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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

(26-50 of 101)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you are looking to test specific pages on your website for how users interact/click with different parts of the page/navigation, then HotJar is a must-use platform! We haven't had any negative issues using HotJar thus far. The only issue we've had is testing landing pages that use an iFrame because HotJar can't access the content in an iFrame, which is understandable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is a valuable tool for gaining insight into user behavior, with the most useful features being heatmaps and screen recordings. It works well as a complement to Google Analytics, and for its price, it's worth it. If your site has plenty of menus, dropdowns, or modals, it might not be the best option for you.
Carlos Ibarra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Camilo Honorato | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is really good to watch and understand the customer experience in your website, letting you watch what users do and how they react to your Call to action, forms, banners, videos, and others
I do not find it very good to make reports of this data without doing manual work
September 28, 2021

Easy to use, valuable tool

Becky Jewell Laughton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I simply love this product -- it provides insight and value to me that is actionable and intentional. I don't make decisions based solely on analytics reports, but we overlay those reports with the contextual usage that we see from real UX/UI. There's no easier tool that I've found to help us make decisions that are supported by data and proven by users' actions.
Aline Gonçalves Rodrigues | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

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 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar works extremely well as a lightweight and easy-to-use tool for deploying surveys and collecting user feedback. Overall this is the simplest system I have used for this and a survey can be created and deployed in a matter of minutes. They also include a decent amount of question types & overall survey styles.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Most use cases are enabled through Hoatjar. We are able to easily see how overall people are interacting with the product. Also, recordings provide a great way to get a sense of what people are doing. And the filters are very helpful too.

But since we sometimes look at individual user responses, we can't do that properly because of the 500 recordings/day limit.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We especially love the surveys within Hotjar, and we have gotten lots of good actionable feedback that has either validated some assumptions we have or has provided us with new information that has helped us improve our website. We also really like having access to the recordings of users on our site so that we can see specific actions or paths that users are taking as they navigate through.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is well suited for Product teams looking to gather additional insights on the user behavior, or run quick surveys or usabulity sessions. The data capture is not as extensive as Heap or other software, so the strengths are actually different although at surface it might appear as similar functionalities.
Lee Preston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's really well priced (clients never have an issue with their pricing), easy to set up, easy to get started, and delivers great insights consistently. I think they maybe need more explainers (for my clients) around how to get the most of it
Duane Thompson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
Halima Satheya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Really great way to get that qualitative feedback from real customers which is just invaluable. For example you may see a reduction in a specific area but unable to identify what it may be but Hotjar allows you to easily watch screen recordings of actual customers using your site and identify the fricition point along with polls being able to ask the customer what may be the issue etc.
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