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…
Hotjar Review
Hotjar sits above its competitors with an easy-to-use and robust feature set!
Hotjar, the best tool for heatmaps
Hotjar - a great way to keep tabs on web ux
Easy to use, Easy to Implement and captures invaluable data
Bringing everything to Light
Hotjar gave us insights we never had before
Easy and Essential User Behaviour Optimisation
Hotjar is the best option in price and features compared to the top concurrent softwares
Must to have product to understand user's behaviour on your website/app.
Very easy to use and paid for itself in a few weeks
A great tool that needs minor improvements
10/10 recommend Hotjar
Relatively simple and well priced tooling to support user research and overall website analysis
Customer Product Insights at its best
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
Pricing
Hotjar Observe - Plus
$39
Hotjar Ask - Plus
$59
Hotjar Ask - Business
$79
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Hotjar?
Hotjar Video
Hotjar Competitors
Hotjar Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
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Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(334)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
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:
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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.
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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.
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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)- 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, the best tool for heatmaps
- Provide heatmaps
- Provide recordings of the sessions
- Provide feedback from users
- More user friendly heatmaps
- Longer lasting heatmaps
- Incomplete tracking
- 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
Easy and Essential User Behaviour Optimisation
- 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
- 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.
A great tool that needs minor improvements
- 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.
10/10 recommend Hotjar
- Reporting
- Survey Set Up
- UX and UI
- Expand product offering
- Customize design
- More survey template options
Customer Product Insights at its best
- 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
- Heatmaps in desktop layouts
- User recordings
- Heatmaps in mobile layouts
- Billing for Agencies
- Sample size for user heatmaps
- Sample size for recordings
Easy to use, valuable tool
- Heatmapping
- Layout/navigation
- Behavior recordings
- Heatmapping over time, or time graphs
- 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
Use Hotjar if you want to understand your users!
- 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.
- 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
- 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
UX/UI tool for conversion success
- 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.
- 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 Helps Us Make Better Marketing Decisions
- 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.
Awesome company and app
- Always enhancing their product
- Great embeddable widgets
- Customize type of widget, such as into a modal
- Add more features offered by competitors
Recording Traffic with HotJar
- 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.
Hotjar is a MUST-HAVE tool for UX testing
- 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.
Great insights for a very low price
- 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.
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.
Price + Features = Slam Dunk
- 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.
- 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 - A Very Useful Little Tool
- 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.
Great tool to track user behavior in your website
- 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 free and useful.
- 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.
- 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