls and surveys all packed together in one tool and delivered at a great price make Hotjar my go-to UX software for websites.
Gideon Taub | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is used by our Product Management and Design/UX resources to deeply understand how our users interact with our product and specifically where in the onboarding process they are abandoning creating and funding their account. The team uses the information to optimize the user experience and to streamline onboarding. It is tremendously valuable in understanding where users get hung up without expensive focus groups.
  • Hotjar does an amazing job of visually showing us how our users interact with our software. Their software creates videos showing how users navigate our app, complete forms, etc. The videos that they create are earmarked when key events happen (change pages, click back, etc.) so that we can hone in on key milestones in the user experience.
  • It works seamlessly across PC web, mobile web, and mobile app.
  • It tracks where the user's mouse is so that we can track how the user is processing each screen.
  • They also provide heatmaps for key screens and highlight where the users are spending time on each page.
  • For our needs, we really have no areas that could be improved. I imagine with very complex apps understanding the user flow and navigation could be tedious, but for most apps, it is a great solution.
Hotjar is super well suited any time a new workflow, new feature, or new user experience is being tested with users. It is a tremendous tool to easily understand how users are engaging with the new capability and to quickly be able to iterate and optimize the user experience, across mobile and web. We have not yet started A/B testing different workflows, so I cannot speak to how well Hotjar would help in decision making once that is in place.
Sasha Fritzel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar to track user behavior on our website, by pulling heatmaps of certain high-traffic pages, and setting up user recordings so analyze user behavior. We simply select the subpages on our website we want to track, and Hotjar records sessions, showing you where a user clicks and scrolls to on our pages.
  • Ease of Setup - To setup Hotjar, we were able to use the pixel through Google Tag Manager. It took only a few minutes, and as long as you have an existing GTM account, Hotjar begins tracking instantaneously.
  • Low Price Point - Hotjar is very reasonably priced for a user behavior tool. Instead of hiring user experience testers, we can leverage the traffic we already have to understand how customers use our website.
  • Heatmaps - The heatmaps provided by Hotjar are easy to analyze and aesthetically simple.
  • Updates - The product has released very few updates or improvements since I began using it, and the core offerings have remained the same.
Hotjar is a great, inexpensive tool with a multitude of benefits for website managers. I highly recommend Hotjar to anyone looking for user data on their website, or trying to understand how user-friendly their current interface is. Overall, I've been using Hotjar for 3 years, and it has helped frame many user experience or website improvement discussions.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar both on our website and our web platform. I'm personally using it and find it very useful. Although there are some other alternatives in the market, I like what the team behind Hotjar has built and continues building. Session recordings and heat maps are the tools that I use the most, as they help me understand how our website visitors browse the website, how they navigate and what we can improve to increase the conversion rate. Also, we use funnels feature sometimes to track completion rates for some essential flows.
  • Hotjar does pretty good session recording which helps us understand how visitors browse our website
  • Heat maps feature is also very useful
  • Surveys are another feature that Hotjar has and we used to get some feedback from our users
  • Would be great to have the ability to add filtering to the funnel analysis
  • Support for native mobile apps would be a fantastic addition
Hotjar is great for tracking user behavior on your websites. It helps you actually see how people use your website and gives you insights on what can be improved and fixed, so more visitors convert into signups. It also helps to see where your visitors click on your website so you can understand which areas are more interesting for them. Maybe there is a button that no one clicks, but it's an important one, so you need to change the location or call-to-action or button color. These are the cases that Hotjar will definitely help.
Chris Lenhart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is my go to source for capturing user feedback within our site. It makes it easy to automate surveys, trigger polls based on specific user actions, record user sessions so that you can observe behavior, and analyze where users are dropping off of your forms. Best of all, it's completely free to try and fairly cheap to purchase.
  • Surveys - you can create surveys and trigger them automatically within your app. Hotjar will collect and visualize the data for you.
  • Session Recordings - you can record whole sessions or trigger them when a user visits a certain page to see how people really behave on your site.
  • Polls - you can ask your users a question at any point in their journey. Particularly useful when combined with tag manager.
  • Regex targeting - use regular expressions to target groups of pages.
  • Forms could be easier to target.
  • Incoming feature is slightly redundant with polls.
  • Branching surveys would be nice.
Hotjar is great for gathering user feedback for almost any kind of web application. You can use it whenever you want to ask your users a question or series of questions, or see how they behave, where they click, and how far they scroll. If your app is a single page application, you may need someone with a bit of front end dev experience and Google Tag Manager to make the most of it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar to record Heatmaps and Recordings of all our websites and apps. It provides invaluable feedback on actual user behaviors and has led us to make improvements and changes to our websites and apps on an ongoing basis directly based on actual user behaviors.
  • Extremely easy to set up. Easy to monitor, and share. The user interface is wonderful.
  • The heatmaps are excellent and provide easy navigation and sharing capabilities to share with other users in the organization, even if they aren't active product users
  • The recording filters are useful for filtering through large volumes of recordings based on time on site, locations, etc.
  • We have had limited success with some hotjars add-on products such as popups
  • Popup customizations and behaviors are not as good as some other products, but this is not the core reason to use Hotjar
  • New licensing can be more expensive than in the past if you have multiple sites and apps
Creation of heatmaps and recordings showing user clicks, scrolls, and other behaviors on marketing websites and within both web apps and mobile apps. This is the core capability of the product, and it is probably the best choice in the market for this.
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