Hotjar Reviews - Pros & Cons, Ratings & more

Lucky Orange

Fullstory

Zoho PageSense

Crazy Egg

Mouseflow

Microsoft Clarity

Smartlook

All the tools and data you need to truly understand your users’ behavior and create engaging experiences that drive results. Trusted by one million websites in 180+ countries.

Hotjar

Web-based

Founder & CMO

Hotjar is reliable and is the best at what it does. There are other options to help record app sessions, but HotJar continues to do what it does best.

Assistant Manager - Digital Marketing

UX plays a very important role for performance marketing and Hotjar is a brilliant tool which helps in collecting user behaviour data to do analysis and take corrective measures.

Marketing Manager

This is a fantastic way to understand how users are engaging with your site. I am a big fan of Hotjar and the approach to marketing insights.

Product Manager

Love using pools - you will be surprised how good it works if you ask the right question in the right time. Very responsive and  professional customer support.

Co-Founder

I would like to recommend Hotjar to anyone as it is so simple to use and the return on investment is also quite impressive.

Hotjar is a great heatmapping software that is easy to install, has great features, and a reasonable price point.

It gives me complete vision what my visitor are doing on my website, what is their behaviours that help me to improve that part of website.

Marketer

Hotjar helps you understand how your users interact with your website. I work at a SaaS and it has been very helpful in improving our UX/UI and also for customer support related tasks.

Surveys were also helpful in finding out where our visitors were coming from. We placed them in our most popular pages for feedback.

Online Media Manager

Hotjar is a great tool for researching user behavior on websites. It is definitely invaluable in the ux development process of any good website.

Portfolio Director

Really cool tool to help you evaluate where users go when on your site. The software is intuitive and has nice reporting.

This is problem because when a user messages us with a problem and we want to view how he used our website right away, we can't confirm his actions right then and there, only after a few hours.

Partnerships Manager

The integration with the website is smooth and the surveys created have a good response rate. Their reporting tool is also solid and provide actionable insights for UX and product improvements.

Principal Software Developer

Easy to integrate, easy to control access, and the functionality to set up recordings based on certain conditions is helpful.

Owner

I was unsatisfied with other Heatmapping and recording software.

Growth Manager

That it's simple and easy to use, implementation literally takes a minute. The great thing is that you have so many tools in one place, heatmaps, recordings, surveys and more.

Demand Generation Manager

Session recordings could have more filtering options and auto detection of rage clicks and ux issues. Unfortunately this tool can slow down your page load.

There was no integration available to our existing CRM or email platform that would feed all the data and analytics Hotjar was collecting into our system.

Cloudflare

We have had an excellent experience with Hotjar.  It has made our user studies very simple and we have learned SO MUCH about how our customers interact with our website.  This has made it infinitely easier for us to streamline our UI and buying process.

I can't imagine how you do CRO without Hotjar

Overall HotJar is a great platform and I am one of their biggest advocates. I would recommend HotJar to anyone looking to enhance their understanding of on-site traffic and conversion.

HotJar is an awesome tool for studying websites and optimizing!

Hey Akande,

Thanks so much for taking the time to review Hotjar! It's great to read that you're getting a lot of value from the tool :)

It's indeed the case that we removed cross-domain tracking in light of our continued commitment to privacy-by-design. I'm sorry to hear that working with the tool is a bit tough without this - we'd like to help if we can! Do reach out to us at support@hotjar.com if you've got questions.

Following up your note on the height of captured pages for Heatmaps - we do have a 15000px limit, but if it's a pain point I'd definitely suggest using the Suggest a Feature function in-app to let us know what you need :)

All best,
Alex

I would be surprised if there was a CRO or UX team that hasn't heard of Hotjar. It's a great little tool, especially given the price, but it doesn't allow enough flexibility to be your main on-site research tool. It's really good for starting out and doing some basic research. Sweet and simple! I guess marketers could benefit the most from this!

Great little tool for starting your UX research

Hey Ioana!

Thanks so much for leaving this review and sharing your thoughts on Hotjar.

Following up your feedback - we're always focused on minimizing any increased page load time with the Hotjar script on your site. Have you checked out this resource? https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115009335727-Will-Hotjar-Slow-Down-My-Site- If you're having trouble please reach out at support@hotjar.com and we can take a look with you.

There's new targeting and filtering functionality on the product roadmap :) https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012303268-Product-Roadmap Stay tuned for that!

All best,
Alex

Very great experience, but with the actualization the manual heatmaps are off :(

Excelent but a little expensive

Undoubtedly, Hotjar is a must-have tool to perform qualitative research on your website visitors so that you can improve the user experience. It will allow you the opportunity to further analyze the data of google analytics. 

With so many excellent features this popular tool will help you to do basic and effective research on your website. I would like to recommend Hotjar to anyone as it is so simple to use and the return on investment is also quite impressive. 

Optimize the UX of your website with Hotjar

I think overall Horjar is a great tool for small to medium-sized businesses. For the price, it has a number of great features to start user testing and CRO. As a marketer (not technically inclined whatsoever), it's also pretty easy to set up and use.

