17 years helping Canadian businesses
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Hotjar
What Is Hotjar?
See how people are really using your site, and uncover insights to make the right changes. Use heatmaps to see the most popular (or unpopular) elements on a page. Combine them with session recordings to understand what's happening before and after. With Hotjar's all-in-one digital experience insights platform, you'll get to know your users at every step of their journey, through interviews, behavioral insights, and frequent feedback.
Who Uses Hotjar?
Businesses of all sizes, selling to consumers online. Web/UX Designers, Digital Marketers, Product Managers, UX Researchers, Data Analysts.
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Reviews of Hotjar
Alternatives Considered:
HotJar is an awesome tool for studying websites and optimizing!
Comments: Overall HotJar is a great platform and I am one of their biggest advocates. I would recommend HotJar to anyone looking to enhance their understanding of on-site traffic and conversion.
Pros:
At each company that I have worked for, I always bring up HotJar as a solution they should implement as soon as possible. It is so easy to use and allows for such a comprehensive view of the customer experience that it's a loss to NOT use it! I love that it can capture click data, scroll depth, and even user interactions on the website. There is so much valuable information to be pulled from the data!
Cons:
There are two things that I'm a little bummed out about with HotJar. One issue is that they recently removed cross-domain tracking. This was a great benefit and we used it often, so not having it is tough. They also have a limit on the height of the pages that can be captured, 1500px. Our pages are slightly larger so we lose some detail on the report that we would have otherwise had.
Hotjar Response
5 years ago
Hey Akande, Thanks so much for taking the time to review Hotjar! It's great to read that you're getting a lot of value from the tool :) It's indeed the case that we removed cross-domain tracking in light of our continued commitment to privacy-by-design. I'm sorry to hear that working with the tool is a bit tough without this - we'd like to help if we can! Do reach out to us at [email protected] if you've got questions. Following up your note on the height of captured pages for Heatmaps - we do have a 15000px limit, but if it's a pain point I'd definitely suggest using the Suggest a Feature function in-app to let us know what you need :) All best, Alex
Alternatives Considered:
The greatest resource for businesses conducting online transactions is Hotjar.
Comments: The SEO of websites is revolutionized by Hotjar. As if we had a hidden window into the brains of our guests. A wealth of information is available for comprehending user behavior through the live interviews, user comments, and visual insights. It is also quite easy to use.
Pros:
For individuals looking to increase revenue and maximize their conversion rate, this product is perfect. With Hotjar's features, teamwork will be easier and everyone on our team can gather the data required to make the right modifications to our website pages. They offer 24/7 support and customized training in the meantime to make sure I can get the most out of user behavior analysis on our website. Hotjar allows me to store data for a maximum of one year. If I want to know what's going on our website for an extended amount of time, this is a good alternative. One feature we've refined in FullSession is visitor recordings. In contrast to Hotjar, FullSession doesn't slow down our website aside from offering sophisticated filtering tools and comprehensive analytics.
Cons:
A few customers mentioned that they would have preferred a user behavioral analysis tool with greater depth. Predictive analytics, which could be useful in predicting user behavior, is not available in the software.
Comprehensive analytics
Comments: Combines qual and quant data, allowing businesses for experimentation and ultimately, optimisation. Excellent tool, highly recommend.
Pros:
Initially used it as part of green field platform launch - really helped us understand user behavior (via heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels), which is always useful, but particularly crucial this early on in the product lifecycle. Integration and use can be done by most non-techies, which gave us time and space to focus our engineers where it really mattered. Surveys are also available (though should be used sparingly as we quickly learned too many can also be annoying for the customer :d).
Cons:
not really a con, but performance is something to consider when integrating
Great little tool for starting your UX research
Comments: I would be surprised if there was a CRO or UX team that hasn't heard of Hotjar. It's a great little tool, especially given the price, but it doesn't allow enough flexibility to be your main on-site research tool. It's really good for starting out and doing some basic research. Sweet and simple! I guess marketers could benefit the most from this!
Pros:
Price. Simplicity of implementation. Good customer service. The scrollmaps and polls are my favourite, and only features I use.
Cons:
Potentially slows down the site. Loads the entire js even when only running a poll, so puts unnecessary load on the page speed. Forms have nearly never worked on any of the websites I have used it on. Funnel I don't really use - I don't see the point really. Free GA will still be far better and more useful at that. Polls have very simplistic targeting methods. Adding one or two new targeting triggers would be awesome...but they haven't released any new features in ages. Heatmaps are still very simple with no ability of segmenting the data. I can't complain for the really accessible prices they have been able to maintain though!
Hotjar Response
5 years ago
Hey Ioana! Thanks so much for leaving this review and sharing your thoughts on Hotjar. Following up your feedback - we're always focused on minimizing any increased page load time with the Hotjar script on your site. Have you checked out this resource? https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115009335727-Will-Hotjar-Slow-Down-My-Site- If you're having trouble please reach out at [email protected] and we can take a look with you. There's new targeting and filtering functionality on the product roadmap :) https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012303268-Product-Roadmap Stay tuned for that! All best, Alex
Alternatives Considered:
Great but too expensive
Comments: Hotjar is amazing but way overpriced. I rather use screen recordings and heatmaps from Microsoft Clarity (which is free) and only use Hotjar for on-site surveys etc.
Pros:
It gives you so much insights into how your visitors behave and think.
Cons:
The pricing... it's too expensive. Even though the functionality is brilliant, I would rather pay less for another service than using this one.
