If you’re running a business, you already know the importance of web analytics. While a traditional analytics tool like Google Analytics may show you significant numbers like churn rate, page traffic, or bounce rates, how do you learn how users behave on your site? Advanced web analytics tools such as FullSession, Hotjar, and Smartlook can help you.
Currently, Hotjar and Smartlook are popular web analytics tools on the market. Rather than spending long hours on research trying to figure out which software is ideal for your website, we’ve made the process easier for you. We’ve prepared a Hotjar vs Smartlook comparison.
In this article, we’ll compare these web analytics tools based on their features, pricing, use cases, integrations, languages, and support, so you can save time, resources, and money.
Also, we’ll address a better alternative – our FullSession. FullSession is a web analytics software that provides you actionable insights into customer behavior via helpful features like real-time session recordings, session replays, interactive heatmaps, and customer feedback forms.
Combining these features gives product teams the ability to understand user behavior, identify user issues, improve their products, and ultimately increase conversions. If you want to test all FullSession features, you can sign up and create your free account today.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the Hotjar vs Smartlook comparison, let’s begin by introducing each software.
What is Hotjar?
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Hotjar is a conversion optimization tool that tracks your web visitors’ behavior and provides you with insights to help you increase your website performance rate. With Hotjar, product managers, UX designers, and researchers can discover user pain points, understand user actions and improve customer experience (CX).
What is Smartlook?
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Smartlook is an analytics software for websites and mobile apps that lets businesses track customer behavior. With Smartlook, product managers, developers, UX designers, and marketers make an informed decision on how to optimize product performance.
What is FullSession?
FullSession is a web analytics software that helps businesses monitor user behavior. It helps them capture and analyze digital engagement data to optimize product design, content, or layout and improve the user experience.
Hotjar vs Smartlook: How they compare and contrast
Below, you can compare Hotjar and Smartlook to spot where their features overlap and what unique features each solution provides. This insight can make a big difference in analyzing your website visitors’ actions.
Both Hotjar and Smartlook provide session recordings and heatmaps and have an easy set-up process. You’ll learn more about their differences, use cases, deployment, features, user ratings, language, and integrations as you read further. Let’s start with the basics.
Hotjar vs Smartlook: Basic differences
You can use Smartlook to track user interaction on websites and mobile apps, while Hotjar doesn’t track user behavior on mobile apps and doesn’t provide mobile analytics.
UX designers, product managers, and digital marketers use Hotjar in their everyday work. Smartlook targets small businesses, agencies, and digital marketers.
One of the most significant differences between Hotjar and Smartlook lies in the filter options for session recordings and heat maps. For example, with Hotjar, you can filter session recordings by user feedback, while Smartlook doesn’t provide this feature.
In another context, Smartlook includes the funnel analysis to help you understand the user navigation, and you can use this feature as a filter for session recordings. In contrast, Hotjar doesn’t provide the funnel analysis.
Hotjar vs Smartlook: User ratings
When it comes to user ratings, both Hotjar and Smartlook have shown promising results in the market. We’ll highlight user ratings based on two popular review sites – TrustRadius and G2.
- TrustRadius – Hotjar has an average user rating of 8.5 out of 10 based on 263 user reviews. In contrast, Smartlook has an average user rating of 8.9 out of 10 based on 297 user reviews.
- G2 – Both tools also have a good rating on this review platform. Hotjar has a 4.4 out of 5 user rating based on 252 user reviews, while Smartlook has a user rating of 4.6 out of 5 based on 846 user reviews.
Hotjar vs Smartlook: Use cases
Since Hotjar and Smartlook have similar features, there’s also some overlap in their use cases.
Some relevant use cases of Hotjar:
- Hotjar helps you collect instant visual feedback via a feedback widget to understand your user behavior better. With this feature, you can learn what goes through your users’ minds while using your website and act on it.
- With the session recordings feature, you can watch what your users do while on your site. For example, you can spot specific user activity by using filters like user feedback, rage clicks, friction events, and more.
- The survey feature lets you collect user feedback after users have visited your site. Here’s a typical scenario – if you’re in e-commerce, you can watch a session recording and spot where a user abandons your shopping cart. You can send an abandoned cart survey to the user’s email to better understand the shopping experience and what stopped them from completing the purchase.
- Heat maps let you uncover what distracts your users and test web copy and page elements to find out what works best for them.
Some relevant use cases of Smartlook:
- With the heatmap feature, you can pinpoint what web visitors are doing on your site. Rather than watching all user actions simultaneously, you can use filters to sort new and returning users. You can also use heatmaps to get segmented data. For example, you can filter mobile users and desktop users.
- You can use the funnel feature to create a sequence of events before a visitor becomes a customer. This feature helps you understand visitor navigation and spot friction points leading to website abandonment.
- Automatic session recordings let you watch user behavior. With this feature, you can spot the specific issues your users have with your product and fix them.
Hotjar vs Smartlook: Deployment
The deployment between Hotjar and Smartlook is quite different. With Smartlook, there are a few ways to install the software.
For instance, you can add the code s