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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

(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

(51-75 of 101)
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Dwight Zähringer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use HotJar across the organization and for client projects as well. We were BETA testers of the product. The reasons we stay with HotJar are the ease of setting up accounts, new heatmaps for specific pages, and user feedback.
Zach Ettelman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As the director of a marketing services team, we leveraged Hotjar to review site analytics and user behavior for all of our clients that came to us for a website project. We would also use Hotjar in the sales process to provide a high-level audit to our prospective client. Hotjar is used for our own marketing websites, our client sites, and was also used to help in product-related projects.
Karla Singson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Hotjar to track the quality of traffic coming into our website and use that data to make important marketing decisions. It was really great because it provided us objective insight on what the next step is in terms of what to do with our promotions, and it also helped dispel common knee-jerk reactions on certain items that may be irrelevant to our website visitors, who are, ultimately, our prospects.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
HotJar is used for:
- heatmaps and qualitatively tracking page engagement
- in-line surveys and feedback gathering
- user session videos
We use it across marketing, product, research, engineering, and any other department that works on the website. Generally, it is a cheap and easy way to see how people are interacting with our website.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HotJar is a heatmap and feedback software and it is used mainly by our marketing department and in particular by our webmasters and digital marketers. We make frequent changes to our website with new landing pages and content and HotJar is a great tool to see if the changes we make work and how effectively we engage our visitors.
Susan Hammiche | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar as an analysis tool to review visitors on our website. Hotjar helps us make data-driven decisions about our website as well as our services and products. It gives a great insight into where users go mostly on our website, in addition to Google Analytics. The marketing and the website development teams are able to use this data to make adjustments.
Veronika Baranovska | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is a new tool that we've recently started using to better understand our user journeys, both on our website and our product. More recently, we upgraded our accounts to get more data so that our findings have statistical significance when it comes to testing different types of page designs and implementing improvements. With Hotjar, we mostly use their heat mapping tools and screen recordings.
Scot Chandler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am using it with multiple companies that I consult with. At my recommendation, they have installed the code and I set up the various recordings and reports to help them gain a solid understanding of how their visitors interact on their sites. Hotjar provides the added depth that most analytics packages don't have.
Mark Linkhorst | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We implemented HotJar into our website with a recent revision to our BigCommerce template moving from a free template to a paid version to increase traffic. 420EDC is basically a one man show, we have help from some other folks for SEO & photography content. HotJar allows us to record the traffic on our website which is what I primarily use the application primarily. There are other features Heatmaps, funnels & forms which I have not had a chance to implement or research as the recordings really show what is going on. This literally takes the guesswork out of traffic. It allows for visuals of problems customers experience in searches with bad URLs and shows what the website looks like across whatever platform/device the customer is using from their perspective. Numbers don't come through, so your customers' credit card information is secure from 3rd parties.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using HotJar to see where our web visitors are clicking on key pages. This allows us to make informed decisions when we want to test out new content or reorganizing content. We're also using HotJar's click-tracking software that shows videos of how users are scrolling and clicking through the site.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HotJar is used by our organization to check up on how a new website design or landing page is faring with our users. When we launch a new design or UX for a specific page, we'll install HotJar and record an analysis of where our users are going on the page and whether they are understanding the page (or not!). The fact that we can record sessions and then play them back is unbelievably helpful. The fact that we could fix early bugs or report issues helped us grow our business and that's thanks to HotJar.
March 28, 2019

Hotjar for agencies

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is used by the UX & CRO department of my agency, which provides digital marketing services. It helps us understand how users are behaving on our client's websites, letting us see what sections of pages are valuable to users, and any technical issues they may have. It adds an extra layer of insight to data gathered via Google Analytics.
Sarah O'Donnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar within our agency on our client's websites. We mostly use if for heat mapping and session recordings. It is a good place to start if you are want to know what your users are doing on your website, and it is a good visual aid.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is currently being used by the UX & CRO department and is included in most, if not all, UX & CRO campaigns. It is used to inform test recommendations and quick fixes to the site which may be hard to add to the dev queue without the data from Hotjar/other user research.
Andrew Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is being used to do both quantitative and qualitative analysis of our marketing site. It helps us answer the question of "how are people using our site?" in ways we cannot assume. It's Recording and Heatmap features help us see how people are using the site, and surveys give us the ability to gather feedback quickly. We use the surveys on our support site for the team to evaluate the effectiveness of individual articles.
Sanjit Mandal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Hotjar to get visuals of how visitors behave on websites; how far they scroll, where they click, how they move on the page, and much more. From here, this information can be used to modify websites to improve conversions. I use it on my website and also on my client's websites too. The problem addressed is to confirm to clients how their site could be improved. Often times, they need to see it so they believe what I tell them. :)
Mirzet Kadric | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Hotjar with the 75 employees at our web agency to understand user experience on our client's websites. By using HotJar we are able to get more accurate data and help with the implementation of new features.

November 06, 2018

HotJar for UX Design

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use HotJar to get detailed user interaction data to help validate and influence usability and design decisions. When designing our web products, we have a relatively limited ability to do the breadth and depth of usability research before we launch new features. When new features do get released, they are validated only by that small audience. Using HotJar, we are able to get more data than we know what to do with to help validate or invalidate our decisions made at launch.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using Hotjar in the marketing department to analyze how the website is performing and what should we be changing in order to improve conversions. The tool shows clicking data (where website visitors are clicking on) and the scrolling data (how far down the page are the visitors scrolling). We use the gathered information to decide what to change on the website to improve users' experience and conversions.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Hotjar is being used specifically in our marketing department to help have a better idea of what our customer journey on our website is in relation to what we intend it to be. Using Hotjar, we can see where on our website people bounce from our pages, where people click, hover their mouse, and watch individual recordings to see how users interact with our website. It adds a more visualized perspective on a lot of information provided by Google Analytics.
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