We Tried 5 Hotjar Alternatives – Here’s Our Feedback

As a website owner, you need accurate information on how website visitors interact with your website, areas where they experience issues, and how it affects your conversion rates. You can use web analytics tools to gather this data and monitor the user behavior on your website.

Hotjar is a web analytics platform and conversion analytics tool that helps you collect feedback from your website users and optimize your website via heatmaps and session recordings. While it applies a customer-centric approach to web analysis, it has its limitations. For instance, it slows down a site’s loading speed and doesn’t allow you to analyze customer behavior on mobile apps.

For this reason, many marketers and product teams want to evaluate other Hotjar alternatives.

Feel free to sign up for a 14-day free trial to test our features and collect and analyze user behavioral data. You can also book a demo for more information

If you want to learn more about other alternatives, this article is for you. We have prepared a complete list of the top five Hotjar alternatives, so you can understand their features and benefits and figure out the one that’s best for your business.

Let’s begin by explaining why it is crucial to analyze visitor behavior:

Visitor behavior and user feedback matter

Image source: SuperOffice CRM

With the users’ irregular behavioral patterns, visitor behavior analytics is crucial. If you can collect feedback from customers and monitor how they engage with your site, you’ll be able to improve the customer experience.

Technological advancement, user feedback, and web analysis tools allow you to understand website visitors’ behavior in many ways. They provide you with data storage and data segmentation to make the process straightforward. You can use event tracking, behavior-triggered feedback forms, heatmaps, funnel analysis, surveys, session recordings and replays, and more.

You need to choose the right behavioral analytics solution when tracking user behavior. Here are some questions to ask as you evaluate the right tool for your business:

• What exactly do you want to learn about your users?
• What features do you need?
• Which optimization tools present detailed insight?
• Which tool’s user interface do you find intuitive and easy to use?

Hotjar is one of the multiple analytics tools you can use for tracking conversion funnels and monitoring users’ actions on your site. Let’s discuss how it works and what are its pros and cons.

What is Hotjar, and how does it work?

Image source: G2

Hotjar is a user experience insights software that helps UX designers and e-commerce brands understand user behavior via session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, form analytics, and website feedback forms. 

It provides behavioral analysis and user feedback tools. It means you can get a bird’s eye view of how users move, click, or scroll on your web pages. You can also collect user feedback to know what users have to say, uncover objections, find growth opportunities and increase the number of satisfied users.

What are the main features of Hotjar?

Hotjar combines behavioral analytics and customer feedback tools to help you improve conversion optimization and user experience.

Here are the key features of Hotjar:

• Heatmaps
• Scroll maps
• Session recordings 
• User testing and surveys
• Form optimization 
• Behavioral tracking

What is the price of Hotjar?

Hotjar provides a free version. As for its paid plans, there are two options you can use—Observe and Ask plans.

The Observe plan lets you visualize user behavior with heatmaps and see users’ actions with session recording. It is divided into

• Basic—costs $0 and allows you to track up to 1050 sessions/month
• Plus—costs $39/month and lets you track up to 3,000 sessions/month
• Business—starts from $99/month and lets you track up to 500 daily sessions
• Scale—offers customized pricing and lets you track 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 $59/month with access to 250 monthly responses
• Business—starts from $79/month and lets you receive up to 500 monthly responses
• Scale—offers customized pricing and access to unlimited monthly responses

While Hotjar provides a free version and access to various behavioral tools, it has advantages and drawbacks. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of this visitor behavior analytics tool.

Hotjar pros

Here are the advantages of using Hotjar:

• It provides a free plan
• The user interface is intuitive and easy to use
• It lets you filter heatmaps by device
• Customizable insights

Hotjar cons

Here are the disadvantages of Hotjar:

• You have to integrate with funnel analysis tools if you want funnel analytics data
• It slows down the website loading speed
• It doesn’t let you analyze user behavior on mobile apps
• Its limited quantitative analytics features don’t let you perform an in-depth analysis

Considering the various advantages and drawbacks of Hotjar, it can leave room for doubts, and you may consider using other Hotjar alternatives.

Why use Hotjar alternatives for web analytics?

While Hotjar is known for tracking web behavioral data, its shortcomings have led product teams to use other Hotjar alternatives like FullSession, Fullstory, Crazy Egg, and others that provide in-depth analytics.

If that’s your case, one of the five Hotjar alternatives explained below may be suitable for your business. We’ve broken them into categories, explaining how these tools perform web analysis.