Great UX/CRO Tool for the Price

Leading Heatmaps Tool

The best heatmap software

Implemented by our Shopify developers, we use hot jar to improve UX by viewing recordings and monitoring post checkout surveys that come through to a slack channel.

Great for keeping an eye on UX

We used Hotjar to track website user sessions, looking for hangups that might prevent customers from converting on partner websites.

Solid solution for conversion optimization

Hotjar has shown us critical user flow errors in the websites we manage, and has provided the information necessary to make calculated adjustments to our UI, resulting in a decrease in bounce rate and an increase in conversions and revenue. We definitely have ROI with our Hotjar spend.

Great Heat-mapping Software

Hi,

Thank for taking the time to review Hotjar.

It's good to hear that you found Hotjar helpful in optimizing your websites.

If you want to reach out to me at sharon.biggar@hotjar.com, I'd like to send you a small thank you for your review.

Cheers,
Sharon from Hotjar

Hotjar does exactly what I need: gives context to the issues I see in GA, and allows me to get into the mind of the user with greater depth. 

Must have for qualitative research

Hey Trevor, thanks for the review!

Super to hear you're getting a lot of value from Hotjar.
You can get unlimited heatmaps on our plus and business plans.
You can find more information here
https://www.hotjar.com/pricing

Thanks again,
Denis from the Hotjar team

About hotjar experience well and good for real

Hot jar application is best application 

Website users activity monitoring

Overall, the experience with the software was positive. Although it is a bit complex to use, it has excellent features.

Amazing tool for website strategy

I like it alot. Heatmaps are important tool in my work on improving websites and customer journeys.

Hotjar - perfect tool for discovering what your users actually do on your website

The benefits of using this tool is well worth it.

Great Heatmaps

Hotjar is an exceptional analytics and user feedback platform that enables businesses to gain valuable insights into their website or app's performance. 

Get Ya A Hotjar

It was overall good, but unfortunately not the best. Which is why we have made the switch.

A heatmapping software that does the job

We are capturing feedback from our members right after they make a donation to our organization.  This is a great way for us to know why our members support the organization.  Being able to more accurately attribute them to individual members in our CRM would be very beneficial.

Does what it needs to do

It is outstanding for survey and forms purposes. Screen recording can be done easily using it. 

Best for website visitor behavior analysis

Been using it for 3 years now. For a low investment it gives you a sense of the effectiveness of your webpages. It is very easy to set up on your website and then it does the work for you. We implemented it when we renewed our website and when we changed menu's and core landingpages. Let it run for 3 to 6 months, so you have enough data, and then analyse and improve the visuals, text and structure of the webpages. Hotjar is a quick, easy and effective tool.

Effective for easy, quick and clear overview of webpage behavior

This tool is simply extraordinary for providing excellent UX to visitors of website

Great tool. Ive used it to do surveys (NLP), heatmaps and AB testing when running product pages or landingpages for newsletter subscriptions. Helped me to eliminate some issues on mobiles. Currently I use different tool but Hotjar is still a tool that you need to try (even in free tier) to see how things should be done in other apps.

pricey, but worth it

good experience, but i hope this dose not  eat much of end users internet and hope it dos not reduces the web performance

capture the live user usage of your web product, and analyse the user experience  

Hi Mook,

Thanks for taking the time to review Hotjar.

We're happy to hear that you are finding Hotjar useful. I would interested to hear more about the data retention issues you experienced - Hotjar retains data for 365 days from the date the data is captured. We do not have any plans with 90-day data retention, so it would be good to dig deeper into your issue.

You can reach me at mike.cullen@hotjar.com if you'd like to discuss further. I'd also like to offer you a little something as a thank you for your review.

