Business
Hotjar Review 2023: Is Hotjar worth it?
You just paid a buttload for a great website design. With a good rollout and some SEO wizardry, your traffic is through the roof. There’s just one problem: it’s not turning into revenue.
Hotjar claims to offer the solution to this classic problem. It tracks user engagement with heatmaps so you can see exactly what visitors are doing when they use your site.
But is Hotjar the real deal? We decided to give it a spin. Here’s our Hotjar review.
What is Hotjar?
Hotjar was founded back in 2014 by entrepreneur and consultant David Darmanin. The way Darmanin tells it, the company started after a string of failures.
“In both cases we built a product for months before we took it to market and started ‘selling’ it at scale. We thought that a well planned and complete user experience together with a top notch design were critical requirements before launch.”
With Hotjar, they made the simplest functional version of the product, released it in beta, and fine-tuned it for nearly a year before the final launch in 2015.
The strategy paid off, as Hotjar is now used by millions of websites around the world, including Nintendo, Adobe, and Microsoft. They were bought out by Contentsquare in 2021.
What does Hotjar do?
Hotjar’s most prominent feature is its heatmaps. These offer a handy visual to showcase how people typically use your website. Other than that, they offer tools for direct customer feedback, while also helping you recruit the right people for interviews and testimonials.
Hotjar review: Pricing
How much does Hotjar cost? For the standard “Observe” feature, they have 3 pricing plans:
- Basic: $0/mo. Unlimited heatmaps, continuous data capture, captures up to 35 user sessions a day.
- Plus: $39/mo. Includes additional filtering and API tools for tracking, captures up to 100 user sessions a day.
- Business: $99/mo (starting price). Includes custom integrations, user attribute tracking, captures up to 500 sessions a day. Can capture more sessions at higher prices, up to 270k.
In addition, they offer more robust business tools with bespoke pricing. To find out more about these packages, pricing for Ask and Engage tools, and custom packages, check out their pricing page.
Observe, Ask, and Engage all have free Basic packages. For the purposes of this Hotjar review, we’ll be focused on those.
Hotjar review: How to sign up
Hotjar has a simple sign-up process. All it takes is a few simple steps:
- Sign up with your email or Google account.
- Input your company’s name, how many employees you have, and your role.
- Select which feature you want to explore first.
- Input your company’s website for Hotjar installation
Once you’ve done all that, you get walked through the steps for adding Hotjar to your website.
How do you add Hotjar to your website?
In order to use Hotjar’s heatmaps, you’ll have to add a tracking code to your website. You can paste the code directly or use Google Tag Manager or another tracking manager tool to set up.
Hotjar also offers integration with:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Squarespace
- Drupal
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
And many more.
Hotjar review: Features
Luckily for new users, Hotjar offers an in-depth demo of their offerings, so you can get a feel for the dashboard and see all the data it collects.
An important thing to remember, however, is that this demo includes unlimited coverage that you won’t actually have on the free plan—or even most paid plans.
The Hotjar web app
The web app is fairly busy, but once you get past the initial whiplash, there’s plenty of neat features to explore.
Front and center in the Overview tab, you’ll find suggestions for new ways to use your account, as well as relevant recordings captured in the past day. This tab also features other recent activity, including feedback, heatmaps, and activity from your team.
The web app has 9 total tabs:
- Overview
- Dashboard
- Highlights
- Trends
- Funnels
- Recordings
- Heatmaps
- Feedback
- Surveys
- Engage
We’ll explore the features offered in each of these tabs.
Dashboard
This classic dashboard offers an aggregated view of how people are using your site. It’s got standard metrics like bounce rate, average session duration, and top clicked links. But it also offers unique data that gives you a well-rounded view of your site’s success.
For instance, one chart keeps track of rage clicks—where a user clicked the same area over and over—and U-turns—where they clicked on a link and quickly went back to the previous page.
Data filters aren’t available for free users; custom trends are only available on bespoke Scale plans. But for everyone else, these extra in-depth charts do make a big difference.
Highlights
Users on any plan can create highlights. This technology lets you save snippets of specific customer experiences you want to keep. You can mark these for bugs, signs of frustration, UI/UX issues, and more, and access them at any time in this tab.
Recordings
Trends and funnels are only available for Scale customers, so we’ll skip straight to recordings. The Recordings dashboard lets you view recent and relevant recordings, or comb through the whole archive.
Business and Scale users can filter their recordings to see new users, returning users, rage clicks, and more. These recordings show you a user’s entire journey, including where their cursor goes, what they click on, and even what operating system they use.
Heatmaps
Hotjar’s flagship feature, heatmaps keep track of where people are clicking the most—and the least.
Surprisingly, this feature was a bit tricky to figure out for me. As intuitive as a heatmap is as a concept, the section is a little harder to navigate on the demo site. Creating a new heatmap from scratch is much simpler, but I’m a little surprised that this, of all sections, feels the most convoluted.
Feedback
That little red sidebar you’ll often see on the right-hand side of Hotjar’s page is a feedback widget. It’s a relatively unobtrusive tool for collecting user insights. On the other hand, many sites make the fatal mistake of cluttering their page with widgets and pop-ups.
Surveys
Free Hotjar users can create up to 3 surveys and 3 feedback widgets at a time. There are classic survey templates asking users to rate your service from 1-5, share how likely they are to recommend it, or explain their reason for leaving.
You can also create custom surveys, and add an unlimited number of questions to them. These surveys can either appear directly on your site or be accessed through a link.
Other features
For free users, Engage lets you set up interviews with up to 2 users each month, with built-in video calling software.
Scale users get access to Funnels and Trends, two additional tracking tools that let you keep track of users’ journeys as they use your site.
Hotjar review: final verdict
Hotjar offers some really useful insights for how people are using your website. It can be helpful for marketing teams and UX designers, and the insights you gain can lead to greater success down the road.
However, it’s not perfect. Consumers are concerned about their privacy, and Hotjar’s direct surveillance of users—including tracking their browser and OS—is a tough pill to swallow.
Hotjar pros and cons
Pros:
- Useful insights
- Solid free features
- Clever design
- Quick and effective
Cons:
- Expensive paid tiers
- Cluttered web app
- Privacy concerns