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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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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

(51-75 of 101)
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Dwight Zähringer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • New site vs old site: this allows you to benchmark what was done and how users are interacting with the new design and getting to conversion points/funnels.
  • Landing pages from external marketing sources.
  • Recording user's interaction from external marketing.
  • Review eCommerce layout and interactions.
  • Above/below the fold visitor usage.
Zach Ettelman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Hotjar is 'cheap and cheerful' and great within that use case. If you want to do heatmaps, user surveys, and session videos easily, it's a great choice.

Once you get enterprise level and need to add PII to sessions and things of that nature, it gets much harder to use. At that point you're better served by a specific tool for the job.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's great for any company that has an in-house marketing department and people are very hands-on and they are interested in testing all the changes to a website. Less appropriate for people that are not very interested in digging deeper into data and insights.
Susan Hammiche | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you have a website for your business, it is really important to know what users do on your site. Hotjar helps evaluate the content that is less viewed and adjust it. Pages and content that are most viewed can be turned into targeted advertising if you track users from your website. Keeping your website constantly updated can help increase views and focus your advertising.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are able to capture the audience journeys when they visit our website and see how they interact with it. Some of the feedback has been very helpful in resolving issues on the website as well as improving language that needed to be tweaked or modified.
Veronika Baranovska | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Mark Linkhorst | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HotJar allows you to be more informed about the activities on your website. Anyone that wants to learn more about their users should use this tool. If you think your users are getting hung up on a particular area (i.e. the checkout process), you can use the video feature to see where they're abandoning the process.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HotJar has been used throughout our organization to identify navigational, organizational, and functional issues on our website and also within our application. What we love about HotJar is that many of these issues that may not appear in our daily use or QA testing. When the site is live, it then allows us to see how users are interacting with our site and collect user feedback, and that lets us find ways to improve the experience of our product. It's well suited for the visitor recordings and keeping a good track of changes.
March 28, 2019

Hotjar for agencies

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is well suited to seeing how actual users of your site behave on a page, rather than user research which can be quite artificial. It also allows you to poll your users. It's good for top-level, brief overviews of behavior, rather than in-depth analysis.

Hotjar is less suited to very specific targeting of polls/heatmaps, as URL targeting is quite limited. It's also unsuitable for in-depth user research via the polls, as many users find the pop-ups annoying and don't answer properly. Focus groups/moderated user research would be better for gaining deeper insight into what users think about your website.
Sarah O'Donnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Sanjit Mandal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Anyone who has created a website and wants to learn how to improve it for conversions, this is the perfect tool. This is a true and tested way to test how a designer has created a website. It can also be used to A/B test a website and the placement of a CTA. The more we know about our website the better we can modify it to better serve the visitors.
Mirzet Kadric | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is super powerful for tracking user behavior on our client's websites. It is very useful when you launch a new website and want to see what your visitors do, where they click and what kind of issues they face. We use this insight to design and optimize web pages for a better conversion rate.
November 06, 2018

HotJar for UX Design

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HotJar is well suited for our UX team in trying to get as much data as possible to validate our decisions decisions. Specifically, we have a interaction component that is focused on showing and hiding metadata of a given item on the screen. We had many conflicting ideas within our team of the best way to show/hide this data. We implemented one of our ideas that we thought would be the best to test out in the wild. HotJar has provided very specific data about how our users are interacting with that interaction component, and we can now iterate on making updates that are in direct response to what we are seeing through HotJarData.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's a great tool to monitor your website activity. You'll learn exactly what is it that your visitors are doing on the website and will be able to identify inefficiencies or places for change and improvement. This tool is suited for bigger teams that can take the data and apply the changes. If you're a one-man show, it's likely you won't have the time to do it all on your own. Changes require design and coding, which are usually very time-consuming.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Anybody who cares about seeing what their users are doing on their website should be using Hotjar. It's definitely best suited for e-commerce websites to see potential conversion opportunities, but can certainly be used by informational websites to help give people the best information in the best way. Hotjar is most useful if you have time to do plenty of research on your data, if you only have a little bit of time here and there it's likely that you won't get the most out of it.
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