Hotjar is a conversion rate optimization tool for digital marketers. Features include heatmapping, visual session recording, conversion funnel analytics, form analytics, feedback polls and surveys, and usability testing.
The tool is used by digital analysts, UX designers, web developers and product marketers. Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare September 2021, and is now a Contentsquare brand.
$39
per month 100 daily sessions
Optimizely Feature Experimentation
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely Feature Experimentation unites feature flagging, A/B testing, and built-in collaboration—so marketers can release, experiment, and optimize with confidence in one platform.
When Google Optimize goes off we searched for a tool where you can be sure to get a good GA4 implementation and easy to use for IT team and product team.
Optimizely Feature Experimentation seems to have a good balance between pricing and capabilities.
Optimizely FX is the only tool I've used that specifically allows for testing in the back-end. Most front end tools are great for simple tests, but there comes a time when you need to go a level deeper and that's not possible with front-end tools.
Hotjar is good for a first pass at understanding user sentiment or locating potential usability issues. There are features such as "rage clicked" which shows recordings or instances when a user rage clicked or had an issue with your site. Hotjar has also been helpful to launch intercept surveys on mobile, desktop, and app, which not all competitor software allow. Hotjar recordings are fun to watch. "Watching Hotjar like Netflix" is a favorite pastime at work.
Based on my experience with Optimizely Feature Experimentation, I can highlight several scenarios where it excels and a few where it may be less suitable. Well-suited scenarios: - Multi-Channel product launches - Complex A/B testing and feature flag management - Gradual rollout and risk mitigation Less suited scenarios: - Simple A/B tests (their Web Experimentation product is probably better for that) - Non-technical team usage -
Heat mapping is great on Hotjar. It is a good place to start when you are looking at the UX & CRO on your website. You can see the % of people clicking on elements on a page, how far they scroll, and mouse movements.
Hotjar is great for session recordings. These record the mouse movements, clicks, pages and scrolls of a user in video format. You can watch these to investigate what works well on a site and identify potential roadblocks and bugs.
Hotjar is great as it ensures that users details are anonymous; for instance, if you are watching a session recording, you cannot see what a user types in a form field, as Hotjar blanks this out.
Hotjar has a poll function, so you can have polls on your website.
It is easy to use any of our product owners, marketers, developers can set up experiments and roll them out with some developer support. So the key thing there is this front end UI easy to use and maybe this will come later, but the new features such as Opal and the analytics or database centric engine is something we're interested in as well.
Would be nice to able to switch variants between say an MVT to a 50:50 if one of the variants is not performing very well quickly and effectively so can still use the standardised report
Interface can feel very bare bones/not very many graphs or visuals, which other providers have to make it a bit more engaging
Doesn't show easily what each variant that is live looks like, so can be hard to remember what is actually being shown in each test
Even though the heat maps and user recordings were useful, our website was significantly slowed down after we installed Hotjar, so much so, that it took over a minute for our blog to load. The data that we gathered was not worth the length that it took our website to load.
So easy and simple to use! Straightforward anyone in the team is able to easily go in and set up anything in Hotjar. The UI is really simple. Whenever you give feedback to Hotjar they continously take on board the feedback and improve the tool.
Easy to navigate the UI. Once you know how to use it, it is very easy to run experiments. And when the experiment is setup, the SDK code variables are generated and available for developers to use immediately so they can quickly build the experiment code
Hotjar is a SaaS-based company, and as such has a good support service. Users can quickly submit support tickets through Hotjar's online portal. Enterprise customers get access to additional support members and have SLAs to support their larger, more complex needs. Overall, Hotjar is extremely reliable and I've never had to reach out to customer support.
Video Capture - HotJars video capture of user sessions is nothing short of amazing. It is so useful (not to mention cool) to see, in real time, how users interact with our software. It makes our jobs so much easier and more enjoyable to get this type of d
User Surveys - The ease and flexibility of surveys we can make available on our website are an awesome tool to get additional data.
Simple implementation - Adding a very small amount of code to our website gives us the ability to use all of HotJars features without having to touch our code again.
When Google Optimize goes off we searched for a tool where you can be sure to get a good GA4 implementation and easy to use for IT team and product team. Optimizely Feature Experimentation seems to have a good balance between pricing and capabilities. If you are searching for an experimentation tool and personalization all in one... then maybe these comparison change and Optimizely turns to expensive. In the same way... if you want a server side solution. For us, it will be a challenge in the following years
We have fixed many issues, for example, checkout usability problems with the video recording feature. You can catch bugs and get an overall idea of how a particular page is working.
Polls have helped us pair intent with the video sessions, so we can understand better why certain users answered different things. You get greedy and try to ask everything but that won't work. Keep it simple and it will give you small but important insights.
We have a huge, noteworthy ROI case study of how we did a SaaS onboarding revamp early this year. Our A/B test on a guided setup flow improved activation rates by 20 percent, which translated to over $1.2m in retained ARR.
