Author: Mohamed Sehwail

Hotjar and FullStory are examples of behavior analytics tools that help you monitor user behavior, optimize your website, and increase conversions. While they share similar features, like session recordings and heat maps, key differences also set them apart.

In this article, we’ll discuss these key differences and how they affect your user experience analysis. We’ll also highlight a great alternative – FullSession, our web analytics platform. 

It provides you with session recordings and replays, interactive heatmaps, customer feedback forms, funnel and conversion tracking, error analysis, and advanced analytics. These features help you identify friction points and frustration signals, collect customer feedback, and improve product performance.

Let’s begin this in-depth comparison article by explaining the basics of Hotjar, FullStory, and FullSession as an alternative to both.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a behavioral and product experience analytics software designed to help product teams and e-commerce brands understand user behavior via session recordings, heatmaps, and customer feedback tools.

Hotjar also helps you eliminate guesswork by asking customers where they encounter issues and have objections to your website. With Hotjar, you can observe what website visitors do on your site and track actions like button clicks, scrolls, and mouse hovering. You can use these insights to improve the overall user experience. 

To learn more about this tool, you can read our Hotjar review.

What is FullStory?

FullStory is website analytics software that helps businesses analyze how users interact with various web and mobile elements, such as drop-down menus, call-to-action buttons, form fields, and more.

FullStory helps you identify website bugs and challenges that various user segments experience when using your website. You can use the data to provide support, improve your site, and optimize the customer experience.

What is FullSession?

FullSession is our customer experience analytics software that helps you collect user feedback and track and analyze user behavior while interacting with your website, web app, or landing page. 

It allows you to identify areas where web visitors rage click, experience issues on your site, and fail to convert into paying customers. With this data, you can fix bugs, improve the user experience, and increase conversion rates.

Our user behavioral analytics tool helps product managers, digital marketing teams, web designers, UX researchers, and UX designers visualize user events and track the customer journey. 

They have session recordings and replay tools, click, mouse movement, and scroll heat maps, conversion and funnel tracking, error analysis, customer feedback tools, and advanced UX analytics at their disposal.

Hotjar vs FullStory: How They Compare and Contrast

At first glance, Hotjar and FullStory are pretty similar. They’re both web analytics tools that help you collect and interpret quantitative and qualitative data on website visitors’ user behavior.

While both tools have similarities, they also have key differences that set them apart. In this section, we’ll explore how both solutions compare and contrast.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Basic differences

Here are the primary differences between Hotjar and FullStory:

1. Hotjar combines user behavioral data with user feedback to help you understand how website visitors behave across various web pages and what they think about your site. FullStory, on the other hand, lets you analyze user behavior through funnel analysis to identify areas where users drop off the funnel.
2. The Hotjar platform gives you an overview of user behavior and the insights you need to improve the user interface. FullStory provides search functionality, and it records each user interaction. You use its search functionality to find user events and support your customers.
3. Hotjar doesn’t let you analyze user behavior on mobile apps, while FullStory helps you analyze user behavioral data on mobile apps and websites.
4. Hotjar focuses on helping UX teams monitor user behavior and get customer feedback to improve website usability and lead generation. FullStory enables you to identify the user experiences of specific user segments and fix website bugs.

Hotjar vs FullStory: User rating

According to Capterra, Hotjar scores 4.7 out of 5 based on 515 user reviews, while FullStory scores 4.6 out of 5 based on 66 user reviews. 

Hotjar vs FullStory: Use cases

Hotjar and FullStory serve similar industries, starting from e-commerce, digital marketing, and product development. They are beneficial for marketing, product development, and customer support teams.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Deployment

You can deploy both Hotjar and Fullstory the same way. You need to copy their Javascript codes into your website source code. The code snippet logs user actions like scrolls, page views, button clicks, mouse movements, and other user interactions.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Features

Here, we’ll compare features feature by feature. First, we’ll examine the features both platforms share and then move on to those that differentiate them.

Heatmaps

Both Hotjar and FullStory provide the heatmap user behavioral tool. With Hotjar, you can use heatmaps to identify friction in the customer experience. You can see where users spend the most time and what impacts their customer journey. 

Heatmaps also reveal how users interact with key elements on your web pages, including where users click and scroll. 

When using heatmaps, you can visualize user behavioral data via colors. Red indicates the sections of your web pages with the highest engagement, while blue indicates those with the least interaction. A heatmap, in this context, is divided into other facets of on-site user interaction. 

      1. Scroll maps

Scroll maps show how far users scroll on your website, including the specific percentage for each page section. This way, you can determine whether your pages are too long and why some web page elements don’t get attention.

      2. Click maps

Click maps show you where users click on your website. You can use the data to know the buttons, links, and CTAs users click the most.

      3. Movement maps

While both tools offer scroll and click maps, they differ in another case.

Hotjar provides another type of heatmap that you won’t find on the FullStory platform: movement maps. This feature shows you user mouse movement patterns so you can see the web elements your users like to interact with the most. 

For example, if customers keep navigating around your page’s header, it’s ideal to place CTAs or lead capture links there.

Session recording

While heatmaps are ideal for showing you the web elements that gain the most and least attention, you’ll still want to see how users act when navigating your web pages, and this is where session recordings come into play.

Hotjar and FullStory provide this feature, but FullStory names it “Session Replay.” FullStory offers advanced functionality in its session recordings feature. For instance, you can link customer complaints to a session replay so that customer support can quickly understand the context and solve customer problems.

Heatmaps vs session replays

Unlike heatmaps, the session replay functionality does not provide aggregated statistical data. Instead, The FullStory session replay lets you see exactly how the user navigated your website, how they moved their mouse, and what they clicked. 

This important feature lets you gain a bird’s eye view of the user experience. How do all of your customers navigate across various web pages? Do they get stuck hopelessly on the same page? Or do most of them gravitate toward the About Us section instead of your blog? 

Analytics data from session recordings answer these questions, and you can use the information to tweak your site’s UI. For instance, if you notice that a particular button shows a dead click, you can quickly fix the issue, optimize your site accordingly, and increase conversion rates.

While Hotjar and FullStory provide session recording features, FullStory is a winner due to the added usability of session recordings for supporting your customers. For instance, when a customer submits a ticket complaining about an issue, FullStory will provide a session replay showing what the user did before and after submitting a ticket.

Feedback widget and survey

You can use the Hotjar “ask” feature to insert surveys on specific web pages to know what users feel and think about your site’s functionality.

FullStory doesn’t provide a native survey feature, but it offers integrations with other platforms, such as Survicate and Qualtrics, to connect your UX data with your targeted surveys.

It also lets you build conversion funnels to map out each step of a user flow. This feature allows you to see where most customers drop off and fail to convert.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Languages

Hotjar’s interface is currently available only in English. However, user-facing features like Surveys and Feedback are supported in multiple languages. FullStory only supports English.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Integrations

When connecting with third-party tools, Hotjar and FullStory integrate with popular apps like Optimizely, Hubspot, Slack, Segment, Omniconvert, WordPress, Shopify, and more.

