Top 10 Hotjar Alternatives You Should Check Out In 2023!

Published by Madhurima Chatterjee on March 15, 2023

Tracking website behavior through analytics is one of the best ways to optimize customer conversion rates for your products or services. And Hotjar is one of the most popular software options that help you with it. Besides its user-friendliness, Hotjar offers flexibility and diversity in analyzing what site visitors like.

However, the tool does have shortcomings, and in this blog, we will explore them and suggest 10 alternatives that you should check out in 2023 if you are looking to optimize your website for conversions and track customer journeys more efficiently.

What is Hotjar?

In their own words, “Hotjar is a product experience insights tool that gives you behavior analytics and feedback data to help you empathize with and understand your customers.” It was developed in 2014 for monitoring and assessing user behavior and experience.

Product teams, designers, managers, researchers, and others can use Hotjar for various activities. These involve enhancing websites and goods, validating A/B tests with user data, or quickly identifying UX problems. It combines user behavior analysis, product experience insights, and customer feedback to help you understand why things happen on your website and how you can improve user experience to optimize your product’s or service’s conversion rates.

Image Source: Hotjar

Why Do You Need an Alternative?

While Hotjar is wildly popular worldwide, users have encountered some big limitations, especially in delivering a stellar customer experience. Here are six reasons you may need a Hotjar alternative:

1. It doesn’t support funnel analysis features. One of the more essential metrics that you need to track is where your website users are dropping out of your sales funnel. Hotjar doesn’t offer that feature (anymore), which means you need to pay for a second tool or integrate a manual third-party application like Google Analytics that messes up your automated workflow.
2. No criteria-based demographics available. This means you cannot deep dive into the type of visitors who check out your website or determine if they match your ideal customer personas.
3. Heatmaps are not interactive. This makes the experience of analyzing them extra tedious.
4. Tracking actions requires programming knowledge and subscribing to a paid plan. The biggest appeal of automation tools is that they don’t require programming knowledge (mostly). That’s not the case with Hotjar, which needs you to write code in JavaScript and use its Events API to track simple events such as button clicks. Furthermore, you cannot use events to build funnels, a critical use case for event tracking.
5. You cannot perform predictive analysis. This means you cannot alter the next steps to your customers’ potential behavior in the future (since Hotjar does not let you predict user behavior through analysis).
6. Poorly organized UI and limited compatibility with third-party applications. This makes Hotjar outdated and time-consuming to use for extracting actionable insights.
7. If you are looking to track customer journeys and connect the data to your customers, Hotjar isn’t the right tool for you.

Key features to look for in Hotjar alternatives

Here are our best tips to find your Hotjar alternative and do so effectively:

1. Assess and set your objectives

Let’s start slow. First, you must identify what objectives you want to achieve with your Hotjar alternative tool. You can do so by asking yourself these questions:

• How much do I prioritize excellent customer service?
• What features do I need that I know Hotjar doesn’t offer?
• Do I require heatmaps and funnel conversion tools?
• Do I want to record user sessions? If so, how many?
• Do I want a free trial before investing in an alternative product?
• What aspects of user behavior do I want to track?
• Will this option be advantageous to my marketing or sales teams?
• Do I need customer journey records for assessing lead quality or personalization?

2. Decide on the budget and compare features

We definitely don’t advise investing in software that burns a hole in your pocket, especially if you’re an early-stage startup or a small business owner. Our two cents?

Explore various user behavior tracking tools available in the market (free and paid) and their pricing plans. Check out options that provide a free trial or a discount. Doing this can help you realize whether your budget for your website analytics needs is high, low, or just about right!

Similarly, you must determine what features you actually need in your website analytics software and compare the attributes each tool you explore lets you access for the various pricing plans. This is the best (and only) way to evaluate their functionality and select one that best suits your unique business needs.

3. Check customer reviews and ratings for various software options

Going through the branded content on their websites (blogs, articles, social media, etc.) will only tell you the best things about the alternative tool options. This is why you must check out reviews from real trustworthy users.

You can find their testimonials and other authentic user content on:

• Software review platforms like G2 and Capterra
• Quora answers or Reddit threads
• Tech channels on YouTube
• Rankings and software evaluations written by third parties, including rivals, relatives, and friends.

Top 10 Hotjar alternatives for your business in 2023!

This section gives you an overview of the top 10 Hotjar alternatives you can check out for your business in 2023 and highlights their features and pricing plans.

1. Salespanel

Salespanel provides a data-driven, seamless B2B tracking solution for sales and marketing that only requires one tracking code. There is no need for extra setups or integrations.

You can begin tracking the stages of a customer’s journey with a few button clicks and record customer journey in single customer views that incorporate data from the website, application, and warehouse with further setup.

Every javascript online form, lead magnet, live chat platform, NPS platform, and pop-up can all be used with Salespanel. As a result, it keeps note of not only every visitor but also when those visitors become leads.

Salespanel also offers firmographic and first-party intent data (as accessible) for leads who never opt in to help you qualify them and execute website personalization and dynamic retargeting campaigns.

You can also integrate the trackable link with WordPress and further connect with your CRM, email marketing tool, or any other marketing automation tool for workflow automation.