Top Hotjar alternatives in 2024

After in-depth analysis, we have chosen the following tools as the top Hotjar alternatives:

1. FullSession (Get a demo)
2. FullStory
3. CrazyEgg
4. ClickTale
5. UserTesting

We have evaluated these tools based on deployment, features list, integrations, customer support, pricing, user rating, pros, and cons.

1. FullSession

FullSession is our website optimization tool that helps you analyze customer behavioral data on websites, web apps, and landing pages. Our comprehensive quantitative analysis tool lets you identify where users experience setbacks as they interact with your website.

Who uses it

The FullSession web analytics platform is an excellent optimization tool for product managers, marketing teams, web designers, UX researchers, and UX designers. Our website analytics tool is also most popular in the e-commerce industry.

Deployment

FullSession is a cloud, SaaS, web-based analytics tool, and you can deploy it by adding its code snippet to the source code of your website.

Features list

FullSession provides behavioral analytics and event tracking features that enables you to spot user issues that affect conversions. Let’s explain each feature.

 

Session recording and session replay

Session recording and replay 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

1. User location and IP address
2. The URL user visited
3. Referrals
4. Average time on page
5. Total active time on page
6. Session list
7. Session event

What’s best, you can skip inactivity 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.

 

Interactive heatmaps

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 are clicking and where they spend the most time on your site.

With FullSession interactive heatmaps, you can:

1. Preview the heatmap on different devices
2. See the URL the user visited
3. Get the number of total views and total clicks
4. See the error, rage, and dead clicks
5. Get the average load time on page
6. Get the average time on page
7. See the number of users that visited the page

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

 

Click map example

 

 

Mouse movement map example

 

 

Scroll map example

It helps you track user actions and optimize your website pages to increase conversions.

 

Segments

Segments allow you to filter major events in critical sessions. This way, you save time by quickly finding what you need and focusing on what matters to your team.

 

Insights

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

 

Customer feedback forms

Customer feedback lets you ask users about their digital experience in real-time so you can improve your product accordingly. 

You can see the user ID, URL the user visited, comment they left, the browser they use as well as 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.

Notes

Notes enable you to leave key findings about customer behavior and share them with your team. You can assess the challenging areas and improve your product development and strategy.

Conversions

Conversions allow you to track conversion goals based on stats like conversion rates, time to convert, and the percentage of users. This data can also help you determine whether specific marketing campaigns are working and which ones should be scaled up or down. You can use this information to optimize your strategy and ensure you get the best value for your budget.

What makes this tool unique

Our analytics solution enables you to ask customers about their overall digital experience so that you can understand the why behind customer behavior. Moreover, FullSession allows you to analyze customer behavior without slowing down your site’s loading speed.

Common with Hotjar

Like Hotjar, FullSession provides behavioral tracking via user recordings and heatmap tools. Both tools provide advanced filtering options that enable you to create specific user segments and spot significant events in a user session.

Integrations

Our website analytics solution helps you to connect with third-party tools like Wix, WordPress, BigCommerce, and Shopify.

Customer support

You can reach our customer support pros via email and live chat feature. You can also read our guides and visit the support center.

Pricing

FullSession doesn’t include a free plan, but we offer a free trial for our two premium packages—Basic and Business. 

1. The Basic plan costs $39/month and lets you track up to 5,000 monthly sessions. 
2. The Business plan costs $149/month and lets you track up to 25,000 monthly sessions.
3. The Enterprize plan starts from 100,000 monthly sessions. You can contact us for more details. 

We also provide a customized pricing package if your business has specific website analytics needs. Check out our Pricing page.

Pros

Some of the advantages of FullSession include:

• You can detect suspicious activities and gain insights into user behavior by taking advantage of its advanced filtering options
• Instead of monitoring all user interactions, you can create specific user segments to monitor key user activity easily
• With our advanced analytics, you can get a birds-eye-view of customer engagement data and see where users get stuck (i.e. what hinders conversion rates)
• Hotjar’s huge data consumption may significantly slow down your site, but our behavior analytics solution allows you to perform in-depth data analysis without compromising your site’s loading speed.

Cons

Some of the limitations of FullSession include:

• FullSession doesn’t offer a free plan
• Our analytics platform doesn’t provide an A/B testing tool
• We don’t provide mobile app surveys

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial and see how FullSession works firsthand.

2. FullStory

Image source: G2

FullStory is a digital experience and product experience software that helps businesses to uncover hidden customer struggles and analyze user events via product analytics and session replay tools. It enables you to understand the user’s entire history.

