No tool is perfect for every business, and Hotjar is no exception! Have you ever wondered what similar tools you can use instead, though?! If you’ve been looking for the best Hotjar alternatives, you’ve definitely faced the long, confusing list of services that failed to make your decision-making process any easier!
Hotjar is a web analytics platform and conversion rate optimization (CRO) tool that analyzes your visitors’ behavior and reports the results in a heatmap and recorded video. But let’s be honest! While Hotjar might meet your needs in some ways, it can hold you back in other aspects.
For instance, if you’d like to optimize your mobile app for users or if your website loading speed is important to you, you might want to steer clear of Hotjar. At any rate, we’re covering a comprehensive Hotjar review here! Then, we’ll work our way through a list of the ten best alternatives to help you make the best decision for your business!
However, if you can’t wait to start with the best Hotjar competitor out there, get started with WatchThemLive! Sign up now to take full advantage of its impressive features.
Now let’s get started, shall we?!
What Is Hotjar
This is a behavioral analytics tool used to analyze customer behavior. In other words, it analyzes user behavior and passes along customer feedback. But how? It will allegedly help you understand your visitors through different services like surveys, session replays, and a website heatmap tool.
Hotjar claims to give you complete data and information about what happened on your website and the reason for that event. Now, let’s dive deeper into its features before we discuss Hotjar’s pros and cons!
What Are the Main Hotjar Features
To understand where Hotjar fails, we should begin with what it offers in the first place! In this section, we intend to introduce the most important Hotjar features that provide website analytics data.
Heatmaps
In our data visualization blog, we previously discussed heatmaps and their numerous advantages at length. They are also one of Hotjar’s most prominent features. But how can they help? Well, to put it briefly, heatmaps show a color-coded representation of your visitors’ on-site activity.
That is, a heatmap uses colors to show every visitor’s action, such as mouse movement, scrolling, and clicking. You can also see the number of times users click on the same places.
To use this feature in Hotjar, you must first click on the ‘Heatmaps’ button on the main menu. At the top of the page, you can see different options that help you view the heatmap on a desktop, mobile, or tablet. Then, you can also filter the heat map report for various factors such as click, mouse movement, or scroll.
You can also decide whether to view only the reports or download them in JPEG or CSV format.
Session Recordings
This feature and the possibility of recording the page as viewed by visitors give you detailed data about each visitor’s session. Moreover, with session replay tools, you can see users’ clicks, taps, and movements in the form of a video.
To view your visitors’ recorded sessions, you can go to the main menu on Hotjar. In this section, the last 100 recorded navigations are displayed. In addition, you can select filters for visited pages, time spent on the website, device type, browser type, and OS.
Form Analysis
With the Hotjar form tracking feature, you can find out why some users didn’t fill out the forms completely. Moreover, you can see which questions have not been answered, how many times the user has filled in the blanks, etc.
According to their official website, you can visualize form pages using heatmaps and recordings. In addition, by setting up a custom event, you can track users’ interactions with each section on the form.
Hotjar Pros & Cons
Now, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of Hotjar, shall we?!
Hotjar Pros
- Hotjar pricing plans have a free package,
- There are filtering options for heatmaps (based on device),
- Plus, the user interface is user-friendly.
Hotjar Cons
- You have to integrate with other tools for funnel analysis,
- It will slow down your website loading speed,
- It has limited quantitative analytics capabilities,
- It doesn’t have a responsive customer service team,
- It doesn’t provide psychographic segmentation,
- Plus, you can’t customize the dashboard view.
Let’s see how Hotjar falls short and the reasons why you need an alternative. Ready for a ride?! Let’s go!
Why Should You Consider Hotjar Alternatives
Although it is popular for certain businesses, here are some of the areas where Hotjar falls short. Now, let’s delve deeper into each of its shortcomings. Ready?!
1. It Doesn’t Offer Funnel Analysis Anymore
If you want to see at which stage of a funnel the users drop off, you need to buy a second tool besides Hotjar. In some cases, you need to set up a manual integration with Google Analytics (GA).
Why is funnel optimization important?! With the information provided by this feature, we can find out which web pages had the worst bounce rates. Therefore, we can redesign and change those pages in order to attract more users.
For instance, when you find out the checkout page is the stage where most users leave, you can change and redesign it to attract and satisfy the customers.
2. Hotjar’s Tracking Events Requires Programming Knowledge
If you want to track a simple event like a button click, you need to write a Javascript code. Moreover, it is necessary to use Hotjar’s Event API. On top of these, you can’t use the event to create a funnel because Hotjar doesn’t offer funnel analysis. These drawbacks mean that non-technical clients can’t use it effectively. That is, they need technical experts on their team for defining or tracking events.
