Hotjar Review: Hot or Not?

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a product experience insight platform that helps businesses better understand their audience through visual behavior insights, interviews, and in-the-moment feedback. It offers 5 key features: heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, feedback tools, and user interviews.

The platform captures data and reconstructs user events. Hence, it doesn’t offer real-time analytics or data.

Hotjar is a popular analytical tool and is used by companies like Mizzen+Main, Brand24, re:member, NerdCow, Yatter, Razerpay, and Materials Market.

It was founded by Dr. David Darmanin in 2014 on the island of Malta. Currently, it is used by 900K websites in 180 countries.

Hotjar is an excellent pick for eCommerce sites. For example, Credo saw a 220% revenue increase after using Hotjar. Other industries also benefit from the use of Hotjar, including:

• Technology: Every.org increased their donations by 29.5%
• Transport: NerdCow implemented conversion rate optimization and tripled conversions in 2 weeks
• Agency: 10% increase in conversions for s360
• SaaS: LearnWorlds saw a 150% increase in conversions
• Retail: 400% ROI for Matalan
• Financial Services: 43% increase in conversions for re:member

The tool is GDPR-compliant and CCPA-ready. It is free to use (with limited features, but ideal for small websites) and offers 365 days of storage to compare over time.

When compared to Crazy Egg, its closest competitor, Hotjar is more popular and has key differences in features for visitor tracking, A/B testing, and feedback pools.

What Hotjar Offers

Hotjar offers 5 features spread across 3 categories:

• Observe: Recordings and Heatmap tools
• Ask: Surveys and Feedback Button
• Engage: Interviews

Let’s go through these features in detail below:

• Heatmaps: Heatmaps let you visualize user behavior analytics, such as where they click, scroll, and move. This helps identify what captures the user’s attention and where they’re losing friction.
• Recordings: The tool records real-time user actions. This, in turn, finds issues hidden in plain sight, resulting in improved sites with fewer bugs.
• Surveys: Offers AI-powered surveys to get website feedback directly from users. Surveys help validate ideas and improve the overall product. It works similarly to survey maker apps like Typeform, Jotform, and Shout.
• Feedback Button: Add a direct feedback button to learn about the users’ experience, frustrations, and desired features.
• Interviews: Get feedback directly from users that match your research criteria. Hotjar automates everything, including recruitment, scheduling, hosting, and recording (included in the basic free plan).

Hotjar Features

In this section, we take a closer look at Hotjar’s features. You must use most of these features together to get the best results. For example, heatmaps with recordings give a clearer picture of user behavior than just relying on heatmaps. Additionally, surveys enable you to get direct feedback from users.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are a core Hotjar feature that helps you improve a web page through users’ information on how they interact. It’ll show the user activities through color – the brighter it is, the more activity there is. By using heatmaps, websites can:

• Learn about user engagement patterns
• Learn where the user clicks, without any guesswork

To showcase different user actions, it offers 5 map types:

• All clicks: Highlights all clicks (red: most popular). Brings necessary data to improve calls to action (CTAs) and bugs.
• Move: Showcases the mouse movement across the screen. Use it to improve user experience by knowing which areas get the most hits.
• Scroll: Highlights the percentage of users scrolling through each section using different colors (red: highest engagement, blue: lowest or no activity). It helps find where users lose attention and how they interact with content above the average fold.
• Engagement zones: Combines interaction data, including clicks, scrolls, and moves, to show the most interactive part of the page. It helps understand users and optimize pages.
• Rage clicks: Exhibits areas of the page where the user shows signs of frustration, such as repeated clicks. This helps you to remove pain points and increase conversions.

Heatmaps also offer 2 overlays:

• Top 3 clicks: Highlights the top 3 clicks on the given page.
• Highlights: It lets users select an area to highlight, which can be downloaded, shared, or created for Jira issues, Trello cards, Asana tasks, or Lunar issues. This helps you collaborate on issues with team members and external contributors.

