We stand for 🇺🇦 Ukraine. You can find more information and donate here

0You discovered
% of information

17 Best Hotjar Alternatives & Competitors

The e-commerce world is always about alternatives or competitors. Hotjar also has alternatives. Not only can your customers go to another company or website – you, as a business owner, also have a choice. This choice is related to every process, including the tools you use for website analytics.

Since its launch in 2014, Hotjar has significantly advanced in its popularity. Today, it’s one of the most renowned alternatives for online business. However, although Hotjar deserves all the credit it gets, its competitors may be more suitable in some cases.

Many online resources rush to start tracking their visitor behavior so much that they skip the preparatory stage. Yet, this stage is essential to pick the optimum service among a gazillion of alternatives and competitors. The right choice may save you money and provide valuable data.

To help you select software with the necessary features, we have completed this detailed overview. It’s not a rating of 17 best Hotjar alternatives and competitors, so that you may disregard the positioning. Instead, we want to highlight the main Hotjar features and compare them to the characteristics of other products, including pros and cons, prices, and the availability of free versions.

What is a Heatmap?

Heatmap displays the data on customer activity with the help of color-coding. This means that the statistics on visitor interactions are converted into the corresponding color and shade. The level of heat reflects the level of user activity. The places clicked the most often are yellow and red, whereas ignored spots are cold blue or green.

Why You Need a Heatmap

The tools like Google Analytics show which pages are popular among users, but there is one key thing they cannot do. They don’t provide metrics on how visitors behave, what makes them convert, and what nudges them into leaving. Web analytics Hotjar competitors can help you step into your visitors’ shoes. Their features allow you to see where website visitors stop, what order users click elements, how deep customer scroll pages, and more.

Components of Heatmaps

Heatmapping software is a broad category that comprises several types of tools. The features of every product vary depending on the provider. Whereas some companies focus on click collection, other competitors specialize in screen recording and scroll tracking.

Hover maps

The creators of such software believe that the cursor’s position reflects how we look at the page. For example, if most visitors focus on a specific place, the spot is trendy. If the element located there isn’t that important, you should replace it with something critical like a Buy button or its alternatives. This, way hover maps help understand where to add calls-to-action, buttons, and other elements that make website visitors convert.

Click maps

Click maps look similarly to hover maps. The algorithms of these alternatives to Hotjar differ. Click maps are based on aggregated click data. In other words, unlike their hover competitors, they calculate completed clicks. The more clicks, the warmer the element, and vice versa.

They show when visitors click inactive elements or try to use the URLs that lead to nowhere. What’s the point here? Let’s talk numbers. 57% of users won’t recommend a company with a poorly designed mobile website; 38% – can leave a web resource because of an unattractive layout or content.

Scroll maps

This kind of heatmapping Hotjar alternatives isn’t critical if you run a simple website with short web pages. Still, there are several cases when scroll maps are essential. For example, they effectively help to optimize long forms or landing pages. You get a chance to see how much patience your visitors have and what makes them lose it. Maybe, it’s a field that asks to provide their phone number? Or a Subscribe button? You never know unless you use a scroll map.

Remember that a combination of several tools that complement each other is always better than one tool. Therefore, make sure to pick a product that unites the listed features and provides a bird’ eye view of your website’s performance.

What is Hotjar and What it Can Do For Your Website?

It allows you to get detailed information on how users browse your website. It doesn’t substitute Google Analytics or similar alternatives and competitors. Hotjar completes their data. It was designed for website owners and marketers who want to stay updated on their customers’ tastes and preferences.

Hotjar Features

Hotjar consists of a traditional set of heatmaps and provides excellent form analysis features. Here are details on both features.

Heatmapping software. It provides everything necessary to see how users perceive your website and navigate. Besides, Hotjar records and displays data by device type (desktops, mobiles, and tablets). This lets you view separate statistics on the desktop and responsive versions of your web resource. Sometimes, mobile versions have subtle flaws that make smartphone users go to your competitors despite not being noticeable on desktops. Tuning up your website usability will improve customer retention and make your business more profitable.
Form analysis (predictably) helps to see how visitors interact with your online forms. You can discover which fields are left unfilled or why customers decide to abandon a form. This data is a wonderful resource for adapting your forms to users’ preferences and increasing your response rate. The higher the response rate, the more conversions you have. Note that not all Hotjar alternatives and competitors support form analysis.

