Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Hotjar

Hotjar

Overview

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing. The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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

10/10 recommend Hotjar

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

Awards

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

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Hotjar Observe - Plus

$39

Cloud
per month 100 daily sessions

Hotjar Ask - Plus

$59

Cloud
per month 250 monthly responses

Hotjar Ask - Business

$79

Cloud
per month Starting from 500 monthly responses

Entry-level set up fee?

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

Offerings

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

Product Details

Hotjar Technical Details

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing. The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product marketers. Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare September 2021, and is now a Contentsquare brand.

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

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.7.

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

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(333)

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

(76-100 of 101)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Sheryl Biesman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
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.
June 11, 2018

An absolute hottie

James Egan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
There is a hell of a lot of things that you can use Hotjar for. I use that funnel as an example to a lot of clients. But the form tool is the most powerful. Drop off points are so intuitive. I love the heatmaps, but again the form tool and funnel creation are the best things since sliced bread.
Gideon Taub | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is a great addition to your online-marketing arsenal. If you're in the position where you can ask yourself: "We have a great website but how do we make it even better?" - this is the application you need. With its detailed heatmaps and videos, you can easily see what's the most interesting and what gets the most attention on your pages.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar does everything you need to help you determine how users behave on your site and to pinpoint issues that couldn't be captured any other way. You can use the data to help you fix bugs, optimize design and improve the user experience. Hotjar is a must have for any marketing, product and conversion rate optimization department.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Austin Schmidt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is well suited for anyone with a website that's seeking context to better optimize it. Hotjar is especially good for small businesses and start ups looking for a reasonable entry price, but not wanting to sacrifice features as they grow. It's less well suited for those without the bandwidth to spend time analyzing the results. It's not a "set and forget" product. While it's efficient, it requires work.
Chris Lenhart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is very useful in the initial phase of your website, when you just launch it and want to see how visitors browse your website, what they do, where they click and what kind of issues they face. It provides a lot of insights so you can decide on what needs to be fixed in order to deliver the best user experience to your website visitors. After a couple of months, when you have already fixed all the issues and understood what the visitors do on the website, it's not that critical to use Hotjar I think, as there is not that much new information there, as in the initial phase of launching the website.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is great if you want to watch what your users are up to on your website. However, it is important to remember that this is only half of the story, as you can't be certain what their intentions are. It's probably best suited to analyzing smaller sequences of interaction where you can more safely draw conclusions about what is going on, wrong or right.
Ashish Tewari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
excellent when considering or evaluating a page or site redesign, or landing page options. not so great in dynamic feedback to a system that can adjust automatically - it's a pure reporting tool, not something that can be used to improve performance automatically. plus, it tracks single pages at a time - wonder if there's a way for it to do a set of similar pages.
Randolph Ramirez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is amazing for tailoring your user experience. It gives you exactly the insight you need to make your site the most effective possible. I can't think of a scenario where you are establishing a web presence where you wouldn't want to use it.
Charles-Edouard Draber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you want to optimize a website, Hotjar is a tool for you. It's easy to set up (less than 10 minutes) and has a lot of tools (heatmap, customer video recording, tracking funnels, and forms, collect feedback with pools, surveys and incoming, a must have to collect visual feedback). It's better to have an A/B Testing solution with Hotjar.
October 11, 2016

Hotjar - You Decide

Patrick Eng | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HotJar is great for tracking visitors' actions on your website. By reviewing recordings of many users, designers and developers can change small things on the website that could have a dramatic impact on its effectiveness. It is also great to see how and why people drop off in the funnel and how one could improve on that.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is well suited for heat maps and recordings of visitors. We always use at least these on every website we launch for clients. Hotjar can also have surveys or polls on specific pages where a user can provide valuable feedback. In turn this can help you optimize your offer. One thing to remember is you have to know how to read the stats Hotjar provides. No matter how much you tweak a design based on heat maps, for example, it won't fix a bad offer. So you have to get a feel for when a design needs to be tweaked versus maybe people going through to the bottom of your sales page, but not clicking buy - maybe it's your product or offer then. The stats alone won't help you figure that out.
Christine Austin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar really excels in getting an overall understanding of how pages throughout your website are understood by your [users], how the flow of your site works, and gaining feedback from your users too. If you are looking for a more analytical analysis of your website, specifically in terms of A/B tests, event tracking, etc., then Hotjar may not be the tool you are looking for.
Paul Klipp | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I recommend Hotjar to all the startups I talk to. It's easy to use, powerful, and you can begin to get a lot of terrific insights using only their free plan. The two scenarios in which I've found it most helpful are in soliciting feedback from site visitors and in optimizing sales pipelines.
Return to navigation