3. Hotjar has Limited Quantitative Analysis Features
In contrast to most tools listed below, Hotjar offers limited quantitative data. So, you won’t be provided with an in-depth analysis of your website performance.
4. Hotjar Makes Your Website Loading Time Longer
You need accurate data about your user interactions and behaviors, so you choose a behavior analytics tool to help you. But, suppose it will slow down your site’s loading speed, which is one of the most important factors. In this case, this analytics tool can’t possibly help you enhance conversion but will only increase your bounce rate.
Now, let’s get right into Hotjar alternatives, shall we?!
What Are the Best Hotjar Alternatives
By now, we have explained some of the reasons why you need an alternative to Hotjar. Here are the top alternatives you can use instead.
1. WatchThemLive: Best Free Hotjar Alternative
WatchThemLive is a user-friendly behavioral analytics and CRO tool that helps you analyze your customer’s behavioral data on the website. It summarizes how your visitors interact with your website and what has happened on it through invaluable features, like session replays and heatmaps.
If you’re ready to start with the best, don’t waste time; sign up right now!
WatchThemLive offers impressive features to pinpoint the challenges your visitors face that affect conversion rate. Let’s explain its features!
Session Replays (Recordings)
Want to understand the reason behind every cart abandonment? This feature helps you understand how your visitors navigate and interact with different web pages. Then, you can use the information to understand the issues, find an efficient solution to any UX problem your site faces, and increase conversion.
So, by reviewing recorded videos, you can easily find out how they interact with your website. Therefore, you can see your website UX from your visitors’ point of view and better understand the bugs and barriers that prevent them from buying.
Good news! WatchThemLive’s session recording feature identifies Javascript errors in your visitor’s browsers. Therefore, you can easily troubleshoot any problem by tracking and watching the errors on your visitors’ browsers.
What’s best, you can skip inactive parts in the recordings, share the sessions with your teams, and export the data into CSV and PDF.
Why are you waiting, then?! Sign up now and give it a try!
Heatmaps
This service shows users’ behavior on the website by displaying colors from red to blue. This way, the parts of the map that are displayed with warmer colors (red) show the most user interactions and the parts with cold colors (blue or purple) show the least user interaction.
In fact, heatmaps can be used to determine which areas of your webpage attract the most user attention. Consequently, you can optimize your user engagement by optimizing various elements on your website.
WatchThemLive offers three heatmaps for free, plus they are available for desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Website Analytics
WatchThemLive is a strong Hotjar alternative that can provide different quantitative and qualitative data. Unlike Hotjar, it offers a lot of helpful information about your website and visitors, including:
- The number of visitors,
- Page views,
- The pages that have the most visitors,
- Plus, the percentage of visitors who visited your website from each country,
- And other useful information about traffic sources, your visitors’ countries, referrers, and more.
The good news is that you can also see these data in visualized forms such as area maps, graphs, and line charts.
WatchThemLive’s other Features
Now, let’s take a look at WatchThemLive’s other services briefly:
Goal Tracking
Looking for a tool to figure out how much you’ve progressed? WatchThemLive’s goal-tracking feature tracks your goals with a few clicks.
Visual Live Chat
Do you struggle with supporting your customers and understanding their questions? Then, WatchthemLive’s live chat feature helps you get the recorded video of their sessions as soon as they leave a message in the chatbox.
Automated Video Testimonials
Looking for great social proof to improve your sales?! Well, video testimonials positively affect your customers. WatchThemLive provides this opportunity for you to gather videos of your satisfied customers answering pre-set questions.
So, what else do you want?! Sign up on WatchThemLive today and take full advantage of these amazing features!
Interested to learn more about its capabilities?! Read the WatchThemLive review! Now, let’s jump into other Hotjar competitors!
2. Smartlook: Alternative to Hotjar
This service is one of the Hotjar alternatives that analyze your visitor behaviors on the website as well as iOS and Android apps. According to their claims, it always records every visitor’s session automatically. Unlike Hotjar, Smartlook offers a funnel analysis feature, which is essential for converting visitors to customers.
Now, let’s take a look at its Pros and Cons.
Smartlook Pros
- It offers lightweight session recording,
- All the sessions from the same user /IP are recorded and grouped,
- And its retention tables enable you to understand user engagement and identify churn rates.
Smartlook Cons
- It is expensive,
- There is no feedback widget to collect user feedback,
- Moreover, you can’t filter user feedback and survey responses.
3. FullSession: One of Hotjar’s Alternatives
It is a website optimization tool that analyzes visitors’ behaviors on the website, web pages, and landing pages. It claims to help you find where users experience setbacks as they visit your website.
According to their claims, this service is for product managers, marketing teams, web designers, and UX designers. Moreover, this Hotjar competitor asserts to analyze behaviors without slowing down your website’s loading speed.