This is one of the most popular mapping tools used by website owners and marketers to perfect their web resources and customer experience.

Hotjar Pricing

The price of this service is very flexible. The cost depends on the number of pageviews/ day collected and additional features. It is worth mentioning that for paid plans, Hotjar offers a 15-day trial and 30-day money-back guarantee. This approach allows users to evaluate the features of Hotjar and compare it to other alternatives and competitors before they subscribe.

Generally, there are 3 subscription plans:

Personal. This plan can be either Basic (test mode) or Plus. You will get a chance to collect 2,000 pageviews/day with limited reports and 365-day data storage. If these Hotjar features cannot satisfy your needs, you can switch to Personal Plus for €29/month to get 10,000 pageviews/day, unlimited reports.
Business. From €89 to €589 per month, Business Hotjar provides advanced features and removes Hotjar branding elements from polls, surveys, etc. The cheapest option supports 20,000 pageviews/day, the most expensive – 400,000 pageviews/day.
Agency. Maximum Hotjar features discussed on a per-customer basis.

Hotjar Integrations

The tool integrates with:

WordPress
Hubspot
Wix
Segment
Drupal
Magento
Prestashop
Unbounce
Weebly
more…

Hotjar Support, Documentation, and Data Security

This service has taken care of its customers and created detailed manuals and a step-by-step guide on every feature. There are also FAQs and an explanation of the differences between Hotjar and Google Analytics.

We recommend to read the next articles:

Best Hotjar Alternatives and Competitors to Consider in 2023

The website analytics industry is rapidly growing with the regular launch of new tools. Let’s take a look at the best options you may test in 2023.

Plerdy Alternative to Hotjar

Plerdy as One of the Alternatives

Plerdy is a CRO & SEO platform that helps business owners, marketers, CRO, SEO, and UX/UI professionals grow their online business relying on accurate user behavior data.

Plerdy already includes 7 products:

Heatmap
PopUP Forms
SEO checker
Session Replay
Event Tracking
Sales Performance
Conversion Funnel.

Comparing Hotjar vs. Plerdy, for example, Plerdy heatmap is better than:

Data is tied to specific elements and doesn’t look like unrelated color spots.
All data is displayed on website pages in real-time instead of screenshots.
Plerdy collects clicks on dynamic elements.
All reports are available both for mobile and desktop devices.
Data segmentation by traffic channel.
Data segmentation by customer group.
Data segmentation by country.
First, click testing.
Sales impact analysis for each element.

Each of the Plerdy products helps solve at least 6-10 business or marketing problems.

Pros of Plerdy as One of the Competitors

Unlike Hotjar, Plerdy collects data on dynamic objects
Affordable prices
Individual tags for event tracking
SEO alerts with updates about website performance and changes

“Plerdy offers a ton of functionality! I replaced HotJar with Plerdy when Hotjar changed their plans and moved a bunch of features around. I think Plerdy is lighter weight, so it doesn’t bog our site down as much, but they include so many SEO and performance tools Hotjar doesn’t that I’m still discovering new ones and how to utilize the software best.” – Mark E.

Plerdy Pricing

Econom – $29, Business – $59, Premium – $99, Enterprise – discussed individually. The pricing influences page views, active pages, months of data storage, smart form functionality, and other additional features. A free version is available.

Mouseflow Alternative to Hotjar

Mouseflow is a website conversion platform with a classic set of features. Mouseflow integrates with Google Analytics, Shopify, PrestaShop, Magento, and other popular CRM and marketing alternatives.

Hotjar vs Mouseflow

According to customer reviews, Hotjar is easier to use than Mouseflow and provides more decent customer support. Besides, it stores analytics data for 1 year, at least two times longer than Mouseflow.