In contrast, FullStory has a much larger base of integrations than Hotjar, which only has seven native integrations. You can connect with more apps via Zapier.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Support

Both tools differ greatly in their support approach. Hotjar provides support via a knowledge base and email, while FullStory provides support via LiveChat and email tickets.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Pricing

Now, let’s move on to how the pricing for each tool can affect your budget. Both products have the same pricing model—they offer a free plan and charge a monthly fee for their premium packages.

Hotjar pricing

Hotjar provides three paid plans—Observe, Ask, and Engage. The Observe plan helps you track customer events using web analytics features like heatmaps and session recording. It includes:

• Basic—costs $0 and allows you to track up to 35 sessions/day
• Plus—costs $39/month and lets you track up to 100 sessions/day
• Business—starts from $99/month and lets you track 500 to 270,000 daily sessions
• Scale—starts at $213/month and lets you track 500 to 270,000 daily session recordings

The Ask plan lets you discover how your users feel and what they have to say via the feedback tool. It is divided into:

• Basic—costs $0 with access to 20 monthly responses
• Plus—costs $48/month with access to 250 monthly responses
• Business—starts from $64/month and lets you receive 500 to 100,000 monthly responses
• Scale—starts at $128/month and offers access to unlimited monthly responses

Lastly, the Engage plan allows you to automate recruitment, scheduling, and hosting for moderated user interviews. It is divided into:

• Basic—costs $0 with access to 3 interviews/month from your own network
• Plus—costs $39.2/month with access to up to 3 interviews/month from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Business—starts from $440/month with access to 12 interviews/year from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Scale—offers customized pricing and access to 20 interviews/month from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network

FullStory pricing

As for FullStory, it offers a free plan that provides basic behavioral analytics. The free plan enables you to track up to 1000 session replays per month.

The FullStory paid plans are divided into three—Business, Advanced, and Enterprise.

1. The Business plan offers a 14-day trial and allows you to track up to 5,000 sessions 
2. The Advanced plan offers premium product analytics tools and everything included in the Business plan
3. The Enterprise plan offers a customized plan, so you’d have to contact sales or request a demo

A downside is that the company does not provide transparent pricing, meaning you’ll have to contact their sales team to get a quote.

So far, we’ve covered how Hotjar and FullStory compare and contrast. Let’s move on to an alternative web analytics solution – FullSession, which also helps analyze user behavior.  

What is FullSession?

FullSession, our web analytics software, helps you capture and analyze all customer behavioral data and visualize how users interact with your website, web applications, and landing pages. All this goes to one goal: understanding user behavior.

This way, you can identify issues within the user journey, fix them accordingly, and help them convert to paying customers.

Book a demo to see FullSession in action.

What Features Does FullSession Provide?

FullSession provides powerful behavioral analytics tools that show how web visitors and customers interact with your website elements like headers, call-to-action buttons, drop-down menus, and more.

Let’s go deep into each feature.

Session recordings and replays

This web analytics feature lets you see your users’ actions as they navigate your website pages. Session recording and replay go beyond quantitative data and provide specific behavioral data showing:

• User scroll behavior
• Mouse movements
• Button clicks
• Text inputs in real-time without showing sensitive information

With our session recording and replay, you can gain access to data such as:

• User location and IP address
• The URL user visited
• Referrals
• Average time on page
• Total active time on page
• Session list
• Session event

You can skip periods of user inactivity, save time, and focus on what matters. You can also drop notes or share the user session recordings with your team for better collaboration.

Interactive heatmaps

Our website heatmap tool visually represents how individual users interact with your website elements. It highlights areas where users give the most attention and lets you see the most engaging buttons, links, form fields, call-to-actions, blog content, and website copy.

This way, you can use the user insights to optimize your web pages to increase conversions.

With FullSession interactive heatmaps, you can:

• Preview the heatmap on different devices
• See the URL the user visited
• Track clicks and see the number of total views and total clicks
• See the error, rage, and dead clicks
• Get the average load time on page
• Get the average time on page
• See the number of users that visited the page

Click map example

Mouse movement map example

Scroll map example

Insights

FullSession provides detailed insights and an easy-to-understand overview of customer behavior across your web pages to identify frustration signals that lead to funnel drop-offs and decreased conversion rates.

Customer feedback widget

The customer feedback form lets you ask users what they feel and think about their digital experience in real time. You also get access to the customer feedback report, which shows the user ID, URL, comment the user left, device type, and feedback date.

Even better, you can watch a user session related to negative feedback to determine what caused a negative customer experience. This information can help you create a customer-centric strategy for your product.

Segments

Our segments feature helps you build specific user segments and use them to filter major events in user sessions. This saves you time during analysis, as you can quickly find the necessary data.

Notes

The FullSession platform provides notes that enable you to leave comments about customer behavior and share them with your team. This allows you to assess challenging areas and improve your product performance.

Funnel and conversion tracking

This feature lets you track conversion goals using metrics like time to convert and user percentages, giving you powerful insights into your marketing strategy. By pinpointing successful campaigns and areas for improvement, you can maximize your strategy for the best budget value.

The FullSession funnels and conversions feature dives deep into user journeys, allowing you to monitor and optimize every stage of your conversion funnel. With tools like Funnel Steps and Segmentation Analysis, you can:

• Track conversion goals and user percentages to see what’s working
• Gain actionable insights to refine your marketing strategy
• Identify and amplify successful marketing campaigns
• Visualize where users convert or drop off
• Spot trends and seasonal changes in user behavior
• Identify and replicate key actions that boost conversions
• Detect and fix issues causing user drop-offs
• Measure and address user frustration at each step
• Enhance engaging features for better retention and conversions
• Reduce exit points by tracking users leaving early
• Compare and tailor experiences for different user segments
• Analyze performance over time to adjust strategies 

Error analysis

The FullSession feature allows you to detect, examine, and correct errors that affect user experience. 

By gathering extensive data on various error types, such as error clicks, network failures, console errors, error logs, and unhandled exceptions, FullSession delivers practical insights to boost the reliability and user satisfaction of your digital products.

With this feature, you can:

• Identify and fix elements that cause client-side JavaScript errors
• Monitor and resolve server request failures to ensure smooth connectivity
• Analyze and address JavaScript error messages to improve your application’s codebase
• Access detailed error logs to diagnose and fix issues accurately
• Find and handle critical errors to prevent application crashes
• Segment data and visualize trends to understand and address errors
• Receive real-time alerts via Slack for immediate error response

You can book a demo today to learn more.