Cheers,
Mike




Product Owner, CRO Services

Trevor:                                                Hi, my name's Trevor, I'm a senior manager in the software industry. I'm here reviewing Hotjar, which I give a five out of five. And for more reviews like this click below. As I've used various user research software platforms, I found that many of them just didn't bring everything all under one roof like I needed it to. I'd use Survey Monkey for polls and surveys. I use Lucky Orange for visitor recordings and CrazyEgg for confetti maps and movement maps. And each of them are really good at those specific areas. Lucky Orange was spot on for viewing one-on-one visitor recordings. CrazyEgg was great for viewing the click maps that I needed, but what I'm shocked was with Hotjar, everything was brought under one roof and it was made a lot easier to use. I didn't feel like I had to use multiple platforms anymore and I could review and deploy all of my data from one place at a time.
                                                       It was the only platform that could do that for me and take everything from the absolute highest funnel of just reviewing conglomerate user data on click maps and scroll maps all the way down to individual one-on-one data from recordings or survey results or polls. That's what made Hotjar stand out to me. Beyond bringing all of the user research tools into one place, something that I really loved about Hotjar was the ability to segment them. To go back through and take users who scrolled to certain areas on the page and then filter them by browser or filter them by device. Likewise, being able to take survey results and break them down by different users, or be able to view trends from different polls. Those tools really stuck out as things that allowed me to take things from the macro level and take them down to an individual level where I can package them up and base hypotheses on those of how has it changed my website based upon how different users are viewing them.
                                                       If you look at data at a macro level, it's not as useful. Different users have different needs, but if I'm able to break it down by browser or demographic or device type, then I can target different pages to different users and alter the content accordingly, which is much more effective. Onboarding with Hotjar can be done in an afternoon, potentially less if you don't need any snack breaks. It's very simple to log in, choose a plan and start setting up campaigns immediately. Integration with your website is a snap when you use Google tag manager, that's my favorite way. You simply punch in your Hotjar ID. It's seven or eight digits maybe, and a new Google analytics or Google tag manager tag. And it deploys immediately. No downtime, no caching required. And when it comes to learning how to use Hotjar, their skills library is awesome.
                                                       And there's plenty of white papers and content where you can learn how to set up a heatmap, scroll map or any of their other tools within minutes. If you're a smaller business looking to get into user research, Hotjar's an absolute no-brainer. The cost is nominal. It's very inexpensive and there's even free plans. But if you're a larger business and you're looking to do larger scale research projects, you might want to consider the cost of Hotjar and what you ultimately need to do prior to choosing a tool.
                                                       There are very few tools that I say would offer the exact same suite as Hotjar. But when you start looking at the cost, which can quickly accelerate into thousands of dollars a month, depending on how much traffic you want to flow through the tool, you may want to consider something like user testing instead. I think user testing is for an entirely different audience, but if you need to do that, one-to-one user research, it's definitely a competitor with Hotjar if you have a potential high Hotjar costs. Like I said, if you have a low Hotjar cost, there's no replacement, it's a hundred percent worth it. But if you're a large company, maybe consider what else you could use that budget for before forking out a couple of thousand dollars for Hotjar. I think their pricing model is competitive on the low end. It loses some of that competitive edge on the high-end, especially when you need to commit large chunks of budget to different initiatives throughout the year.

Hotjar is solid and keeps leading the pack

Josh:                                                  I'm Josh, CMO and Co-Founder. I'm reviewing HotJar and I would give HotJar a rating of four. For more reviews like this, click the link below. The other softwares that I used prior to HotJar were mainly analytics type softwares, like Google Analytics. Google Analytics provided me really good data on the type of people that are coming to the website, what they were doing on the website. However, it was not nearly as visual as what I got in HotJar. Some of the reasons that I chose HotJar for my business were mainly focused around getting additional information around what the visitors were doing on the website when they came to our site. We had some good data that we were receiving from Google Analytics and some other tools like Adobe. However, we didn't have a really good visual way of seeing what people were actually doing on the website and HotJar provided a really good visual tools that allowed us to see in many different ways, what people are doing once they came to the website and how they engaged with us.
                                                       When it came to onboarding HotJar into my business, it was actually very easy. It just involved adding a piece of JavaScript code to the website. And so we had the JavaScript code added to the website using Google Tag Manager. It probably took five minutes to actually get it installed. And then you just go through a verification process that makes sure that the code was actually installed correctly. The whole process was under 10 minutes and that included grabbing the code off of HotJar that's unique to our website. If you have multiple websites, you get a unique code for each website and you just integrate those so that they fire on every page of the website that you'd like to monitor or use the tool on, so one of the simplest processes that I've ever used for implementing a tool, and definitely one of the quickest.
                                                       If I were to give recommendations or suggestions to others that were looking to use HotJar, the biggest piece of feedback that I would give, or the foremost, would be just making sure that you come up with the use cases of how you're going to use HotJar. HotJar is one of those types of tools that once you begin to use it, have it integrated, it happens so quickly. You get it in place so quickly that it can have a wow factor of, wow, this is like really cool data that I've never seen before. It shows me really cool insights of what people are doing on my website and then over a couple of days, it may fade and you may forget that you even have the tool in place.
                                                       I've had two different companies that I've worked with that have used HotJar and in both cases, that's what happened is we loved it, we used it for a little while and then we forgot that we had it. So study up some use cases prior to using the tool and ensuring you know who's going to use the tool can help you ensure that it doesn't go forgotten and that people are actually going to continue to use it and are responsible for using the tool once you have in place. The other thing that I would recommend is making sure that you select the right plan based on the number of page views that you want to record, or the number of visitors that you would like to record. It's not a big deal to change the plan after you've already started.
                                                       However, what can happen is if you don't have the right plan selected, you may go to retrieve your recordings and find that you've had far fewer recordings or a smaller sampling size than what you would have thought. And it can just be a little bit annoying, I would say, to then go back, reset your HotJar platform and instance to have a big enough plan to catch all the people that you would like to, and then to rerecord them. So from the very start, make a good estimate of how many people you'd like to record, how many visitors you'd like to record and take data on and make sure that your plan is aligned with that.

Hotjar Reviews (2025)

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