5 Best Hotjar alternatives for product teams in 2024

UXCam

Best for Mobile App Experience Analytics

UXCam delivers empathic mobile app experiences.

UXCam is an intuitive platform delivering granular insights into users' journeys to develop empathic mobile apps. Popularly dubbed "the Hotjar for mobile app" — through qualitative and quantitative data, mobile app teams are empowered with a thorough understanding of user behavior.

UXCam's qualitative data is designed to understand the reasoning behind your customer's micro-interactions. Its unique features help product teams understand user frustrations, drop-offs, and motivations to help improve UX and app performance, allowing product teams to make design decisions for CRO and a healthy bottom line.

Relevant features

• Session replays 

• User analytics 

• Heatmap analytics 

• Funnel analytics 

• Event analytics

• Issue analytics

• User ID with user demographic, segmentation, and  geolocation data

• Metric data, including retention, conversions, engagement

• A/B testing and multivariate testing

• 3rd-party integrations 

Pricing

UXCam offers flexible pricing plans for different-sized companies, from multinationals to startups. The free plan is pretty generous and accommodates up to 10,000 monthly sessions, and all options offer a 14-day free trial. Consider contacting us to confirm pricing details.

Pros

• High-quality customer support

• Quick set up and easy to use

• Lightweight, so it doesn't impact the UX

Cons

• Pricing is not available on the website.

UserTesting

Best for Qualitative Feedback

UserTesting offers quick customer opinions on their experience

UserTesting focuses on combining what your users say with their actions. You can collect customer opinions and feedback for insights on engagement and marketing campaign reach.

It allows you to develop and manage written tests to gather customer attitudes on your products, services, apps, and campaigns. You can create customized assessments, including rating scales and multiple-choice questions. It offers a testing panel and user database to target specific audiences through custom criteria filtering.

Relevant features

• A/B testing

• Audience targeting

• Customizable forms

• Engagement tracking

• Multi-channel data collection

• Prototype creation

• Performance testing

Pricing

UserTesting keeps things simple with three plans; you'll need to contact them for pricing information. You can sign up to request a free trial before committing to an annual subscription. Alternatively, run a free test and, within an hour, receive video footage of someone reviewing your website.

Pros

• Real-time analytics and notifications

• Quick detailed qualitative feedback

• Easy to set up and use

Cons

• No pricing or free-trial length details available on their website

Crazy Egg

Best for Heat Mapping Web Pages

Crazy Egg optimizes web pages using visitor usage patterns

Crazy Egg was among the first user testing platforms to analyze website performance visually. It focuses on supporting businesses in conducting A/B testing and marketing campaigns. The heatmap, scroll maps, and visual reporting tools are vital in uncovering how web users interact with web page elements and how they navigate the system.

Crazy Egg is an ideal tool for website analytics. However, its session recordings will not capture all visitor sessions. Instead, it offers a sample of your traffic, and you can decide the sampling rate.

Relevant features

• Heatmaps and scroll maps

• Session recording

• A/B testing

• Traffic analysis

• Surveys

• Error tracking

Pricing

Crazy Egg offers five plans but no freebie this time; however, you can take advantage of a 30-day free-day trial on any plan.

Pros

• Great for CRO

• Competitive plan pricing

• Relatively easy to set up

Cons:

• No free plan

Lucky Orange

Best for Conversion Rate Optimization

Lucky Orange helps you to understand why your web traffic isn't converting

Lucky Orange is a complete conversion optimization suite to increase sales and capture leads. Its dashboard analytics show the number of site visitors and how they arrived at your website in real-time. They provide historical stats to compare website traffic drivers based on keywords, languages, locations, referrers, and more. Comparisons are also possible for a specific behavior, which can be filtered using behavior tags.

One of their standout features includes chat functionality to allow you to communicate with customers through your website. This fully responsive chat includes canned responses, typing previews, and a chat widget with customization options.

Relevant features

• Session recordings

• Visitor profiles

• Form analytics

• Live chat

• Dynamic heatmaps

• Conversion funnels

• Surveys and polls

• Announcements

• Daily email updates for site traffic

Pricing

Lucky Orange has six plans with reduced pricing. You'll save 20% when paying yearly, and all plans offer a 7-day free trial.