You can select multiple map types and overlays to get a custom view. For example, below is the screenshot of the Geekflare homepage with All Clicks, the Top 3 Clicks, and Engagement Zones enabled.

For better understanding, it also shows stats like total clicks, rage clicks, rage time on the page, u-turns, and drop-off rate.

Heatmaps also support filters for better clarity. You can add filters, including country, duration, page count, event, etc. You can also save unlimited heat maps and analyze them according to your needs.

Recordings

The Recordings feature enables you to find user behavior patterns or bugs. Furthermore, Heatmap’s recordings are a robust way to validate data-based decisions. The recordings are sharable and help you take instant action to solve issues with site design, fix bugs, or improve user experience.

To get the relevant recording, you can use filters, select relevance score, or choose from already existing recording categories, including:

• Direct traffic
• Mobile users
• New users
• Paid traffic
• Organic traffic
• Rage clicked
• Returning users

Once you play a recording, you can see the recording information and actions, along with complete session information (location, browser, operating system, referrer, and device type, such as Desktop or mobile).

It also offers a seek bar that shows activities and actions, such as page reload or U-turn.

Recordings can be added to a collection, shared, or deleted.

Surveys

Hotjar’s surveys give direct feedback from the user by asking the right question without the need to write a single line of code. You can create custom surveys or templates to gather user feedback and visitor insights quickly. Some of its notable templates include:

• Feedback button
• Design satisfaction survey
• Article Feedback
• Product feedback survey
• B2B churn survey

In addition, Hotjar also provides a “Generate from goal” option, where users can use AI to generate questions for the surveys.

Each response can be viewed for further action, including inviting the user to an interview or creating an actionable card on Trello, Jira, Asana, and Linear.

Feedbacks

Feedback is part of Surveys, where you can add a Feedback button to a webpage. This helps in different use cases, be it a new product, campaign, or feature.

Similar to Surveys, it supports AI feedback analysis, while offering recordings for further examination. It provides seamless connections with existing user stacks. Businesses can also invite users for an interview to get a better understanding.

User Interviews via Engage

Hotjar lets you find and interview users through its Engage feature. It highlights high-quality participants by automating the research process, including recruitment, scheduling, hosting, and recording.

This is useful for different use cases, including:

• Learning about the site’s usability
• Getting design feedback
• Conducting market research

To use Engage, you need to set up a project. Here, you can select the interview length, the video call software, and the time zone. It also lets you connect your calendar with the option to schedule without clashes.

Trends

Trends let you spot user behavior by visualizing captured metrics. It supports filters that help refine visuals. For example, the below image lists the trends for 3 segments:

• Traffic from “US” country
• Duration greater than 30 seconds
• Organic traffic from Google.

You can save these segments for later use or add the Trends widget to the dashboard for quick visualization.

It supports visualization in line, pie, and bar formats. You can also change the duration to suit your needs (24 hours to 12 months or custom).

Funnels

Funnels lets you find conversion blockers and optimize the site for the best results. It helps you see beyond the numbers, through filters and comparisons via segments. This results in personalized insights with access to quantitative and qualitative data.

The Geekflare website uses a notification to ask users whether they want to be notified when a new post is published. With funnels, we can set up recordings to show the success and non-success rate.

To see it, we set up the following sessions and filters.

• Viewed page to the test website home page.
• Clicked element where the button or text contains “Allow”.
• Using a filter to see results for organic traffic only.

And here are the results.

Administrators can view recordings to find conversion issues and optimize them as needed. Like Trends, Funnels can also be added to the dashboard.

Hotjar Data Security

Hotjar takes data security seriously and has certifications and audits in place. Its security implementations include the following: 

• Only specific ports are open for Hotjar service
• Utilizes Threatstack for monitoring unauthorized access
• Escalated access is done with 2-factor authentication and VPN
• Uses data encryption for data transfer
• Uses redundancy to ensure failover and disaster recovery
• Compliance with GDPR user privacy
• Carries out annual third-party penetration testing

Hotjar Pricing

Hotjar uses a freemium pricing model with 3 paid plans, starting from $32/month. 