What Makes FullSession Stand Out

While FullSession provides similar features to Hotjar and FullStory, many traits make it stand out. Here are some of the major ones:

1. FullSession helps you quickly filter user sessions to identify significant events via user segments, user feedback, and more.
2. While Hotjar will significantly slow your site’s loading speed, FullSession will enable you to analyze user behavioral data without affecting your site’s performance. 
3. The FullSession insights provide a comprehensive analysis of user behavior and help you quickly identify friction points and funnel drop-offs that affect conversions.  
4. Our web analytics solution helps you to gather customer feedback and run user surveys to know what users think and feel about their digital experience with your product.

Now that you know some of the traits that make FullSession unique, let’s move on to why FullSession is ideal for your web analytics needs. 

Four Reasons to Use FullSession

Here are four key reasons why you should use FullSession for your web analytics needs.

1. FullSession enables you to spot user pain points and bugs via its session replay feature.
2. Our web analytics tool categorizes analytics data so you can thoroughly analyze performance issues across your web pages.
3. FullSession provides advanced filtering options that help you better understand user events and spot Javascript errors during a session recording.
4. The FullSession platform is easy to set up and use. You don’t need any advanced technical knowledge to get the insights you need.

Before we conclude this in-depth piece, let’s briefly highlight the key features of each tool we mentioned in this article. 

Hotjar vs FullStory vs FullSession: A Summary

This table highlights a summary of the main points so that you can grasp the features of each tool.

Hotjar vs FullStory: Final Words

Both Hotjar and FullStory are known for helping people analyze user behavior data. However, each tool has its strengths and weaknesses. 

While FullStory offers more ways to support customers, it cannot collect customer feedback to uncover objections and struggles.

On the other hand, Hotjar is a good option for collecting direct feedback that you can use to improve your site’s UI. Ultimately, you’ll need to choose the right affordable tool that can meet your business’s needs.

However, don’t get stuck deciding between the two – you can consider other great alternatives.

The Best User Behavior Analytics Tool

FullSession is an excellent alternative that provides real-time session recordings and dynamic heatmaps that help you visualize your users’ actions on your site. 

Even better, FullSession allows you to gather data and make the correct CX analysis without slowing down your site, unlike Hotjar, which slows down a site’s loading speed. You can also use our customer feedback forms to ask customers about their experience using your website. 

We’ve written about other analytics tools and how they compare to Hotjar. Feel free to check some of our unbiased reviews, such as Hotjar vs Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange vs Hotjar, and Hotjar vs Mixpanel vs ClickTale.

FullSession Pricing Plans

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial and three paid plans: Starter, Business, and Enterprise. A yearly subscription can save you up to 20%!

Here are more details on each plan.

• The Starter plan costs $39/month or $32/year and allows you to monitor up to 5,000 monthly sessions with up to 6 months of data storage.
• The Business plan costs $75/month or $60/year and helps you to track and analyze up to 100,000 monthly sessions with up to 12 months of data storage.
• The Enterprise plan has custom pricing and offers customizable sessions plus full access to all features.

Book a demo today.

Track User Behavior the Easy Way With FullSession

Setting up your web analytics dashboard with FullSession takes less than 5 minutes, and it’s completely free!

Get a demo now.

FAQs About Hotjar vs Fullstory

What is the difference between Hotjar and FullStory?

Hotjar focuses on heatmaps, user feedback, and session recordings, providing insights into what users are doing on your site. FullStory offers a more detailed, qualitative analysis with advanced session replay, error tracking, and in-depth user interaction insights.

What is the disadvantage of Hotjar?

One disadvantage of Hotjar is that its free and lower-tier plans have a data storage limit, which can restrict long-term analysis. Additionally, it may not offer as detailed session replays as some competitors like FullStory.

Why is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

Hotjar is better for visualizing user behavior through heatmaps and session recordings, which Google Analytics doesn’t offer. It also provides direct user feedback tools like surveys and polls, giving a more qualitative understanding of user experience.

What is Hotjar good for?

Hotjar is excellent for understanding how users interact with your website. It visualizes user behavior with heatmaps, captures detailed session recordings, gathers user feedback through surveys and polls, and identifies areas for improvement to enhance user experience.

When planning the features of FullSession, our behavioral analytics software, we tested many other tools to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses because our goal was to build something even better with these lessons in mind.

In this blog post, we will explain the differences between Google Analytics and Hotjar, as many businesses are stuck between these two solutions. We will also explain why FullSession can be a good alternative.

FullSession helps you understand the reasons behind user actions via session recording and replay tools, website heatmap tools, funnel and conversion analysis, error tracking features and customer feedback tools.

You can schedule a demo to learn how our software helps you gather user behavior analytics data you can use to improve your web app, landing page, or website.

Let’s start with some basic information.

The Importance of Web Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most important marketing tools. It helps you measure customer interaction with your website and tells you more about your customers’ needs, intentions, and goals.

Aside from tracking users’ behavior, you can see where you are losing customers in your sales funnel. You can make segmentation by sales conversion, upsell or cross-sell activities, traffic, bounce rate, and more.

By understanding what attracting your target audience is, how often they visit your site, and what they do on it, you can optimize your landing page or website and ultimately increase conversions. But is this enough to help you make informed decisions?

Learn more about user behavior

Data collected from analytics tools like Google Analytics let you know what’s working and what isn’t. Numbers can show you what people do on your site, but they can’t tell you why your users made the choices they did. 

You need more information to understand what’s happening between events; in other words, between the lines.

By seeing how your users behave while interacting with your website, you’ll be able to get answers to questions you might not have thought of by looking at metrics alone, and that’s where the behavior analytics tools perfectly blend in.

Hotjar: The Behavior Analytics Solution

Between Google Analytics and Hotjar, deciding which is right for your business can be challenging. 

While both are excellent tools for measuring user behavior on your site, some differences between them might make one more suitable than the other. Additionally, there are other Hotjar alternatives you should consider.

Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform that complements Google Analytics and other traditional analytics tools, providing in-depth analysis that you can’t derive from traditional data. With Google Analytics, you can see your metrics. With Hotjar, you can see why they’re happening.

Hotjar has helpful features that let you track and analyze real-time website engagements. With heatmaps, user recordings, surveys, and user feedback services, you can make informed decisions about your website’s usability, navigation structure, content organization, and more.

We’ll go step-by-step through Hotjar and show you how to get the most out of it.

Keep an eye on customer interaction with heatmaps

Hotjar is a unique heatmap software. Heat maps can take a visitor’s activity and translate it into a visual representation. This information is presented as a color: the warmer the color, the higher the activity.

Hotjar offers three types of heatmaps:

1. Click heatmaps that show you where your visitors click the most.
2. Move heatmaps that track visitors’ mouse movements while browsing your website.
3. Scroll heatmaps that are very useful for landing page analysis and optimization.

What elements grab your potential customer’s attention? Heatmaps will help you clearly understand this question and create a website layout that keeps your potential customers engaged and entices them to come back.

