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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

(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

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Halima Satheya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I currently use Hotjar to get real customer insight and data and to be able to understand our customers pain points and frictions. Using the insight gathered from Hotjar I am able to define my roadmap and strategy for A/B testing. It is used across several departments in the business for example the product teams, marketing, digital and development.
  • Quick customer insight
  • Ease of use
  • Continously improving the features of the software
  • Would be great if you could schedule polls/surveys to go live
  • Be able to QA poll and surveys on your IP
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.
  • Ease of set up
  • Ability to get customer feedback instantly
  • Increased importance of areas of focus based on customer feedback
  • Allows us to always put our customers first
  • Clear strategy roadmap definition
Several more features when viewing session replays on Hotjar that make session replay analysis so easy to not only tl share but analyse to.

No
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Features of Hotjar are extremely important and the offering of the tool. Being able to use and make the most of the tool is the most important factor.
Quick response rate in support and issues are always resolved if any. But never really have issues that I need to contact the support team.
No as not required, tool is so easy to use and self serve.
No
Introduced a new feature which honestly was not ideal, made exports hard. I raised this with the support team and instantly it was reverted! Was so glad feedback was taken on board it always is with the Hotjar support team.
So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.
  • Quick set up
  • Instant real time data
  • Quick analysis/overview done by the tool
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.
  • Quick and easy installation via Google Tag Manager.
  • Intuitive, easy-to-use user interface makes adding tags extremely easy and quick.
  • Hotjar provides heat mapping and user session recording to see how users interact with your website.
  • Hotjar is primarily used for web-based experiences. Not that easy to use on mobile apps.
  • I'd love to see Hotjar integrated with Google Analytics for an even deeper view.
  • Hotjar is primarily used by smaller organizations...pricing can get steep quickly for larger organizations.
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.
  • Hotjar quickly improved our CTR by 25% MoM.
  • Hotjar is relatively inexpensive for most of it's packages, so any changes we made to the site would correlate to new deals, thus paying for the monthly subscription in one deal.
  • Hotjar has saved our team immense time by not having to do in-person, manual user testing.
Hotjar is a cheaper alternative to FullStory, but not as robust. FullStory is designed for more use cases, including custom product development. Hotjar's price point is way lower than FullStory, making it a great choice for a startup, mid-market organization, or a lean enterprise. FullStory is more complicated to use than Hotjar because of the additional functionality it provides.
Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.
Hotjar is extremely easy to use! Quickly install the tool by adding in a code snippet as a new tag in Google Tag Manager. After you've tested the connection, a user can go in the Hotjar user interface, select the pages that you want to have analyzed, and then quickly select heat mapping, user session recording, how many page views, a timeframe, and then you're done. Viewing reports is extremely easy and the insights are laid out in an intuitive manner.
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.
  • It's an accurate representation of traffic.
  • It is fast.
  • It is accessible data.
  • Maybe more flexibility on the free features.
  • Chat support that will help understand the service better while using it, probably.
  • App version.
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.
  • Better decisions in marketing.
  • Less guesswork on what to do next.
  • Easily accessible data.
To be honest, we used Hotjar because it was so widely used by the developers I trust so I just went along with it.
Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins, 8x8 X Series (Formerly Virtual Office), PhoneBurner
I'm really just assuming at this point, as I have never really needed support for Hotjar for as long as I have used it. I love my experience with it!
It is fairly easy to use, easy to explain, and easy to learn even for a non-techie like me. I admit I was a little intimidated when it was recommended by my developers, but I learned afterwards that there really was nothing to worry about. My experience has been awesome so far!
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.
  • Incredibly affordable and easy to set up
  • When I've contacted support, they've been helpful
  • Excellent value-for-money
  • Very accessible for people with different technical skills
  • Hard to look at data at an individual user level (makes cleaning up non-geo traffic or outliers harder)
  • Tough to integrate at the user level with other tools
  • Some of the tools don't support multiple users as well as they could
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.
  • Has helped us optimize pages for CRO
  • Has helped us identify bugs to fix
  • Has helped us identify user confusion and copy issues that impede conversion
FullStory is more expensive but much more 'enterprise' than HotJar. Some of its integrations are more valuable and give more user-level data, as well as better archiving on individual sessions. However, it costs significantly more.
Very easy to use, typically requires no training. Generally easy questions are available from search, and their support team is helpful with other questions.
Support has been responsive and helpful. But isn't available by chat.
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