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:

1. Sign up with your email or Google account.
2. Input your company’s name, how many employees you have, and your role.
3. Select which feature you want to explore first.
4. 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

Final rating: 7.0/10 ♨️

Since the inception of DaVinci Resolve in 2004, word made its way around the internet that a new sheriff was in town. While yes, there is plenty of competition for editing software, few are free and even fewer are as remarkable as DaVinci Resolve. The software has undergone many iterations over the years, and in July 2022, the much-anticipated version 18 was released. In this DaVinci Resolve review, we’ll lay out the capabilities of this free video editing software and tell you how to get your hands on it.

DaVinci Resolve Review: Features

Did you know you could have the same video editing software used in post-production for famous movies, shows, commercials, and music videos? It’s true. DaVinci Resolve is one of a select few tools known for its use in Hollywood editing – Everything Everywhere All At Once, Black Widow, and Love and Monsters are just a few examples.

For basic video editing, DaVinci Resolve 18 has more than enough power behind it. The software allows you to add text, create smooth transitions, sync audio to your visuals, create intros/outros, and much more.

Some other features include: 

• automatic mask
• HDR grading
• super resolution
• automatic depth map
• subtitles
• YouTube chapters

Another new feature of DaVinci Resolve 18 is multi-user collaboration. You can have several people working on a video edit together with the help of BlackMagic Cloud. This removes the tedious hassle of translating projects, exporting files, and trying to keep track of changes.

When rendering videos, you won’t have to worry about watermarks. Users can edit any 8‑bit video formats up to 60 frames per second. Resolutions may be as high as ultra HD 3840 x 2160.

Here’s a full list of DaVinci Resolve 18’s new features.

Minimum Requirements for DaVinci Resolve

Perhaps the only catch to using this free video editing software is the system requirements. Needless to say, this is a huge download that uses a lot of RAM. Most sources recommend you have 16 GB (a Mac could squeeze by with 8) along with a 64-bit operating system and at least a quad-core CPU. You’ll know you don’t have the system requirements if the application lags, freezes, or playback continuously skips.

DaVinci Resolve Review: Basics

Assuming you’ve never used editing software in your life, how easy is it to get started? If you’re willing to learn by doing and look up a few quick tutorials, it’s very easy to get started on your first video. 

Once you’ve gone through the entire installation process, click the icon to open the software. Across the bottom of the screen, you’ll see viewing options. For beginners, the best place to start is in the “Edit” view.

In the top left section, you’ll see all the media clips you’re using in a given project – audio, video, and pictures. To add media, simply drag and drop computer files into the media section. In the center, you’ll see the playback screen where you can review your progress. The bottom half of the screen is where you’ll do the actual editing. You can drag and drop video and audio files from the media section into the editing section and get to work.

From here, you can play with the toolbar across the middle of the screen to make cuts and begin editing your media files. Right clicking a video clip also gives you a plethora of options like linking/unlinking audio and video together. In the top right section, you’ll see tools to zoom, crop, change the position of text and images, rotate, and more.

Again, there’s a lot to do in DaVinci Resolve and professional editors can go much deeper than this. But the Black Magic team does a great job of bridging the gap and making the basic tools accessible to beginners.

How to Get DaVinci Resolve for Free

You might think it’s too good to be true that such a sophisticated tool could be free. But alas, DaVinci Resolve is available for download right from the Black Magic Design website. Both Mac and Windows versions are up for grabs – Simply fill out the form and download whatever version you need. Linux users will be happy to know there’s a version for them too.

Once you get comfortable with the basics of video editing, there’s no shortage of DaVinci Resolve plugins to play with. You can up the quality of your motion graphics, mimic classic film stock, and remove video or audio noise. Watch your production value improve in myriad ways.

DaVinci Resolve Studio vs Free

If you think free DaVinci Resolve has a lot of features, you’ll be thoroughly impressed if you opt for the paid version. It includes:

• GPU accelerations
• 30+ Resolve FX
• DaVinci Neural Engine
• Supports 32k at up to 120 frames per second
• Play more formats (AVCHD, AVC-Intra, and popular 10-bit formats)

If you’re unsure whether or not to upgrade, there’s not much to lose. The paid version (DaVinci Resolve Studio) is only $295 for a lifetime license. With that said, the vast majority of video editing projects can be done in the free DaVinci Resolve, especially if you’re not skilled with editing software.

Hopefully this DaVinci Resolve review gave you a little more information so you can make an informed decision. And if you’re wildly overwhelmed by all the features, spend some time browsing these DaVinci Resolve tutorials. Happy editing!

When you’re collaborating on documents with other writers or co-workers, how do you keep everyone on the same page?

Truth be told, for most of you, the answer is probably Google Docs. It’s quick, efficient, and easy to share. But what if there was a better way?

Bit.ai professes to be “the world’s most powerful workplace and document collaboration platform.” In this Bit.ai review, we’ll put that claim to the test.

Bit.ai Review: What is Bit.ai?