Hotjar heatmaps help you learn:

• Where your users drop off in the conversion funnel
• Which page areas confuse or fail to keep users’ attention
• What they’re doing during A/B testing
• What page elements decrease conversion and engagement rates
• How users interact with website pages during real-time experiments

When testing your website on different devices, you can use Hotjar to switch between desktop, tablet, and mobile views to pinpoint which issues are device-specific.

See your site from a visitor’s point of view with session recordings

With visitor recordings, you can watch real users interact with your product as they would in the real world. From clicking to scrolling to hovering, you can see everything a user does on your website’s pages.

Hotjar helps you understand why your visitors are navigating away from the page so you can find frustration points driving them away. Spot problems, pause the recording to view it from any angle, or zoom in on the page to see what’s going on. It will help you improve your site with each video.

You can also add tags or notes to your session recordings. These can be used to mark important events or gather feedback from your team.

Hotjar also provides advanced segmentation options, letting you view data through many lenses. You can record user activity easily and filter your session recordings by specific visitor types.

Know what your customers want with user surveys

With Hotjar user surveys, you can easily create a list of questions and place it on your website. As your visitors take the survey, the software records users’ words, providing you with direct feedback.

With this qualitative data, you will know what to improve next on your website. Depending on your needs, you can start from scratch or choose a template.

If you ask users what they love the most about your website or app or what issues they might have, you will gain insight into customer experience and help your development team improve your product.

Make your customers happy with user feedback

With Incoming Feedback, you can engage with your users at a micro-level. Hotjar offers a real-time suggestion box that lets you follow individual visitors as they move across your website, pages, forms, or images.

You’ll be able to record your users’ comments and complaints, know whether they’re thrilled or not quite satisfied, and capture any problems that might arise.

This level of engagement brings your company and your users on the same page, building trust and loyalty in the process. If you want to improve your website for happier users, Hotjar’s Incoming Feedback will enable you to get there faster.

Hotjar bonus features

Hotjar is easy to set up and use – it doesn’t require additional software and comes with detailed instructions and video tutorials.

The platform also has an intuitive dashboard. The interface is clean and well-organized, making it easy for users to get started and discover what Hotjar can do. There isn’t a large learning curve, and anyone can set it up.

With Hotjar, you can:

• Invite unlimited team members and clients to use the software free of charge
• Target your users smarter
• Collect feedback in more than 40 languages
• Use all features on desktop devices or mobile devices
• Protect your website users with privacy features
• Export and share feedback in CSV or XLSX
• Install and use the solution on all major platforms
• Integrate the solution with major tag managers like Google Tag Manager
• Optimize your ad campaigns
• Have reliable customer support
• Collect qualitative and quantitative data with ease
• Customize an External Link survey, a Full Screen survey, etc.

Whether you’re working on your first digital product or running a massive campaign, your company can track and access data points to implement design changes. And that data is fun to look at, too!

Hotjar vs Google Analytics: What is the Difference?

There is no need to abandon Google Analytics to start using Hotjar or vice versa. Hotjar is an alternative, not a replacement, for your Google Analytics account. You can use both tools, as they serve different purposes.

While Google Analytics is an in-depth tool for tracking metrics, from a site’s traffic levels to shopping cart abandonment, Hotjar offers a more user-centric approach. 

It helps you receive customer feedback and make necessary changes to your landing page or website based on their comments.

Hotjar vs Google Analytics: When to use each

Google Analytics is an essential tool that every business should be using to collect data and access information. You can use Google Analytics to get details about user acquisition, demographics, traffic sources, website metrics, ad campaign results, and more.

It is best suited for individuals or SME businesses that require basic data because it lacks many of Hotjar’s advanced features.

On the other hand, Hotjar can help you analyze and optimize your landing pages, websites, or conversion funnels with features like Heatmaps and Recordings. It also specializes in improving user experience by gathering feedback with Polls, Surveys, and Form Analytics.

It is best suited for large enterprises that need advanced functionalities or employees working as Product Managers, Product Designers, or Researchers.

Google Analytics vs Hotjar: Learning curve

Using Google Analytics requires preparation for a significant learning curve, which is one of its main disadvantages. While the data is straightforward to interpret, using it properly requires much time and effort. 

The customization and depth it offers are extensive, but gathering and deciphering different metrics and optimizing your performance based on them is a process you must learn.

Compared with other tools, Hotjar lets users add it to their websites with the click of a button.  The entire process takes just a few minutes, making it easy for businesses to add the code to their website and start surveying and tracking their customer behavior quickly and effectively.

Hotjar vs Google Analytics: Integrations

Hotjar offers more integrations than Google Analytics. With more ways to add real-time evaluation and deeper integration with other major platforms, you can see data from all sources in one place, eliminating the need for multiple tools. It will help you find the insights you need faster.

With this software’s wealth of information, there’s almost no limit to what you can learn about your customers. It gives business owners who use multiple platforms more flexibility in everyday work.

Google Analytics vs Hotjar: Pricing

You can use Google Analytics free of charge as an offer you won’t find in many other places. There are no upgrades, no hidden fees, and no catch. You can set up a free account with no credit card information required after signing up for a free Google account.

What is less known is that Google Analytics has a paid version called Google Analytics 360 that starts at $50,000/year. This enterprise version provides an advanced interface that allows large businesses to conduct more in-depth analyses.

On the other hand, Hotjar offers a basic package that lets you capture up to 1,000 pageviews/heatmap free of charge. In case you are satisfied with the software, you can choose paid upgrades anytime:

Hotjar provides three paid plans—Observe, Ask, and Engage. The Observe plan helps you track customer events using web analytics features like heatmaps and session recording. It includes:

• Basic—costs $0 and allows you to track up to 35 sessions/day
• Plus—costs $39/month and lets you track up to 100 sessions/day
• Business—starts from $99/month and lets you track 500 to 270,000 daily sessions
• Scale—starts at $213/month and lets you track 500 to 270,000 daily session recordings

The Ask plan lets you discover how your users feel and what they have to say via the feedback tool. It is divided into:

• Basic—costs $0 with access to 20 monthly responses
• Plus—costs $48/month with access to 250 monthly responses
• Business—starts from $64/month and lets you receive 500 to 100,000 monthly responses
• Scale—starts at $128/month and offers access to unlimited monthly responses

Lastly, the Engage plan allows you to automate recruitment, scheduling, and hosting for moderated user interviews. It is divided into:

• Basic—costs $0 with access to 3 interviews/month from your own network
• Plus—costs $39.2/month with access to up to 3 interviews/month from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Business—starts from $440/month with access to 12 interviews/year from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Scale—offers customized pricing and access to 20 interviews/month from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network

Hotjar vs FullSession: What We Do Better

FullSession is a user behavior analytics tool offering comprehensive features to capture and analyze all user interactions, enabling you to optimize your website.