This behavioral analytics software eliminates the blind spots in analytics data. It lets you understand how customers interact with the web and mobile elements like buttons, form fields, hamburger menus, headers, and more.

User Rating

According to Capterra, FullStory scores 4.6 out of 5 based on 63 user reviews. 

Who uses it

FullStory is a good option for product managers, e-commerce businesses, cross-functional CX teams, marketers, engineering, and support teams. It helps them gain insights into user behavior and customer journey.

Deployment

FullStory is a SaaS, web-based, and cloud platform that you can deploy by implementing Javascript code snippets into your website.

The FullStory code snippet logs your user’s scroll, pageview, click, mouse movements, and form-fill without the need for technical resources. 

Features list

FullStory provides a wide range of features for analyzing behavioral data. 

Here are some of its main features:

• Conversion tracking 
• Customer journey mapping 
• A/B testing 
• Conversion funnels
• Customer segmentation 
• Funnel analysis 
• Cohort analysis 

What makes this tool unique

While FullStory shares some similar features with Hotjar, such as heatmaps and session recordings, it has some features that make it stand out. 

For instance, FullStory provides more in-depth conversion rate optimization and funnel analysis, so you identify areas where users drop off the funnel and optimize for higher conversions. 

Moreover, you can use FullStory to analyze data for mobile apps and websites. Its session recording feature lets you filter events, skip periods of user inactivity and identify what matters to your business. 

Common with Hotjar

Both Hotjar and FullStory provide heatmaps and session recording tools. They also let you filter behavioral data to analyze events and spot user issues. 

Integrations

FullStory integrates with popular marketing tools you can find in your tech stack like Intercom, Slack, Salesforce, Segment, BigCommerce, Drift, and more. 

Customer support

You can contact the FullStory customer support team via live chat and email.

Pricing

FullStory offers a free plan for basic needs. It gives you access to 1000 session replays per month.

FullStory offers two paid plans—Business and Enterprise plans, but a downside is that it doesn’t provide transparent pricing for each plan on its website. 

1. The Business plan offers a 14-day trial and allows you to track up to 5000 sessions 
2. The Enterprise plan offers a customized plan, so you’d have to contact sales or request a demo

Pros

Some of the advantages of FullStory include:

• You can see every step of a user interaction and behavior across various web pages 
• You can spot specific events like when a user encounters an issue on your website 

Cons

Some cons of FullStory include:

• It displays analytics data in a complex way that can be hard to understand
• It can be a challenging task to track a specific event during a session replay
• Many users complain about the pricing. The pricing increases as you scale your needs for tracking more web visitors

3. CrazyEgg

Image source: G2

Crazy Egg is a website optimization software that helps you understand the customer journey better, identify various user struggles, and fix errors impacting your site’s conversions. 

With Crazy Egg, you can analyze your website traffic, run experiments, and improve the user experience and your site’s performance. 

User Rating

According to Capterra, Crazy Egg scores 4.5 out of 5 based on 75 user reviews. 

Who uses it

Crazy Egg offers marketers, e-commerce companies, product teams, digital agencies, and educational institutions the user’s journey and actions analysis.

Deployment

Crazy Egg is a web-based and cloud platform you can deploy by installing its snippet code on your site. 

Features list

Crazy Egg provides many features for analyzing user behavior. Here are some of them:

• Behavioral analytics 
• Surveys 
• Conversion rate optimization 
• A/B testing
• Data visualization 
• Snapshots 
• Heatmaps 
• Session recordings 
• Traffic analysis 

What makes this tool unique

Crazy Egg provides a traffic analysis tool to help you evaluate your website traffic and identify user problems affecting conversions. 

Unlike Hotjar, which focuses on user feedback and surveys, Crazy Egg provides A/B testing tools to let you run experiments and understand user actions. 

Common with Hotjar

Both Hotjar and Crazy Egg share similar features like heatmaps and user recordings. Both tools also let you filter behavioral reports by different user segments so you can better understand the people that interact with your web pages. 

Integrations

Crazy Egg integrates with third-party tools like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Segment, Google Tag Manager, and more. 

Customer support

Crazy Egg provides support via phone, email, chat, knowledge base, and a FAQ section. 

Pricing

Crazy Egg doesn’t provide a free plan, but it offers five premium packages with a 30-day free trial.