Co-founded by Raj and Saje Sandhu, Bit.ai has been offering document collaboration to companies like Canon and Harvard University since 2007. The company employs a global team with headquarters in San Francisco.

What does Bit.ai offer?

Bit offers a lot of custom features depending on your business’ workflow. Some of their offerings include:

• Collaborative document editor
• Content library
• Cloud integration
• 100+ file types
• Automated formatting, themes, templates
• End-to-end document sharing
• Branded documents
• Customizable workspaces

We’ll explore some of the key features in the next section.

How much does Bit.ai cost?

Individual users and small teams can use Bit.ai for free. Here’s a breakdown of their three pricing plans:

• Free plan: $0/mo. Up to 5 members, 50 documents, 5MB file limit, 1GB storage.
• Pro plan: $12/mo or $96/yr. Unlimited members and documents, 200MB file limit, 500GB storage.
• Business plan: $20/mo or $180/yr. Unlimited storage, document tracking tools, dedicated support, free guest access.

They also offer bespoke plans for enterprise customers, as well as discounted pricing for education, startups, nonprofits, and businesses involved in the COVID-19 response.

Bit.ai Review: How to sign up

Getting started with Bit.ai is as simple as inputting your email and receiving a six-digit verification code.

After that, you’re asked to fill out information like your name, your job title, and your department at your company, as well as create a password. Right off the bat, Bit puts businesses first, setting itself apart from Google Docs before you even log in.

But it doesn’t stop there. When you sign up, you create a profile for your whole company, getting a custom subdomain for your team to access your library.

And there you have it! Once you’re logged in, you have the option to see a tutorial. If you want to upgrade to a paid plan, use the handy “Upgrade” button in the lower left corner of your dashboard.

Bit.ai Review: Features

The Bit.ai web app includes tabs for your dashboard, a list of all your workspaces, and a link tracking tab for Business and Enterprise users.

The Bit.ai dashboard

Your Bit.ai homepage allows you to view recent activity, featured templates, tutorials and updates, as well as see how close you are to your document limit if you’re a free user.

With this limit, Bit.ai offers almost all of their features to free users. I prefer this model for free versions rather than arbitrarily limiting features.

You can open documents directly from the dashboard, but only using a featured template or a recently-opened one. To create something from scratch, you’ll have to head over to Workspaces.

The Workspaces tab

First thing’s first: create a workspace. Workspaces are where your documents are created, saved, and shared. Once you’ve made one, you can create a new document, either by using a template, importing an existing document, or starting from scratch.

Creating a document with Bit.ai

When you create a new document in Bit.ai, you’re taken to a bare-bones writing editor similar to Notion. I always find it hard to start writing when you don’t have anything visual to guide you, but once you get the hang of it, it’s fairly intuitive.

I think the reason for this no-frills approach is to make it easier to take meeting notes and write down quick thoughts about a project. For more in-depth functions, however, you can highlight your text after you’ve written it to change the formatting. There’s also a + icon next to your cursor that lets you add links, embeds, files, code blocks, and more.

One neat feature of this text editor is the ability to link directly to other documents and content in your Bit.ai library. It makes it much easier to cross-reference documents than it is in Google Docs, Word, Notes, etc., another great benefit for businesses.

There’s no need to save your documents in Bit.ai—that happens automatically. When you’re done, however, you can share it with collaborators and others, lock it to prevent further edits, change its associated colors, view stats and version history. Note: exporting is only available for paid users.

Bit.ai writing templates

Bit offers a huge range of templates, with themes geared towards managers, marketers, designers, educators, and much more. Some of these are designed to function as static documents, such as thesis papers. Others can be hubs for entire business processes, like the video production template.

After trying out a few of these templates, they’re great at showing off all of Bit.ai’s functionality, but they’re useful even if you don’t use Bit for everything. They offer great templates for outlining your processes, making it easier to set a roadmap and including things you might not have thought of.

Importing documents into Bit.ai

While Bit.ai professes to support a massive range of file types, their import menu is a little peculiar. You can choose to import from “Word” (which just allows you to import .docx files from your computer), from a number of cloud-based sources, or Markdown, .txt, and .pdf files.

The strange thing is, you can’t click on “Word” and then upload a .txt file, nor can you click on “PDF” and upload a Word doc. I have no idea why it’s formatted like this, but it made my upload attempts very confusing.

Not to mention, formatting isn’t included when you upload, and the first two uncommon file types I tried (Pages and Final Draft) were both incompatible.

Bit.ai Review: Final thoughts

So, how does Bit.ai live up to its thesis statement? Is it really “the world’s most powerful document collaboration platform?”

Eh, I don’t know about powerful. It’s mighty useful, and certainly more business-oriented than any of its major competitors. But it’s actually a little lacking as a writing tool. You can’t choose a font, there’s no toolbar, and there’s limited formatting options.

There are some good resources here for content management. The templates are stellar, and it has some of the easiest tools for cross-referencing other documents that I’ve ever seen. However, I’ve definitely seen tools that make it easier to organize documents and upload from your device.

Final grade: 6/10 😐