Some of the key components include:

• Session recordings and replays
• Website feedback forms and reports
• Click, mouse movement, and scroll heatmaps
• Funnel and conversion tracking
• Error analysis
• Advanced user and event filtering options

You don’t need to download any additional plugins to use our service. Instead, you can start recording sessions immediately to track your users’ behavior.

Start a free trial or book a demo to evaluate all features.

How we compare

We looked into Hotjar’s features, compared them with our solution, and researched its core competencies. Here is what we found out:

1. FullSession uses broader analytics tools to analyze visitor behavior, allowing you to assess better where friction points occur and how to solve them.
2. FullSession provides insights into the impact on conversion rates and dropouts in the sales funnel.
3. With advanced filtering options, you can quickly find sessions that raise an eyebrow and dig deeper so you can create a better experience for your customers.
4. FullSession will help you identify significant events in one session to save time and reduce the noise.
5. FullSession funnels offer an in-depth analysis of user journeys, allowing you to monitor, comprehend, and optimize every stage of your conversion funnel.
6. Error analysis will help you identify, analyze, and resolve errors impacting user experience by leveraging data on error clicks, network errors, console errors, error logs, and uncaught exceptions. 

Also, we found one significant difference in website performance. If you use Hotjar, your website will slow down significantly, making the data gathered and analyzed unimportant because it will take forever to load.

On the other hand, FullSession allows you to conduct the right customer experience analysis without affecting the site’s performance.

Get a demo to learn more.

Why FullSession is the Best Analytics Tool of 2024

When optimizing your website and enhancing user experience, FullSession stands out as the best option.

Unlike other behavioral analytics tools, FullSession provides a comprehensive suite of features that give you a complete picture of your user journeys without the huge learning curve.

From detailed funnel analysis and real-time visitor tracking to robust heatmaps, website feedback forms, and session recordings, FullSession covers all bases to help you understand and improve every aspect of your site.

FullSession’s unique advantage lies in its ability to offer actionable insights without compromising website performance. Its efficient design ensures your site remains fast and responsive while you gather invaluable data.

The intuitive interface makes it easy to navigate and leverage these insights, whether you’re a seasoned analyst or just getting started!

FullSession Pricing Plans

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial and three paid plans: Starter, Business, and Enterprise. A yearly subscription can save you up to 20%!

Here are more details on each plan.

• The Free plan is available at $0/month and lets you track up to 500 sessions per month with 30 days of data retention, making it ideal for testing core features like session replay, heatmaps, and frustration signals.
• The Growth Plan starts from $23/month (billed annually, $276/year) for 5,000 sessions/month – with flexible tiers up to 50,000 sessions/month. Includes 4 months of data retention plus advanced features like funnels & conversion analysis, feedback widgets, and AI-assisted segment creation.
• The Pro Plan starts from $279/month (billed annually, $3,350/year) for 100,000 sessions/month – with flexible tiers up to 750,000 sessions/month. It includes everything in the Growth plan, plus unlimited seats and 8-month data retention for larger teams that need deeper historical insights.
• The Enterprise plan starts from $1,274/month when billed annually ($15,288/year) and is designed for large-scale needs with 500,000+ sessions per month, 15 months of data retention, priority support, uptime SLA, security reviews, and fully customized pricing and terms.

Book a demo today.

Complete Your Analytics Stack With FullSession

Setting up your web analytics dashboard with FullSession takes less than 5 minutes, and it’s completely free!

Get a demo now.

FAQs About Hotjar and Google Analytics

Can Hotjar replace Google Analytics?

Hotjar is not a complete Google Analytics replacement. Google Analytics provides comprehensive quantitative data on website traffic and performance, while Hotjar offers qualitative insights into user behavior through heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback tools. Using both tools together gives a complete picture of your website’s performance.

Why is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

Hotjar is better for visualizing user behavior with heatmaps and session recordings, allowing you to see exactly how users interact with your site. It also provides direct user feedback tools like surveys and polls, which Google Analytics lacks, offering a deeper qualitative understanding of user experience.

What is the disadvantage of Hotjar?

One disadvantage of Hotjar is that it has a data storage limit on its free and lower-tier plans, restricting long-term analysis. Additionally, it may not offer as detailed session replays or advanced segmentation as some competitors like FullStory.

What is Hotjar good for?

Hotjar is excellent for understanding how users interact with your website. It’s ideal for visualizing user behavior with heatmaps, capturing detailed session recordings, gathering user feedback through surveys and polls, and identifying areas for improvement to enhance user experience.

Does Google Analytics analyze Google ads?

Yes, Google Analytics can analyze Google Ads. By linking your Google Ads account with Google Analytics, you can track the performance of your ads, see how users interact with your website after clicking on an ad, and gain insights into conversion rates and user behavior.

Understanding how your website visitors behave is essential to the success of your online business.

The best way to measure your website’s performance is through the use of web analytics tools. These tools will help you improve your website and increase conversion by offering insights into how your users behave, where they click, and whether or not they’re satisfied with their experience.

If you are looking for a seamless way to record your website visitors’ sessions, we encourage you to check out FullSession. We are passionately building our web analytics tool.

We’ve analyzed dozens of tools that provide similar features to ensure that our customers’ experience with the product is top-notch.

Hotjar is one of the tools we’ve analyzed. Today, we are happy to share our in-depth Hotjar review. Check it out, and feel free to share your thoughts with us!

Track How Users Interact with Your Website

Hotjar is a web analytics tool that helps you understand user behavior on your website and identify usability issues. It was created to remove the guesswork from creating a website or landing page.

Hotjar captures all of the user actions and saves them in a database. It provides instant visual feedback that helps you see what your real users are doing, why they come to your website, and how they interact with it. 

The goal is to help you make informed decisions to improve the customer experience and ultimately reach your business goals.

For example, Hotjar might record the following user actions:

• Clicking on a link to another page within your site
• Clicking on the back button and moving backward through your website
• Scrolling down or up on a long webpage, such as an article page
• Moving the mouse over a link on your page
• Clicking or tapping on images, buttons, and other interactive elements

It complements traditional analytics tools such as Google Analytics (check out our review of Hotjar vs Google Analytics for more details), helps you track user sessions in real time, and gives you a full picture of the user journey.

If you want to know how Hotjar compares with other web analytics tools, you can also read our Hotjar alternatives review.

Understand Your Site Visitors with Hotjar

Hotjar is a quick and easy-to-use tool. It is suitable for beginner-level users, but advanced digital marketers can use it as well as an addition to their marketing analytics software.

Hotjar’s user-friendly interface and visual representation of the data it provides help you understand why your users behave as they do.

The downside of this solution is that it can get pretty pricey once you upgrade to higher plans, and the basic plan is relatively limited. For most businesses, upgrading will become a must once your business scales up.

Also, some users may find it difficult to use some of the features. Luckily, Hotjar provides guides, tips, and tutorials to help you overcome these challenges.