FullSession Pros
- It offers advanced filtering options,
- You can create specific user segments to analyze particular users,
- It also claims to allow you to perform data analysis without increasing your website loading time.
FullSession Cons
- It doesn’t have a free version,
- Plus, it lacks A/B testing,
- And they don’t provide mobile app surveys.
4. FullStory: One of Hotjar Competitors
Although it is an alternative to Hotjar, both are similar tools for analyzing user behavior on your website. However, there are some differences between them, which we will discuss in the next section.
Fullstory is product experience software that compiles all users’ interactions in a list. It also offers funnel analysis, visitor segmentation, filtering options to narrow down visitors’ actions, and more.
FullStory Pros
- You can monitor every step of your visitors across different web pages,
- And, it enables you to spot specific events.
FullStory Cons
- It is hard to understand its analytics data,
- You can’t easily track specific events during session replay,
- Plus, it is quite expensive.
5. Crazy Egg: One of the Alternatives to Hotjar
This tool analyzes and evaluates users’ behavior and displays the results as reports, which can be very effective in website optimization. Crazy Egg provides features like snapshots, heatmaps, scroll maps, overlays, list reports, and recordings.
Here are CrazyEgg’s pros and cons:
Crazy Egg Pros
- It offers A/B testing,
- Plus, it has a responsive support team.
Crazy Egg Cons
- It doesn’t offer a free plan,
- It doesn’t capture all users’ sessions,
- There is no survey service,
- Moreover, it lacks a feedback widget.
6. ContentSquare: One of Hotjar Alternatives
You can analyze your website’s performance and functionality by monitoring customer movements on your website through ContentSquare. This service claims to discover the customer experience and understand how they interact with your site, from login to logout.
It provides features like zone-based heatmaps, session replays, AI insights, surveys, conversion tracking, and customer segmentation. Now it’s time to briefly check ContentSquare’s pros and cons.
ContentSquare Pros
- Its report lets you pinpoint the areas on your website that cause funnel drop-offs,
- With a zone-based heatmap, you can understand how specific customer segments interact with your website,
- It also provides integration with various marketing, VoC, and chat tools.
ContentSquare Cons
- You can’t upload a CSV/PDF list of mapping criteria,
- It has a long loading time,
- Plus, the tool slows down your website,
- Plus, when you add a new webpage, it takes a while before the maps update.
Still looking for better alternatives to Hotjar?! Keep reading.
7. Lucky Orange: One of Hotjar’s Competitors
It is another alternative for Hotjar that helps you understand what the users did on your website before leaving it and why they left your website without any clicks or conversions. Lucky Orange offers analytics features like Heatmaps, session replays, funnel, form analytics, and live chat.
Lucky Orange Pros
- It has a clutter-free interface,
- And, it offers live chat and pop-up announcements.
Lucky Orange Cons
- The session recording tool often loses a user if s/he moves between web pages,
- Its customer chat feature is basically unusable,
- Plus, there is a steep learning curve.
8. MouseFlow: Hotjar Alternative
You can see videos of user interaction on your website, including every click, mouse movement, and scroll. Moreover, you can also have heatmaps from different time periods so you can see the impact of changes you made on your webpage.
This SaaS software claims to help turn most of the users into customers by figuring out why they don’t convert. Mouseflow offers analytics features such as session replays, heatmaps, conversion funnels, surveys, and more.
MouseFlow Pros
- It is easy to use and implement,
- Plus, you can record all users’ sessions or only some of them.
MouseFlow Cons
- It’s an expensive service,
- Moreover, It has limitations on its plans (for example, its free plan provides only 500 recordings per month).
9. Inspectlet: One of Hotjar’s Competitors
It is a website analytics tool that has combined CRO and debugging features like A/B testing and error logging. It is similar to Hotjar in features like session recording, heat mapping, and feedback surveys. In other words, they also have some limitations in the events tracking and funnel analysis feature. Moreover, it can just analyze websites.
But Inspectlet provides three more features compared to Hotjar, including A/B testing, form analytics, and error logging.
Inspectlet Pros
- It offers more recorded sessions compared to Hotjar,
- Plus, it can identify errors on your website.
Inspectlet Cons
- It stores data for a short time (1 to 6 months),
- And, it stops recording users’ sessions to prevent from monthly quota, but unfortunately, you will miss some important recordings.
10. UserTesting: The last Hotjar Alternative
It is a customer insights analytics platform that records all user activity in videos. Using this service, you can create a test plan to ask customers about their experience and watch a recorded session of them to determine issues in the customer journey map. In other words, you ask real users to do a particular task and then ask them about their experience.