Here are the pricing details for each plan:

1. Basic—costs $29/month and lets you track 100 session recordings per month 
2. Standard—costs $49/month and lets you track 500 session recordings per month 
3. Plus—costs $99/month and lets you track 1000 per month
4. Pro—costs $249/month and lets you track 5000 sessions per month 
5. Enterprise—offers a customized plan

Pros

Some of the advantages of Crazy Egg include:

• An easy setup process and an intuitive user interface
• Heat mapping, scrolls, and click data that deliver insights into how users interact with various web elements

Cons

Here are some of the disadvantages of Crazy Egg:

• It doesn’t offer a free plan which can be challenging for startups with a limited budget 
• The premium pricing can get more expensive as you scale your analytics needs 

4. ClickTale

Image source: G2

ClickTale (now ContentSquare) is a digital experience analytics tool that enables you to monitor customer behavior, identify funnel falloffs, and use the insights to improve the customer journey. 

With ClickTale, you can visualize every step of the customer journey using filtering, segmentation, heatmaps, and session recording tools. 

User Rating

According to Capterra, ClickTale scores 4 out 5 based on seven user reviews. 

Who uses it

ClickTale is a good option for marketing teams, e-commerce, telecommunication, insurance, and finance companies. The web analytics platform also helps designers and product managers track user behavior.

Deployment

ClickTale is a web-based, SaaS, and cloud platform. The software starts tracking your website once you install its code snippet on your site.

Features list

ClickTale provides web analytics tools that give insights into your web and mobile app performance. 

Here are some of its major features:

• Customer segmentation 
• Conversion tracking 
• Session replay
• Customer journey analysis
• Struggle analysis
• Survey
• Behavior analytics
• Campaign management 

What makes this tool unique

ClickTale combines quantitative and qualitative web analysis to help you understand the “why” and “how” of user actions. It provides intuitive heat maps that allow you to measure user clicks, scrolls, taps, engagement, and much more. 

The analytics tool eliminates guesswork so you can visualize real user actions and learn how to optimize your app’s performance. 

Common with Hotjar

Just like Hotjar, ClickTale provides heat mapping and screen recording features. Both tools offer advanced filters that enable you to pinpoint specific user features, including device type, location, and user events. 

Another case where both tools overlap is that they provide user journey analysis and conversion tracking. 

Integrations

ClickTale allows you to connect with third-party marketing tools like Google Analytics, Heap, Intercom, LiveChat, and more.

Customer support

Efficient customer support isn’t one of the tool’s strengths. It provides support via FAQs and a knowledge base.

Pricing

Unlike Hotjar, ClickTale doesn’t provide transparent pricing on its website. You’d have to contact the sales team for a custom quote based on your needs. 

Pros

Some advantages of using ClickTale include:

• ClickTale provides an analytics report that lets you pinpoint areas that cause funnel drop-offs
• It provides a robust integration with a wide range of marketing, the voice of the customer, and chat tools
• With its zone-based heatmaps, you can get a better understanding of how specific customer segments interact with your website and mobile apps

Cons

Some of the disadvantages of using ClickTale include:

• While ClickTale provides numerous customer behavioral features, using some of its features can slow down your site
• It doesn’t provide transparent pricing, so you’d have to contact sales for a custom quote 
• Some users complain that the web analytics software can be expensive to use, especially if you own a startup with a limited budget

5. UserTesting

Image source: G2

UserTesting is a customer insights analytics platform that helps organizations understand what their users feel and think to improve the customer experience.

With UserTesting, you can create a test plan to ask users about their overall digital experience and watch a recording of specific user actions to pinpoint issues in their digital journey.

User Rating

According to Capterra, UserTesting scores 4.5 out of 5 based on 111 user reviews.

Who uses it

Usertesting is designed for product teams, marketers, e-commerce brands, financial services, and healthcare companies.

Deployment

UserTesting is a cloud, SaaS, and web-based analytics tool. Once you install its code snippet into your website, it starts tracking your analytics data.

Features list

UserTesting focuses on features that provide insights into customer behavior and actions. Some of its main features include

• Customer segmentation
• Audience targeting
• A/B testing
• Surveys and feedback
• Screen recording
• Collaboration tools

What makes this tool unique

Unlike other web analytics platforms, UserTesting allows you to request real users to test your website or mobile app. All you need to do is give them a specific task, including questions to help uncover critical details about their digital experience. This way, you can get first-hand customer feedback regarding what customers experience in real-time.

UserTesting enables you to understand user behavior while using a mobile app, including the features they interact with the most, why they abandon apps, and how you can improve the UX.

Common with Hotjar

Where UserTesting and Hotjar overlap is the use of the user recording feature. Both tools also provide user testing, surveys, and feedback features.

Integrations

UserTesting allows you to connect with third-party marketing tools like Trello, Slack, Jira, Google calendar, Qualtrics, and more.