Exactly What You Can Do with Hotjar

Businesses that have implemented Hotjar use it to acquire, convert, retain, and grow their audience. It offers a set of features that allow you to know your audience better.

Using Heatmaps, Forms, Visitor Recordings, Funnels, Polls, and Surveys, you can receive high-quality feedback regarding your website’s features, features that are trending, and overall user experience without having to worry about the technical side of things.

Make good design decisions with Hotjar

Hotjar is a good tool for speeding up and streamlining the usability testing process. It is a great option not only for small and medium-sized companies but also for startups!

It is a good solution for your business if you have:

• Product team
• Design team
• UX team
• Digital marketing team
• Support team

What made Hotjar different

While Hotjar’s competitors, such as Smartlook or Crazy Egg, have started to release similar features, Hotjar was the first to offer session recordings, combined with many feedback collection features from the CRO platform that allow you to see what you need to improve in your product or multiple sites.

Hotjar also provides feedback regarding lead generation, user engagement, sales, and customer support. These are all actionable insights that are vital to an online business’s success.

In summary, Hotjar is a web analytics tool with many features, an intuitive interface, and a fair pricing structure. Let’s discuss each feature to see how it can improve your web app.

1. Heatmaps

Image source: G2

By using Hotjar heatmaps, you can identify which page elements are catching your users’ attention. Hotjar heatmaps also track where your users scroll or click on the individual page and their mouse movements.

The software gathers data based on the user’s interactions with your site on any device and presents it visually. Analyzing this data will show where you need to make page elements, layout, or content changes to improve the customer journey.

You can also share this data with your team members for further analysis. By implementing corrective measures, you will improve your sales funnels and create high-converting landing pages or websites.

Hotjar heatmap feature lets you know:

• If a user is not able to find a specific feature
• If key elements of your web page are not accessible
• If users aren’t scrolling to key sections
• If users click on your CTA
• If a specific feature is confusing your users

Hotjar tracks your users’ behavior anonymously. You can see how visitors move through your site and what they spend the most time on, but you will never find out their names or anything that could identify them.

This way, Hotjar protects user privacy while still giving you the information you need to improve your web app.

2. Visitor recordings

Image source: G2

How can you ensure that your site is working well? Visitor recordings will tell you. This feature allows you to see clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements during real user sessions. With user behavior analysis, you can identify usability issues and fix them to avoid future headaches.

Video recordings help you see exactly what is happening during visitor sessions. You can use the replay sessions feature to pinpoint any specific problem on individual pages or multiple websites.

Also, Hotjar makes it easy to share or download session recordings and their metadata as a CSV or XLSX file. In addition, you can also take notes on visitor recordings to provide feedback and share them with your team members to improve collaboration while working on the same project.

Hotjar offers data retention for up to a year. It is a good option if you want to know what’s happening on your website for a long period.

Visitor recordings are one feature that we’ve polished in FullSession. Unlike Hotjar, it doesn’t slow down your website, apart from advanced filtering options and in-depth analytics.

As you may know, loading speed is a ranking factor for Google, so keeping your website fast and furious is one of our priorities. Book a demo and see it!

3. Conversion funnels

If you run an e-commerce site, funnel testing can help you determine how easily your users can complete the checkout process. 

It can show you where your users drop off on your landing page or website and which page elements are more or less effective. Helping your users reach their goals, you are reaching your goals, too!

One of the best ways to improve your conversion rate is to conduct A/B testing on your landing pages, websites, and conversion funnels. A/B testing can help you determine what elements work best for your product or service.

Data will help you optimize your landing page or site to attract more visitors who will sign up for your email list, buy your product, use your service, or take any other action you want them to take.

4. Form analytics

The first step to fixing any problem is identifying the problem. Hotjar includes form analytics as part of its conversion rate optimization platform so you can see how your potential leads are interacting with your forms, how long they are taking to fill them out, and where they are having issues that lead to decreased conversion rates.

With its form analysis feature, Hotjar will provide a basic visual report and give you data on successful or unsuccessful submissions.

If you want to dig deeper into your user interaction data with forms, you can’t do that with Hotjar. One of the disadvantages of Hotjar is that it doesn’t provide in-depth form analysis, and it doesn’t let you split data by date ranges. 

If you need this type of information, you’ll have to turn to more advanced analytics tools.

5. User feedback polls

Why do people take certain actions on your website? The best way to find out is by using feedback polls. 

Feedback polls are a great way to generate feedback forms and let your users leave feedback directly on your website or landing page.

When users scroll, click, or tap on your website, you can show them your feedback polls as pop-ups. This way, you can allow your users to give you feedback easily, and you can incorporate this feedback into the next iteration of your website or landing pages.

6. Incoming feedback

Image source: G2

Feedback is a significant part of any project, but unfortunately, it can be hard to get sometimes. That’s why it’s vital to always make yourself accessible to your users. One way to do this is by adding the Incoming Feedback widget on any page of your website.

You can place an incoming feedback widget on your website to allow users to share their opinions in real time. This will help you learn how they feel when they use your web app.

Incoming feedback will help you collect actionable data about how they are engaging with your website, what they are responding to, and what elements they are ignoring. This information will help you improve your conversion funnels and increase your conversion rate.

7. Surveys

Hotjar Survey is a very helpful feature for SaaS companies. These surveys allow you to ask your site users any questions to get the information you need. You can also survey an unlimited number of respondents. Later, you can see the survey results in Form Analytics.

Surveys can take many different forms: they can be part of your web page, appear in a pop-up, take over the whole screen, or even appear externally.

You can ask multiple questions in one survey, allowing users to focus on one question at a time and give them enough time to type their responses. Also, if you are using Hotjar’s Business plan, you can customize the look and feel of your surveys.

8. User testing recruitment

Recruiting user testers is an easy and non intrusive way to get meaningful user feedback. Your customers will be pleasantly surprised to learn that you’re asking them to share their thoughts and opinions about your site, and the Hotjar widget allows them to sign up effortlessly. 

They can also remove the widget if they want to.

9. Other features

Hotjar is more than just a heatmapping tool. It contains many features you can use to improve your website. Below are some of Hotjar’s other less-known features. You can:

• Invite multiple team members or clients without additional fees
• Use different options for targeting visitors
• Collect feedback in more than 40 languages
• Test your website across all device types
• Feel safe because your privacy is secured
• Export and share feedback in CSV or XLSX
• Easily install the Hotjar script
• Integrate Hotjar with other tools

Compare and Contrast: Hotjar vs Google Analytics

You can use both tools to measure website traffic and visitor engagement. They have some similarities; however, some differences between these two solutions may be important to consider. 

Google Analytics collects raw data about your visitors, while Hotjar captures visitor behavior visually.

Hotjar is a popular tool for tracking visitors on your website. It’s great for understanding which pages and areas of your site convert visitors into customers the most effectively.