The free Basic plan is helpful for small businesses and guides them in understanding the fundamentals of user behavior. 

However, if you’re a medium to large business, it’s best to go with paid plans that offer no limitations and provide features like page view filters, session information, API access, funnels, trends, and more. 

You can take advantage of its 15-day free trial without needing a credit card before choosing the plan you deem fit.

We suggest checking out their free plan first and then switching to a 15-day free trial. Once satisfied, you can choose a plan.

They also offer custom plans where you can pick the features you want, like Heatmaps, Surveys, etc. 

Hotjar Integrations

Hotjar provides integrations to popular apps like Slack, Jira, and HubSpot for seamless automation workflows. It supports Google Analytics and Segment in analytics integration and custom integration via Zapier—all without coding.

Who Should Use Hotjar?

Hotjar is primarily aimed at small to medium-scale businesses. However, it is equally useful for larger websites with high traffic. It has a low learning curve and comes with a user-friendly interface.

The platform primarily benefits businesses that want to improve conversions, which makes it a great pick for SaaS or product-selling websites, such as eCommerce sites. For example, Mizzen+Main increased their Add-to-Carts conversion rate by 39% in just 3 weeks. 

Hotjar can also be useful for professionals such as UX/UI designers, digital marketers, product managers, and agencies, who can use it to find bugs, improve user experience, and increase conversion rates.

Who Shouldn’t Use Hotjar?

Hotjar is an analytical tool that primarily guides businesses on improving conversion rates and user experience. However, it is not a substitute for Google Analytics, A/B testing, or bug-tracking tools.

Companies that work with sensitive data and are looking for advanced AI-driven insights should avoid Hotjar. Instead, they should opt for on-premises solutions.

Customer Support

Hotjar offers good customer support for its paid plans, but it is available only during Business hours (there is no 24/7 customer support). The free plan user needs to rely on its comprehensive Help Center, which includes guides, self-serving articles, and FAQs. 

Currently, they offer the following customer support channels:

• Email Support: Can be submitted via Hotjar’s website.
• In-App Chat: Available for Business and Scale plans.
• Help Center: 24/7 access to self-service articles, guides, and FAQs.
• Community & Feedback: A helpful community that answers doubts.

Use Cases

There are 8 popular use cases of Hotjar, as shown below.

• UX/UI Improvement: Hotjar lets you launch surveys, get feedback, understand where users drop off, and find bugs. Additionally, it helps users understand what grabs their attention and where they lose it. You can also use Hotjar’s Engage tool to interview the right participants for usability testing.
• Enhancing Conversion Rates: Improve conversion rates with heatmaps on high-traffic/bounce-rate pages. It also offers feedback polls and surveys via email to learn about the user’s needs.
• Understanding User Behavior: Get to know users through heat maps, recordings, and real-time feedback with feedback tools. It offers visualization to learn about users’ frustrations, what they find valuable, and what they think. Businesses can also run surveys to get deeper insights into various use cases, such as learning about website redesign. Furthermore, Hotjar Engage lets you conduct interviews remotely with important users.
• Collecting Direct User Feedback: Businesses can use Hotjar to collect direct user feedback via its proactive Feedback tools, such as user interviews, surveys, emails, feedback forms, website widgets, focus groups, and Questionnaires.
• A/B Testing Support: Hotjar offers A/B testing support via other A/B testing tools like Omniconvert, ABTasty, Unbounce, and Optimizely. Teams can understand which page is performing better with heatmaps, recordings, and other Hotjar visualization tools.
• Analyzing Form Abandonment: Learn how to improve cart abandonment by analyzing form abandonment through surveys. 
• Optimizing Landing Pages: Hotjar offers landing page optimization by understanding the target audience via running surveys and interviews. It also offers scroll, click, and move heatmaps to understand user behavior.
• Identifying User Pain Points: Get to know users’ pain points by running surveys, getting feedback, and understanding user behavior via recordings and heatmaps.