Therefore, you will have customers’ feedback and know the users’ real thoughts about your brand. Some of the main features of UserTesting is customer segmentation, A/B testing, surveys, and screen recording. Now, let’s take a quick look at its pros and cons:
UserTesting Pros
- It offers an intuitive user interface,
- It is easy to set up tests,
- Plus, it enables you to watch all users’ sessions.
UserTesting Cons
- Its dashboard doesn’t display analytics data,
- It is hard to see a visual representation of data,
- And, it takes a long time to load after the test.
Final Verdict on The Best Hotjar Alternative
So far, we’ve explained the key features of the top alternatives to Hotjar. Here is an overview table to help you make an informed decision. Ready for a ride?! Let’s go!
Now, it’s time to choose the best Hotjar alternative!
We hope this comparison table gives you enough information to choose the best Hotjar competitor for your business needs. If you want to understand visitor behaviors on your website, it’s good to stick with a platform that works well for your business.
WatchThemLive is the best alternative to Hotjar (for free) in this comparison guide. You might be wondering what its incredible features are?! Let’s see!
Well, this analytics software provides real-time session recording and replay tools that aid you in identifying the causes of funnel drop-offs. Moreover, You can see the visualized form of users’ actions in real time through its heatmaps. What’s best is that you’ll get access to users’ sessions after they leave a message in the chat box to find the problem immediately.
With WatchThemLive, you’ll never miss any necessary analytics. It combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand users’ behaviors and increase conversion rates. Sign up now and start its free plan!
FAQs on Hotjar Alternatives (Free & Paid)
Here are some frequently asked questions to help you learn more about Hotjar and its alternatives.
1. Is Hotjar Slowing Down My Website?
Unfortunately, yes. According to their official website, they don’t guarantee that your website loading speed will not be affected while using Hotjar. They claim any piece of JavaScript code added will affect your website somehow. To sum up, Hotjar will increase the loading time of your website.
2. Is Hotjar GDPR Complaint?
Yes, GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation) will be applied to you while you use Hotjar. In other words, using Hotjar services is completely legal under GDPR.
This rule defines personal data as information relating to individuals’ private, public, and professional lives. This information includes photos, names, bank details, device ID, IP address, etc.
3. Hotjar vs. Crazy Egg: Which One Is Better?
Crazy Egg is a CRO and web analytics tool with heatmaps, session recording, A/B testing, and features for analyzing your website traffic rate. In the following, we discuss Crazy Egg vs. Hotjar similarities and differences to help you choose the suitable one.
Hotjar vs. Crazy Egg: Similarities
- Both of them are easy to learn,
- Plus, Both of them have heatmaps,
- They are CRO tools that aim to show you user behaviors and help increase conversions.
- On top of these, both of them have negative impacts on website loading time.
Hotjar vs. Crazy Egg: Differences
- While Hotjar stands out with surveys and user feedback, Crazy Egg offers A/B testing,
- Crazy Egg’s quantitative data are more limited than Hotjar’s because it doesn’t record all users’ sessions,
- Crazy Egg only offers a free trial for its plans, but Hotjar has a free plan.
Which One Is the Winner?
CrazyEgg is a suitable platform for understanding what your visitors are doing on your website. It is similar to Hotjar’s old version before the transition in 2022. Compared to Hotjar, Crazy Egg’s customization is much cheaper regarding the number of user sessions you can record. In other words, Crazy Egg’s first paid plan costs $29 per month, which offers 3,000 recordings per month, but Hotjar’s plan costs $32.
But if you’re looking for better alternatives to Hotjar and Crazy Egg, we recommend WatchThemLive. One big difference between WatchThemLive and Crazy Egg is their pricing plans. WatchThemLive has a free version that includes up to 1,000 user recordings per month, and its first paid plan provides 10,000 sessions, whereas Crazy Egg doesn’t offer any free plan at all. Moreover, its $ 29/month plan only includes 3,000 user recordings.
Which one is more affordable?! Why are you waiting?! Sign up now and Get instant access to WatchThemLive’s free plan!
Conclusion
In today’s day and age, tracking user behaviors is essential for improving UX and conversion in eCommerce marketing. Hotjar is a behavioral analytic tool that provides decent user behavior metrics, but like other software, there are some areas where Hotjar falls short.
So, we reviewed its shortcomings, introduced the best Hotjar alternatives, and discussed each of them and their features. We hope our list has helped you decide which alternative suits you!
To make this decision-making process easier, we recommended WatchThemLive as the best free alternative to Hotjar to get perfect and valuable data. So, if you’ve decided you want an all-in-one behavioral analytics tool to cover all Hotjar shortcomings, WatchThemLive is the number one tool. Make sure to Sign up on WatchThemLive and take full advantage of its free plan!
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No tool is perfect, Hotjar is no exception! Are you considering other services? Let’s look at the list of the 10 best Hotjar alternatives and competitors in 2023!