GA gives you detailed information about your website’s traffic. It shows you how many visitors came to your site, what pages they visited, and where they spent the most time.

Both tools are good at giving you valuable information about your website’s visitors. However, if you want to understand the behavior of your website’s visitors in more detail, then Hotjar is probably a better choice for you.

If you want to learn more about the differences between these two solutions, you can read our full Hotjar vs. Google Analytics review.

Hotjar Pricing

Hotjar costs can vary. Its pricing model is based on a monthly subscription. According to Hotjar reviews, it comes with a free version that is perfect for small businesses, startups, bloggers, and freelancers.

Hotjar currently offers a free basic plan that allows you to track up to 1,050 sessions per month. To improve your conversion rates, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid plan—Observe, Ask, and Engage.

The Observe plan lets you track and analyze user behavior data using heatmaps and session replay. It includes:

• Basic plan: Costs $0 and enables you to track up to 35 daily sessions
• Plus plan: Costs $39/month and gives you access to 100 daily sessions
• Business plan: Starts from $99/month and allows you to track and analyze 500 to 270,000 daily sessions
• Scale plan: Starts at $213 and enables you to track up to 270,000 daily sessions

The Ask plan helps you understand how your users feel and what they have to say about your site performance via the user feedback tool. It includes:

• Basic plan: Costs $0 and gives you access to 20 monthly responses
• Plus plan: Costs $48/month and enables you to receive 250 monthly responses
• Business plan: Starts from $64/month and allows you to collect 500 to 100,000 monthly responses
• Scale plan: Starts at $128/month and gives you access to up to 1 million monthly responses

The Engage plan helps you automate most of the processes that come with conducting moderated user interviews, including finding interviewees and scheduling. It includes:

• Basic plan: Costs $0 and lets you automate up to 3 interviews from your own network
• Plus plan: Costs $39.2/month and allows you to automate 3 interviews from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Business plan: Starts at $440/month and allows you to automate 12 interviews from the Hotjar participant pool and unlimited interviews from your own network
• Scale plan: Customized pricing and includes up to 20 Hotjar pool interviews and unlimited interviews from your own network

What We Liked

We hope you like our review so far. We wanted to share this insight with you so you can see if Hotjar fits your needs. Now, we’ll talk about what we like most about Hotjar.

1. Quick and easy installation

Hotjar offers a simple, easy-to-use tool that you can integrate into your website or product in minutes. It takes no time to set up and does not require extensive time and effort to use.

2. Integration options

Hotjar integration with other tools will help you find the insights you need faster. It helps you see all your data in one place. It eliminates the need for multiple software, which will save time and resources for your business.

You can integrate Hotjar with:

• Slack
• Segment
• Hubspot
• Google
• Optimize
• Omniconvert
• Optimizely
• Zapier

3. Low learning curve

The first and most important feature of Hotjar is its user-friendly interface. It has a low learning curve and enables you to understand and track user behavior fast.

It provides guides and tutorials that can help you understand how to use Hotjar and good customer support that will answer any questions you might have about the tool.

4. Visual reports

Hotjar helps you analyze your website’s traffic with an interactive dashboard that shows you real-time user behavior.

Visual data reporting shows you how people interact with your site and gives you a better idea of what they’re looking for. It provides insights on how to improve your user experience and keep the bounce rate low.

5. Continuous improvements

We like that the Hotjar team continues to improve their product. They add new features and improve the old ones, making sure that you’ll be able to use them in the future as well.

What We Didn’t Like

We like the idea behind Hotjar and think it has a lot of potential. However, it also has some downsides and features that it lacks. We think you need to know about them before making your sign-up decision.

1. Hotjar is not compatible with mobile apps

If you want to use Hotjar to collect user feedback for your mobile app, you’ll need to choose a different solution. You can use Hotjar primarily for websites or web apps, so it’s not compatible with mobile apps.

2. Hotjar can get pricey as you grow

Hotjar is a powerful way to collect feedback from your visitors. Its free version is a good option for smaller organizations, but as the number of website visitors grows, Hotjar can quickly become very expensive.

3. You can’t create custom reports

Hotjar’s reporting interface lacks some crucial features that can make your life easier. You can’t create custom reports that summarize data from multiple elements on the page or even create a custom report that focuses on one particular page element.

4. Surveys have basic customization options

Surveys can be a great way to get your customers’ feedback, but Hotjar doesn’t offer advanced customization options. Currently, you can only change the background color, button color, and font color or add your logo.

5. It’s hard to tell if Hotjar measures all website traffic

Hotjar can’t track every user, but it equips itself with the latest technology to capture as much data as possible. The company tries to improve its performance and provide you with the most accurate information.

Some reviews also state that Hotjar can go overboard with protecting data privacy by hiding a lot of information that is part of the app but not the customer’s data.

Reasons to Switch to FullSession Web Analytics Software

FullSession enables you to measure, monitor, and analyze your website’s effectiveness. You can also identify what types of content perform best on your site and segment it for improved targeting strategies.

FullSession lets you conduct a more in-depth analysis of your website visitors than HotJar. 

Without affecting your site speed, it enables you to identify trends in user behavior and provides super-accurate data to help you make strategic business decisions regarding your product development.

Create a Seamless Digital User Experience with FullSession

Companies need to recognize that the customer is at the center of their business, and they need to make sure all aspects are in place for an exceptional user experience. In other words, the process from beginning to end of the user journey should feel natural and simple for your visitors.

Seamless digital customer experience is the result of a full-stack approach to web analytics. FullSession has combined different parts of this process and gives businesses an omniscient view of their website’s performance.

It allows companies to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies by having access to information from all angles and without missing any detail regarding how people are experiencing their products or services online.

Learn from a Powerful Behavioral Analytics Tool

FullSession lets you discover the data that drives your business. The idea of using behavioral analytics tools is to identify users’ behavior by analyzing their online interactions and pinpointing growth opportunities.

You can gain insight into which pages users access most often, where they come from, what links they click on, and what they do when they get there. 

You would be able to see the exact path they took on your website, how long it took them to make their decision, and what products or services caught their attention.

Start a free trial now.

FullSession Features

It’s often said that usability testing is an “all-or-nothing” process, but in reality, it’s a process of revisions that includes many steps:

• Conducting usability testing
• Evaluating findings and working to address them
• Studying the results
• Repeating for as many rounds as necessary

Making simple changes to your web app can make it more comfortable for your users with no major impact on your site performance. It is where FullSession comes in handy. We provide you with the tools to test the most challenging ideas with ease.

Continue reading and learn more about our current features for understanding user behavior.

1. Session recording and session replay

Session recording and replay tools enable you to understand how customers navigate various web pages. In real time, you can identify funnel drop-offs and observe significant customer actions like button clicks, scrolls, hovers, and mouse movement.