Features:

• Free real-time website monitoring with no need for integration with lead generation, live chat, or email marketing programs
• Single-user view that combines information from your application, website, and warehouse
• Dynamic retargeting and website customization, lead scoring based on the website tracking information, email tracking, campaign, UTM parameters, and referrer tracking
• Lead scoring and segmentation
• Page view, video watch duration, and custom website event creation and monitoring
• Seamless CRM synchronization (with Pipedrive, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.)

Pricing:

Salespanel offers a 14-day free trial on all of its paid plans, which include —

Basic Plan: $149 per month
Growth Plan: $499 per month
Scale Plan: Request a quote from the company

2. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a website analytics tool that offers many customization options. It is similar to Hotjar’s version before they introduced Continuous Capture.

The heatmaps feature from Crazy Egg is perhaps one of the best ones in the industry. It depicts where your users go and where they interact, and it functions very accurately. You can determine where your visitors are coming from and where they seem to get stuck by listening to session logs because they function flawlessly.

Although every session is not recorded, Crazy Egg samples your traffic and allows you to choose the frequency of sampling, allowing for more customization per your needs.

The ability to create and change content with the help of the convenient editor, which is quite user-friendly, is another area where this affordable option looks pretty good. So even if you’re not a seasoned developer, you can easily change some fundamental elements, and A/B test them to optimize your website.

Features:

• Impressive heatmaps
• Lots of customization options
• A/B testing
• Organized recordings
• Ad traffic monitoring

Pricing:

Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial on all of its paid plans, which include —

• Basic Plan: $29 per month
• Standard Plan: $49 per month
• Plus Plan: $99 per month
• Pro Plan: $249 per month
• Enterprise Plan: Request a quote from the company

3. Clicktale (now ContentSquare)

Clicktale, or ContentSquare, is the parent website analytics platform that acquired Hotjar in 2021 to serve more audience segments. While Hotjar caters to individual business owners, SMBs, and SMEs, ContentSquare serves massive enterprises with website monitoring and customer experience-enhancing functions.

In their own words, ContentSquare is a “digital experience analytics cloud” that offers a variety of advanced functions packaged into a comprehensive solution, for examining and enhancing the customer experience.

Contentsquare targets businesses and has tools for teams in product development, user experience design, marketing, e-commerce, information technology, management, and customer service.

Features:

• User journey analysis
• Session recordings
• Zone-based heatmaps
• Form analysis
• Merchandising analysis
• Conversion and revenue attribution allocation to different page elements

Pricing:

ContentSquare does not offer direct pricing plans on its website. You have to contact their sales team in order to get a quote for your enterprise.

4. Mouseflow

Mouseflow offers the versatility of various functions involved in website user behavior tracking at competitive prices! It offers the usual Hotjar features, and although it is not as efficient, it is a pretty affordable option for small and medium-sized business owners.

With Mouseflow, you can choose whether or not to log all visitors to your website. You can also easily categorize your visitors by operating system, source of traffic, location, and other factors using filters and segments. Even better, you can save a different selection to review later.

Overall, due to its capacity to provide in-depth analysis, Mouseflow is a completely functional substitute for Hotjar. Not to mention, it offers a bunch of third-party integrations for seamless workflow automation.

Features:

• Form analytics, heatmaps, session replays, and funnels
• Integrations with WordPress, Google Analytics, Joomla, HubSpot, and Shopify
• Clean interface with filters and segmenting for site visitors

Pricing:

Mouseflow has a free plan that allows users to record up to 500 sessions per month.

Its paid plans include —

Starter Plan: $31 per month (5000 recordings per month for 1 website)
Growth Plan: $109 per month (15000 recordings per month for 3 websites)
Business Plan: $219 per month (50000 recordings per month for 5 websites)
Pro Plan: $399 per month (150000 recordings per month for 10 websites)

5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel offers a powerful solution for product teams to gain actionable insights about how their users use the various features of their product, what they like or don’t, and how they can improve their existing product to acquire, engage and retain more customers and generate more revenue.

Mixpanel is geared toward funnel analysis and tracking more than heatmap analysis and comes with a funnel function that aids in determining where and why you are losing customers. It has an engagement tool to track visitors’ actions within your website.

Additionally, it has machine learning, which prevents data mining and takes immediate action on insights. Using this platform, you can unify all your data sources and quickly discover your visitor behaviors. It enables you to push notifications to your customers in an effort to boost sales and client engagement.

Features:

• Versatile data visualization
• Compatibility with both iOS and Android
• Customer engagement and retention features
• A/B testing
• Point-and-click analytics
• Event tracking and targeted data collation

Pricing:

Mixpanel has a free plan that allows users to record up to 20M events per month.

Its paid plans include —

Growth Plan: Starts at $20 per month (up to 300M events per month)
Enterprise Plan: $1667 per month (500M-1B+ events per month)

6. Heap

Heap is a platform for digital insights that provides several different categories of tools for data management, data foundation, and analysis.

Heap began as a platform for quantitative analytics, but it recently purchased the session recording tool Auryc and integrated session replay into its main platform.