Customer support

UserTesting provides support via email, phone, chat, FAQs, and a knowledge base.

Pricing

UserTesting doesn’t provide a free plan, but you can get a free trial of its premium plans upon request. As for its paid plans, UserTesting doesn’t disclose its pricing details, so you’d have to contact the sales team for a customized quote. Here are the available details:

1. Essentials plan—allows you to collect customer feedback, including test builder, dashboard, and analytics metrics
2. Advanced plan—includes sentiment analysis, test builder, and audience management
3. Ultimate plan—includes audience targeting and management

Pros

Some of the advantages of UserTesting include:

• It provides an intuitive user interface
• It’s easy to set up tests and set criteria for recording customer experience
• UserTesting provides screen recording features that allow you to watch every user action on your site

Cons

Some of the disadvantages of UserTesting include:

• Running A/B tests is based on regions and specific device types, so you’d have to meet the criteria to run a test
• The dashboard doesn’t display analytics data, so it can be hard to visualize data
• Some users complain that the app takes time to load after receiving a test

Hotjar alternatives: A short overview 

So far, we’ve explained the key features of the top five Hotjar alternatives. Here’s a short overview table to help you grasp the features of each software.

Features	FullSession	FullStory	Crazy Egg	ClickTale	UserTesting
Real-time Session recording	✔	✔	✘	✘	✔
Funnel analysis	✘	✔	✘	✘	✘
Conversion tracking	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘
Behavioral analytics	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔
Customer segmentation	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
A/B testing	✘	✘	✔	✘	✔
Customer journey mapping	✘	✔	✘	✔	✘
Dynamic heatmaps	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘
Free trial	✔	✔	✔	✘	✔
Free version	✘	✔	✔	✘	✘
Surveys and customer feedback	✔	✘	✔	✔	✔
Insights	✔	✘	✘	✘	✘

 

Time to choose your Hotjar alternatives

As we conclude this in-depth piece, we hope it has given you enough information to choose the right tool for your business, out of all the Hotjar alternatives listed.

With many software solutions available to marketers, e-commerce brands, product teams, and engineers who want to understand visitor behavior on their websites, it’s imperative to stick with a tool that works for you and your team.

FullSession stands as the best Hotjar alternative in this comparison guide. Our digital analytics software provides real-time session recording and replay features that can help you see what your users do on your website and identify the causes of funnel drop-offs. You’ll get access to interactive heatmaps that let you visualize users’ actions in real-time. What’s best, you can ask your customers to leave you their feedback and learn about their experience immediately.

FullSession offers a central analytics dashboard that enables cross-functional teams to collect customer behavioral data without affecting the site’s loading speed. This way, you can quickly figure out where users are having issues and improve accordingly.

Try FullSession for free

Don’t hesitate to start gaining actionable insights into user behavior by looking at how FullSession works. You can test our solution by signing up for a free trial or requesting a demo.

FAQs Relating to Hotjar Alternatives

Here are additional answers to help you learn more about Hotjar.

Is Hotjar a replacement for Google Analytics?

No, it is not. Hotjar is one of the analytics tools on the web that will provide you with user behavior metrics you cannot get from a free Google Analytics account. Read our Hotjar vs Google Analytics comparison to learn more about these tools.

What are the benefits of using a Hotjar alternative?

Here are some of the ways Hotjar fails to deliver and why using Hotjar alternatives could be beneficial for your website:

• Hotjar doesn’t have the option to track logged-in users
• Hotjar doesn’t offer predictive analysis of customer behavior
• When using the platform for more curated uses (such as pre-production testing), some UI interactions tend to appear disorganized 
• Heatmaps aren’t interactive

How to choose the best Hotjar alternative for your needs?

If you are looking for the best Hotjar alternatives or its competitors, there are several important features, such as a search box, split URL testing, and data analysis. FullSession is the best Hotjar alternative that provides advanced behavioral analytics tools that will help you to improve your website experience. You can sign up for free to take a look at how it works 

What is better than Hotjar?

FullSession is one of the best Hotjar alternatives to help you understand customer behavior. Our analytics tool provides some significant features that Hotjar doesn’t, such as interactive heatmaps, customer segmentation, etc.

Is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

Hotjar and Google Analytics don’t serve the same purposes. Instead, they are two tools that should be combined to analyze your customers’ behavior in-depth.

Is Hotjar for free?

Hotjar provides a free plan you can use at no cost.

Will Hotjar slow down my site?

Yes, Hotjar will slow down your website while analyzing behavioral data.