With our session recording and replays, you will get access to data such as:

• User location and IP address
• Clicked URL
• Referrals
• Visited pages
• Average time on page
• Total active time on pages
• Session list
• Session event

What’s best is that you can skip inactivity, pause, or speed up the session replay to save time while conducting your analysis. You can leave your comments, watch a heatmap, or share the session recording with your team, improving collaboration on the project.

2. Interactive heatmaps

An interactive heatmap is a visual representation of user activity on your website. It shows areas of high concentration with colors or symbols that stand out, often to indicate areas of strong interest. It helps you determine where users click and spend the most time on your site.

With FullSession interactive heatmaps, you can:

• Visualize heatmap data on different devices
• See the URL the user visited
• Track the number of total views and total clicks
• Watch error clicks
• Visualize rage clicks
• Monitor dead clicks
• See the average load time on the page
• See the average time on the page
• Track the number of users that visited the page

Also, you can switch between mouse movement, click, and scroll maps by clicking on the icons in the top right menu.

3. Advanced filtering and segmentation

FullSession’s advanced segmentation and filtering options allow you to create unique customer segments, filter important user events, and identify questionable user recordings and session replays.

4. Insights

FullSession presents detailed insights based on a comprehensive analysis of customer behavioral data. Our in-depth insights help you visualize friction points affecting conversion rates.  

5. Customer feedback forms

Customer feedback forms help you ask users about their digital experience in real time, allowing you to improve your product accordingly. 

You can see the user ID, URL the user visited, comment they left, the browser they used, and the date of the feedback. 

Also, you can watch a session recording that’s connected to the feedback to understand what happened and learn why the user had a negative experience.

Start a free trial now.

6. Notes

Notes allow you to record key findings about customer behavior and share them with your team. This allows you to assess challenging areas and improve your product development and strategy.

7. Funnels and conversions

The FullSession feature is your key to achieving conversion goals. It provides precise tracking with metrics like conversion time and user percentages. This offers valuable insights into your marketing strategy, helping you identify successful campaigns and areas needing improvement.

With the funnels and conversions feature, you can closely monitor and refine each stage of your conversion funnel, turning data into actionable insights. 

You can track conversion goals and user percentages to see what’s effective, then refine your marketing strategy to enhance your best campaigns.

Visualizing user behavior is straightforward. Understand exactly where users convert or drop off, spot trends and seasonal changes, and identify actions driving conversions. FullSession helps you address issues causing drop-offs and reduce user frustration.

The advanced reporting tools provide a detailed overview of user interactions and engagement metrics, ensuring you have a comprehensive understanding of your audience.

8. Error analysis

The error analysis feature identifies, analyzes, and resolves various errors impacting user experience. By using data on error clicks, network errors, console errors, error logs, and uncaught exceptions, FullSession provides insights to improve reliability and user satisfaction. 

It helps detect non-responsive elements, monitor connectivity issues, reveal underlying code problems, and capture detailed error logs for effective debugging. The integration with Slack for real-time alerts ensures swift issue resolution. 

This comprehensive approach leads to a smoother user journey, higher conversion rates, and improved product reliability.

Why Choose FullSession Over Hotjar?

It’s really hard to get a sense of what you do and don’t do well just by looking at your product. Since we’re serious about improving our solution, we deep-dived into Hotjar and compared it with FullSession. 

Here is what we do better:

• FullSession uses more sophisticated analytics tools to help you identify and eliminate friction points. This will improve your conversion rate, increase revenue, save costs, and improve customer retention.
• FullSession helps you understand which steps in the sales funnel are critical. You can see exactly how many leads you have converted and how many have dropped out.
• FullSession has advanced filtering options, so you can find sessions that interest you and do more research. This will help you create a better experience for your customers.
• FullSession will help you identify major events inside one session and save you time by getting to the essentials.
• FullSession’s intuitive user interface is easy to use, even if your tech expertise is limited.

Oh, this is interesting. We found that your website becomes significantly slower when you use Hotjar. It’s not worth it because the data you’re gathering would take forever to load. 

In contrast, FullSession empowers you to determine the right customer experience without affecting the site’s performance.

FullSession Pricing Plans

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial and three paid plans: Starter, Business, and Enterprise. A yearly subscription can save you up to 20%!

Here are more details on each plan.

• The Free plan is available at $0/month and lets you track up to 500 sessions per month with 30 days of data retention, making it ideal for testing core features like session replay, heatmaps, and frustration signals.
  
• The Growth Plan starts from $23/month (billed annually, $276/year) for 5,000 sessions/month – with flexible tiers up to 50,000 sessions/month. Includes 4 months of data retention plus advanced features like funnels & conversion analysis, feedback widgets, and AI-assisted segment creation.
  
• The Pro Plan starts from $279/month (billed annually, $3,350/year) for 100,000 sessions/month – with flexible tiers up to 750,000 sessions/month. It includes everything in the Growth plan, plus unlimited seats and 8-month data retention for larger teams that need deeper historical insights.
  
• The Enterprise plan starts from $1,274/month when billed annually ($15,288/year) and is designed for large-scale needs with 500,000+ sessions per month, 15 months of data retention, priority support, uptime SLA, security reviews, and fully customized pricing and terms.

Book a demo today.

See What FullSession Can Do Today

Setting up your analytics dashboard with FullSession takes less than 5 minutes, and it’s completely free!

Get a demo now.

FAQs About Hotjar

What is the disadvantage of Hotjar?

Hotjar’s disadvantages include limited features in its free plan, potential data privacy concerns that require careful configuration, possible performance impacts on your website, a complex setup process, and fewer third-party integrations compared to some other analytics tools.

Is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

Hotjar and Google Analytics serve different purposes and can complement each other. Google Analytics excels in providing quantitative data on user behavior and website performance, while Hotjar offers qualitative insights through tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback. Using both tools together can provide a comprehensive view of your website’s user experience.

What is Hotjar used for?

Hotjar improves website user experience by providing insights through heatmaps that show where users click and scroll, session recordings that allow you to watch individual user interactions, feedback polls and surveys for direct user input, conversion funnel analysis to identify drop-off points, and form analysis to understand user interactions with site forms.

Is Hotjar secure?

Yes, Hotjar is secure. It uses data encryption, complies with GDPR, anonymizes personal data, enforces strict access controls, and undergoes regular security audits to ensure data protection. Proper configuration is essential to maintain security and compliance with local data regulations.

Does Hotjar record all visits?

It’s possible that some specific users will not be tracked. However, Hotjar should capture the majority of them in Heatmaps and Recordings.

How do you use Hotjar effectively?

You can use Hotjar for conversion rate optimization and conversion research. With it, you can measure and optimize conversion rates and sales funnels, and you can improve any type of website, from eCommerce websites to startup websites.

Who uses Hotjar?

It’s best for large enterprises that need advanced functionalities or employees working as Product Managers, Product Designers, or Researchers.