Besides functions for segmentation, funnels, and user retention analysis, Heap provides quantitative and qualitative metrics while automatically collecting user interactions.

Moreover, Heap offers the option of building a custom pricing plan without getting in touch with the sales team, which adds to its self-serve functionality.

Features:

• Auto-capture of every click, tap, swipe, form fill and pageview with a single snippet
• Data visualization
• Data monitoring and management
• Private dashboards
• A/B testing and personalization

Pricing:

Mixpanel has a free plan that allows users to record up to 10K monthly sessions.

Its paid plans include —

Growth Plan: Request a quote from the company
Pro Plan: Request a quote from the company
Premier Plan: Request a quote from the company

7. FullStory

FullStory is a “digital experience intelligence” tool that provides one of the most sophisticated session replay tools available. It also has funnel analysis, the ability to segment and filter users based on their activities, and much more. It is geared to serve enterprises, hence, comes with a rather steep price tag.

FullStory is equipped with much wider quantitative analysis capabilities. And can be used for your apps as well as your websites. It offers a holistic assessment of all online engagement points for your brand. But what sets it apart is the creative manner in which specific insight is presented.

It makes sure you have access to all the crucial information on a clutter-free interface, from extensive quantitative analysis to crucial qualitative research.

The freemium plan of this web analytics tool comes with essential features like 1,000 monthly sessions, user trends analysis, event funnels, and heatmaps. If you don’t want to invest in its paid plans, (starting at $849 per month), you could still be employing a fine Hotjar alternative to serve your business needs.

Features:

• Standard and custom event tracking
• Extensive monitoring of digital interactions
• Intuitive presentation of detailed insights
• Session replays
• Click-and-scroll heatmaps
• Omnisearch: gather qualitative and quantitative data for every individual visitor, such as IP address, the duration of the visit, the referrer URL, UTM parameters, and characteristics such as page navigation, text entered, clicks, events, and field changes, respectively

Pricing:

FullStory offers a 14-day free trial on all of its paid plans, which include —

Business Plan: Request a quote from the company
Advanced Plan: Request a quote from the company
Enterprise Plan: Request a quote from the company

8. VWO

VWO (or Visual Website Optimizer) provides in-depth website user behavior analysis, much better than Hotjar. With the aid of heatmaps, on-page polls, and session replays, VWO makes it simple to identify the trouble spots and optimize your website user experience.

You can utilize funnels to your advantage to find conversion leaks and ascertain the causes of the decline in traffic. The segmentation feature in this tool is extremely useful, and makes it easier to filter results.

The form analytics feature allows you to accurately figure out visitors’ interactions with your on-site forms and why they may be dropping off before filling them out. You can also decide to view the recordings of the visitors who either didn’t submit the form or got stuck if you want to dive even deeper into the details.

Features:

• A/B, multivariate, and split URL testing
• On-page surveys, session recordings and heatmap analysis
• Form and funnel analysis
• Super-handy segmentation

Pricing:

VWO has a free plan, along with its paid plans, which include —

Growth Plan: $357 per month
Pro Plan: $822 per month
Enterprise Plan: $1438 per month

9. Optimizely

Optimizely offers businesses the ultimate conversion optimization experience through A/B testing, personalization, and website optimization. It makes it simple for everyone, from engineers to product and marketing teams, to create custom websites, mobile apps, and other online assets that help businesses accomplish their goals faster than ever before.

Optimizely comes with powerful capabilities including visual editors, data-driven targeting options, and real-time insights—all created to give its users the most modern digital experience possible by offering insights into how to improve websites and apps and increase their product’s or service’s conversion rates.

Features:

• Digital asset management
• Web and feature experimentation with A/B testing
• Personalization with visual editors, targeting options and real-time reporting
• Intuitive design capabilities and comprehensive analytics monitoring

Pricing:

Optimizely does not have pricing plans listed on its website. To obtain a quote for your business, you must get in touch with their team.

10. Piwik Pro

Piwik Pro comes with an Analytics Suite that is equipped to asses and monitor complete customer journeys across websites and apps. It helps businesses acquire and manage huge customer data volumes, while ensuring user privacy and data security.

Piwik Pro provides in-depth custom reporting and is equipped with a search engine-optimized dashboard, that helps you analyze the digital user experience, and optimize the full customer journey safely.

Features:

• Campaign management
• Creation and customization of data tags
• Easy and transparent consent collection
• Conversion and goal tracking
• User interaction, pageview, site search, time on site, and referral tracking

Pricing:

Piwik Pro offers a free forever Core Plan, and a paid Enterprise Plan, for which you need to contact their sales team for a quote.

Final Thoughts

Monitoring your website analytics and evaluating the data for conversion rate optimization of your website is a matter of great relevance in today’s digital landscape. Online businesses cannot afford to do without it, and you need the right tool to see industry-best results.

However, there is no “one-size-fits-all” strategy here, which means the software working for your neighbor’s business will probably not benefit you. Choosing the right website analytics tool should be solely based on your unique business needs and goals.

If you want a user-friendly solution to track your website’s user behavior and extract sales and marketing-focused data, check out the 14-day free trial plan from Salespanel.