Both competitors can be used to track customer conversion funnel and website behavior. The alternatives have almost the same trial period for paid subscriptions: 14 days (Mouseflow) and 15 days (Hotjar)

Pros

Mouseflow is awesome because it allows me to see how people interact with my pages both individually and group stats, so I can see trends and optimize my pages and my funnel based upon the data I’ve received. – Michelle B.

Cons

If you use WordPress and the Mouseflow plugin, you may find it slowing down your page load speed. Manually installing the scripts should help improve performance. – Josh M.

Crazy Egg Alternative to Hotjar

Crazy Egg is known for its Confetti filter that allows tracking referral sources to see where your website users come from. You can also choose from other metrics such as time of day, operating system, device type, campaign source, browser type, and more.

Hotjar vs Crazy Egg

Both competitors offer heatmap reports supported on mobile devices. You can see how visitors interact with your website and content depending on various factors. Hotjar includes a move map feature that Crazy Egg doesn’t have, whereas Crazy Egg has a 30-day trial (compared to 15 days of Hotjar)

Pros

The ability to map how users are interacting with our pages — where they’re clicking, where they’re not clicking, how far down they’re scrolling — has made it so much easier for our team to evaluate the effectiveness of pages and adjust the content and design accordingly. – Jason N.

Cons

The biggest downside is the hassle of setting up heat maps separately for every page, as opposed to automatically creating heap map pages across the whole site. You have to track individual pages explicitly. A hassle, but once setup, it works well. – Tony F.

Lucky Orange Alternative to Hotjar

You will get access to your personal Lucky Orange dashboard, conversion funnels, visitor recordings, heatmaps, form analytics, users polls, and, most importantly, chats.

Hotjar vs Lucky Orange

If you have a very limited budget, this may be a valid reason to opt for Lucky Orange. Besides, you should pick this option from all Hotjar competitors if you need live chats. Other than that, Hotjar provides broader functionality and better performance.

Pros

I love the heat maps and recorded sessions. It tells me what customers are clicking on and what’s happening with my site. I haven’t tried competitors, and I don’t need to. It has everything I need. – Lydia M.

Cons

Not many downsides, although sometimes there are some issues with screenshotting heat maps as they don’t come out right, nothing other than. I’d like more webinars from Lucky Orange – Kayleigh F.

Freshmarketer Alternative to Hotjar

Freshmarketer is a marketing automation tool powered by Freshworks. It’s one of 13 tools currently available from this provider. Freshmarketer automatically detects a device type to display the necessary heatmap format and includes a built-in split testing feature.

Hotjar vs Freshmarketer

The biggest concern of Freshmarketer users is its price. While most Hotjar alternatives fall under the same price range (monthly subscription starts from around $30), Freshmarketer is at least 1.5 times more pricey. Since Freshmarketer is actively developed, users often complain about some bugs. On the other hand, Hotjar is a well-tested product with smooth performance. If you want more information, you can check a separate Freshmarketer’s document comparing it with Hotjar as one of the alternatives.

Pros

It helped me send mass email campaigns. This platform saves my time a lot. – Pradeep K.

Cons

It’s a good tool, but probably the “contact” section could be improved to the segment it faster and see the hottest leads and the most engaged users or readers of an email. – Iryna Z.

Glassbox Alternative to Hotjar

It’s the best of Hotjar alternatives if you want to get recordings of user behavior. Yet note that it takes a lot of time to process such videos.

Hotjar vs Glassbox

Glassbox provides insufficient information about its prices and features. According to the reviews, it’s more expensive than Hotjar and is more suitable for medium and large enterprises.

Pros

I like the customer journey recap, and it helps our business team to validate the pain points of customers, thereby we reduce the painpoints of customers by creating the enhancements. – Aarthi K.

Cons

Make it easier to search and sort through recordings it can be a bit much would be great for us and our needs and would give us a better experience with the product – Latisa J.

Inspectlet Alternative to Hotjar

Compared to other Hotjar alternatives and competitors, Inspectlet is more focused on session recording. Click maps and scroll maps are just complementary features.

Hotjar vs Inspectlet

Whereas Hotjar doesn’t offer real-time analytics, Inspectlet immediately displays statistics on customer interactions. Both competitors provide a test version and several paid options.