Hotjar Pros and Cons

Hotjar is a user-friendly analytical tool that enhances user understanding, directly improving conversions and user experience. It shines for B2B and eCommerce projects where it can directly help the business improve its sales.

On the other hand, Hotjar is equally good at finding bugs and getting direct feedback from users. Its core Heatmaps feature is handy and easy to use. 

Additionally, the free plan is its biggest plus point. It is self-sufficient for small businesses that can get positive information to make actual changes. 

As for integration, it supports widely popular tools and services such as Slack, HubSpot, Trello, and Asana. It also works with Zapier for custom integrations and automations.

However, Hotjar does have some drawbacks. It doesn’t support mobile apps, and works only for website apps and services. As for customization, surveys only offer basic options, and you cannot create custom reports. To bypass it, you need to rely on Zapier to send data to visualization and reporting tools like Google Sheets.

To summarize, Hotjar’s pros and cons are shown below.

Hotjar Pros

• Increases conversion rates
• Improves user experience
• Has extensive integrations support
• Helps find UI/UX bugs

Hotjar Cons

• It doesn’t support mobile apps and only works for desktop website apps
• Surveys offer basic customization options

Hotjar Alternatives

Crazy Egg, Fullstory, Mouseflow, Inspectlet, and Lucky Orange are Hotjar’s alternatives. In the sections below, I’ve provided details on what each tool offers and how it differs from Hotjar.

• Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg is a competitive alternative to Hotjar. It doesn’t offer a free plan, but does provide a 30-day free trial. The platform offers heatmaps, recordings, and surveys but lacks feedback widgets. It offers a dedicated AI-powered A/B tool that is easy to set up and provides continuous optimization opportunities.
• Fullstory: Fullstory helps you understand user behavior through AI-ready data analytics models. It collects as much user interaction data as possible from web/mobile elements such as form fields, drop-down menus, and CTA buttons. Unlike Hotjar, it supports mobile apps.
• Mouseflow: Mouseflow is an excellent alternative to Hotjar as it offers similar features, including heatmap analysis, direct user feedback, and reply user sessions. Additionally, it provides friction score calculation that gives insight into user difficulties. Some of Mouseflow’s other features include Conversion Funnels, Journey Mapping, and Form Analytics. As for pricing, both are closely priced with similar value for money.
• Inspectlet: Inspectlet is a web-based analytics software that offers a comprehensive feature set, including dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, error tracking, form tracking, and A/B testing. It is also GDPR-compliant.
• Lucky Orange: Lucky Orange offers dynamic heatmaps, surveys, and session recordings. It also offers live chat, conversion funnels, and an easy-to-use dashboard. However, it lacks interview features.

Hotjar Verdict

Hotjar is a popular insight analytical web tool capable of capturing user actions and transforming them into useful insights. It primarily targets B2B businesses, giving them the necessary tools, such as heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, etc., to improve conversion rates and user experience.

Hotjar’s biggest strength is its Heatmap feature, which lets you visualize user behavior. 

However, if you want the best outcome, all features must be used together, including session recordings to find user pain points, surveys to validate ideas, and a feedback button to understand user’s frustrations. 

Trends and Funnels are helpful for understanding user information and optimizing the overall user experience.

Additionally, Hotjar’s free plan is generous and useful for small businesses, with unlimited heatmap options. However, it is limited in features and can become restrictive as a business grows. 

This leads us to its paid plans. While their plans offer value for money, they can quickly become expensive for growing businesses.

Overall, I liked Hotjar despite its limitations, such as its lack of mobile app support. It offers a versatile user analytics tool and provides a complete package.

Hotjar receives the Geekflare Editorial’s Choice Award for providing beginner-friendly user behavior web analytics tools. It is competitively priced and offers a generous free plan, making it worth a try, especially for B2B businesses like eCommerce sites.