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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

(331)

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 101)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is very well suited to monitoring your web traffic user experience and surveying your users. You can gather feedback on any web-based experience and use it to make informed decisions about what to change, improve, add to your product roadmap, etc. Hotjar should not be used as your sole Customer Service interface. It captures data passively for planning, not individual reaction.
Alex Richards | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a user of the commercial team, I am glad that I can know the interactions that my clients have on the platform and how effective they are. This allows me to be sure that they are making the maximum out of their subscriptions and our revenue will only be positively impacted
Chris Gomez, SPHR | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For quick insights, surveys and heat maps are great. There is so much you can learn from using those 2 things. But it will probably lead to more questions than answers. That is where recordings can be incredibly helpful as long as you have the time to go through them and watch. I see Hotjar as the beginning of research and helping us to narrow our focus and solve the biggest problems. In that context, Hotjar excels.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Leandro Chaves | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketing/UI/UX teams can use it to understand where the key elements of a site should be placed Development teams can use it to develop better websites by understanding what/when/where something is wrong
Namandeep Bhatia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar allows users to test specific areas on your website by clicking different parts of the page and analyzing where the user is drawn to on the page. We have very few negative things to say about Hotjar, the tool is user-friendly and easy to navigate and it complements other tools such as Google Analytics.
Mohamed Saied | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is great for collecting qual and quant feedback quickly without needing to setup specific tracking or writing a test plan and recruiting users. The mixture of tools within the Hotjar suite work well together by allowing you to view recordings of users that have left feedback via surveys which is an awesome touch.
Akhil Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I love the easy setup via a tag manager. Even some not really tech-oriented people in my company had almost no problem setting it up. Which is a great use for SMB clients/companies that just need some basic measurements to see where they are at. You can have it easily set up on your website and start collecting data within an hour.
July 06, 2022

Hotjar review

Jasper van der Zwaan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is a very useful tool to analyze new and current web pages through heat mapping. The recording feature provides even more in-depth insights on user behavior on webpages and lead forms. The feedback widget tool is also very helpful for quick deployment of such widgets on any page without utilizing internal development resources.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is best suited for scenarios when you want to have a high level look of a page performance by checking the heat maps. It helps in identifying the order of the widgets on the page and what is keeping the users engaged. Since it is relative it saves a lot of time which otherwise have to be done by putting and analysing a lot of click events separately.

Hotjar might not be a best tool to create business funnels and see the business metrics as it more focused on the subjective analysis.
John Silva, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used to monitor which product page dentists would access to gauge their knowledge and understanding of our products (dental laboratory). We then matched this to our direct mail cross selling campaigns to target very specific cohorts with invitation to courses and seminars.
Kèlene Poyurs | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I can't recommend Hotjar enough for people who want to improve the useability of their website, understand how users are behaving on their site, or just want insights into how people experience their website. The recording and heatmap functionality is super easy to implement, and you start getting useful insights quickly. It is definitely one of the most worthwhile tools for anyone who works with websites and landing pages.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
There is a situation where they think that they have a great website design that matches the standards but in reality, they can not see it in practice. they have some bad feedback from their customers and clients. But do not know what is the problem and how they can improve and fix the user experience.
Markus Kapferer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We do not use the whole functionality yet, but the areas that are most used and helpful for us are: * session recordings: this functionality helps us to identify problems on our website. We discover issues that we didn't expect. So we can see if users understand messaging and functionality in our online store. * surveys: this feature helps us to get insights directly from our customers. We tend to ask what they miss or how they like a new product. * heat maps are helpful if it's about identifying the most recognized areas on a website. So we identify areas where we should invest more time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
So I have a sales page where I’m selling a low ticket option at the top of my funnel. I use Hotjar to record people who land on my sales page and also heat maps. This allows me to understand how my users interact with my sales page, where they scroll, whether they go to the checkout, where they leave, and more.
Willy Bilaro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Easy to implement, even for non-techy users. A ready out of the box type of solution where implementation is done via GTM. Security is one of its focuses as well. By default, any PII is automatically masked. The user doesn't have to worry about any changes that need to be done on their websites. For any type of website or scale, Hotjar is already suitable.
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