Pros

It is very easy to use. I like it is quite economical, and it offers videos in an explicit and detailed way, the interaction of the users, with a good quality of the video, without losing any detail and giving a complete report. It has useful and complete functions. – Thania C.

Cons

The only problem is the price is inconsistent. It could be a little more adjusted according to the tools it offers. However, I will continue using it because it is an essential tool, with a powerful utility takes us much beyond knowledge. – Nicohlas S.

Contentsquare Alternative to Hotjar

Contentsquare is a cloud-based marketing analytics platform. Unfortunately, they don’t provide sufficient information to compare their service with other competitors and alternatives.

Hotjar vs Contentsquare

Both competitors include personal dashboards, provide behavior mapping features, and support all platforms (web, iOS, Android, Mac, Cloud).

Pros

CS Live is the best part of the tool. It allows me and the wider team to conduct analysis quickly and efficiently without loads of training. These are the insights are the most sharable and appreciated by the wider business too. – Adriana S.v

Cons

It is tough to find faults in Contentsquare’s analytical platform. If I had to pick one thing, I would say the first attempts at setting up zoning for a/b tests were a little tricky. Still, the CS team spent time talking me through what I needed, and I was all set. – Kathryn J.

Clicky Alternative to Hotjar

Clicky is a web analytics service with heatmaps, session replays, SEO, and SMM tools. Like Plerdy we have described above, it supports alerts that will instantly inform you about any significant changes on your website. Don’t let the outdated interface confuse you – it’s a quality platform.

Hotjar vs Clicky

The setup process of these two alternatives is very similar. They can also be installed with the help of Google Tag Manager or as plugins for WordPress, Shopify, Magento, and other popular platforms. Compared to Hotjar, Clicky is quite inconvenient to users without proper knowledge of English. The localizalition process is performed on a volunteer basis. Generally, Clicky is more suitable for website analytics, whereas Hotjar is recommended for conversion optimization. Thus, make sure you know your needs before choosing any of the competitors.

Pros

In-depth analytics, with many ways to customize the data to your preference. The live traffic snapshot is also very helpful for spikes. Very reasonable pricing as well. Their integration into SheerSEO is also handy. – Peter A.

Cons

Clicky is a viable alternative to Google Analytics for easy and easy-to-understand reports for and uses. Enterprise users may prefer Amore’s sophisticated platform for measuring the website performance. – Ashish S.

Fullstory Alternative to Hotjar

Fullstory provides ultimate customization since you can black- or whitelist domains, geographic location, or IP to enable or disable recording.

Hotjar vs Fullstory

Fullstory provides features for UX improvement and is more expensive than Hotjar, but it also offers more features. Both competitors are GDPR compliant and very easy to install.

Pros

The session replay tool is second to none. Replay Fidelity is practically flawless. FullStory gives insight into the site I don’t know how else we would get. – Alex H.

Cons

There is a learning curve, and I wish you could have separation for different types of users. UX, PM, CX and Devs have different goals, and it would be nice to be able to focus based on the type of user. – Krista W.

Optimizely Alternative to Hotjar

Optimizely is more than one of Hotjar’s competitors – these tools integrate.

Hotjar vs Optimizely

To put it shortly, Optimizely is a multi-functional platform for A/B front-end testing. It can do what Hotjar doesn’t, and vice versa.

It’s quite hard to tell which of these competitors is more suitable since they are designed for different purposes. Optimizely can create different versions of a web page to test its effectiveness, whereas Hotjar is meant for user behavior analytics and CRO. If you cannot afford to pay for two of these alternatives, mind your primary needs.

Pros

So easy to use, different content can be sorted through with ease & I would not be able to access the insights provided through any other platform – Suresh R.

Cons

I found it went quite slow when I first began using it – Stephen G.

Matomo Alternative to Hotjar

Matomo is a web analytics platform that can be hosted on your server.

Hotjar vs Matomo

Both alternatives pay a lot of attention to user data privacy and GDPR compliance. Nevertheless, Matomo took security a step further and launched GDPR Manager, which can check whether a specific website is compliant. In terms of pricing, Matomo and Hotjar belong to the same category. In Matomo, you can buy additional pageviews for €2 or €3, which is great if you don’t want to upgrade your account.

Pros

I’m in love with the Matomo. It provides me with lots of details about activities on my website. One of the reasons for having Matomo over Google Analytics is I have full control over the statistical data of customer activity on my website. – Waqas S.

Cons

You do need to roll up your sleeves and prepare for installation support on your server; you will need some experience and admin access to complete and trouble-shoot. – John W.

VWO Alternative to Hotjar

In VWO, a heatmap is only an additional tool. This service is dedicated to website UX and design testing. The team of VWO stresses that this tool can do more than HotJar and its alternatives and even illustrates this with a table. The product comprises several tools, including VWO testing, VWO Insights, VWO Fullstack, VWO Engage, and VWO plan. You can combine them to your liking.

Hotjar vs VWO

It’s also a very effective service for A/B testing which is unavailable in Hotjar. You can use it to see how users react to your design solutions before making drastic changes.

Pros

I like the combination of insights tools (heatmaps, screen recordings) with test segments. This cuts down on the tools needed to answer deeper questions. – Ben Y.

Cons

Considering there are a lot of nuances to using VWO, it would help if the documentation is much more detailed as it gets difficult to contact the support team so often. – Vatsala S.

Ptengine Alternative to Hotjar

Ptengine functionality is mainly suitable for website analytics and customer engagement. Unfortunately, the website doesn’t provide detailed information about Ptengine features.

Hotjar vs Ptengine

Ptengine has a lot in common with Google Analytics. Yet, it cannot fully substitute Hotjar since the features are more limited. In case you are looking for something tried and tested, Ptengine may not be the best choice.

Pros

Ptengine is perfect for website performance analysis and growth. The tools in Ptengine help to track user interaction and behavior on the website in real-time, A/B testing, Heatmaps, Real-time user activity tracking is very useful in sales, marketing and service automation. – Sandeep S.

Cons

There is no dislike in this tool, but try to decrease the cost for premium packages, so everyone can use the premium packages. The tool is best for all the website analytics. – Satyamurthy C.

Zoho Pagesense Alternative to Hotjar

Zoho Pagesense is a conversion optimization platform that allows you to set performance goals, conduct A/B website design testing and URL split testing.

Hotjar vs Zoho Pagesense

These guys dedicated a separate page on their website to explain why Zoho Pagesense is better than Hotjar, its competitors and alternatives. They boast iframe support, goals tracking.

Pros

Excellent tracking capabilities and good UX as well. It can be set up easily to track your customers with heatmaps, session recordings, funnels, etc. It is a can do all platform.- Shivansh P.

Cons

Sometimes there will be a decision paralysis. When you have multiple integrations you might not need but still have to deal with.Can ruin your overall user experience – Hanumantha Rao B.

Smartlook Alternative to Hotjar

Like many other described competitors and alternatives, Smartlook is a website conversion platform. It works well both on websites and Android or iOS apps.

Hotjar vs Smartlook

Both competitors are GDPR compliant, so you won’t need to worry about data privacy while using them. Besides, they provide a money-back guarantee, which is great.

Whereas Hotjar can offer you more in terms of features, Smartlook provides a deeper insight into user behavior. If you just need to see how users behave on your web resource, opt for Smartlook. Otherwise, you may need something more diverse and multifunctional.

Pros

The best part of the tool is the way we can review the customer’s on-screen navigation throughout the time users are on your website. I have never witnessed a tool doing this apart from screen capture. – Arla C.

Cons

The operating system can lag a bit. I also would like a way to flag a little bit easier, especially putting flags at pinpoints in the user experience. It would be great to see continued improvement to the heat mapping as well. – Kailey H.

Summing Up

As you can see, the options are almost unlimited. We won’t recommend you to use certain alternatives and competitors since everything depends on your needs. Just remember that despite being very effective, Hotjar isn’t the only option. Sometimes, a service with simpler features and a focus on heatmapping may be all you need.