Pros

• Email, phone, and chat support

• Training available through online live sessions, webinars, and videos

• An excellent UI design

Cons

• No data archiving functionality for data older than a year

Smartlook

Best for Tracking Behavior on Website and Mobile Apps

Smartlook records customer interactions around the clock

Smartlook provides quantitative and qualitative data for web and mobile user analytics. Its standout features include automatic visitor recordings and heatmaps for precise behavior insights and automatic event tracking for behavior patterns.

Customers and technical support teams can resolve reported issues thanks to their constantly active automatic visitor recordings functionality and user ID details like username or email. In addition, recordings will pick up the user's steps leading up to any issues. This accurate information can help solve individual customer-facing issues quickly.

Relevant features

• Session recordings

• Key user event tracking

• Sales funnel creation

• Heatmaps

• Behavior flow diagrams

• Engagement tracking

• Premium consulting and integration services

Pricing

Smartlook delivers three plans; a freebie, a pre-made plan, and the option to build your plan. Each option offers a 30-day trial.

Pros

• Comprehensive free plan

• Fast one-click setup

• Real-time tracking

Cons

• The UI layout could be improved for easier use

Choosing the best alternative to Hotjar

Hotjar is a popular website UX analytics tool that helps marketers better understand how their users interact with their websites. It enables product teams, UX designers, marketers, and researchers to flesh out customer experience data to support them in making the right changes to enhance UX.

Hotjar says it's an "all-in-one analytics and feedback" tool. Its primary selling point is it marries a selection of key analytic functionality with customer feedback.

Features

Here are some of Hotjar's best features available across their plans: 

• Season recordings - Hotjar filters session records by rage clicks, page U-turns, sessions causing JavaScript errors, and traffic from a specific traffic source.

• Filter combinations can be saved - so you can get back to relevant recordings quickly when a full site survey isn't necessary.

• Heatmaps – Hotjar's heatmaps allow you to analyze interaction behavior with dynamic page elements such as pop-ups and drop-downs.

• Feedback customization – this is for qualitative in-the-moment feedback about your pages. Their feedback widget can be customized to display various icon styles and colors that suit your brand.

• Feedback replies go to a dedicated email – if users add their email address when using the Feedback feature, their response can be forwarded to the people who need to see it.

• Triggered surveys – you can add survey triggers to ensure surveys appear once a user gets to a specific area on the page or clicks on a particular element.

• Form analysis - shows you how users interact with your forms.

Pricing

Hotjar currently offers four packages with four price plans in each. You can choose from observation, feedback, user interview setup, tester recruitment specific, or personalized packages.

Why look for Hotjar alternatives?

Hotjar is a popular and well-established platform and should meet some of your UX analytic needs. However, it may not provide the specific functionality and metrics data required to support your business model.

Here are some reasons why it might be a good idea to take a look at Hotjar alternatives:

• It has a limited number of tool integration options.

• It’s not compatible with mobile apps.

• It no longer offers funnel analysis.

• It slows down the website's loading speed.

• Its tracking events feature requires JavaScript code.

• It has no option to create custom reports.

• Hotjar becomes expensive with more users.

• Heatmap analysis may be complicated due to a lack of interactivity.

• It lacks criteria-based demographic data.

• It doesn't track logged-in users.

• There is no customer behavior predictive analysis.

• The UI layout organization could be better, and there's no option to customize the dashboard.

Things to consider when choosing a Hotjar alternative

Usability

All aspects of a UX insight analytics tool should be easy to use, from implementing the service to pulling off reports. All features should be intuitive to accommodate everyone on the team, whether they have the technical expertise or not.

Reports should be clear and easy to understand to accurately analyze the customer's journey and make the right changes for increased ROI.

Goals and Objectives

Not all analytic tools will offer the functionality required to support your business model and metrics data for insightful analysis. With your business goals and objectives in mind, identify the most essential app analytics metrics the tool should measure. It should provide data on the basic metrics, including the number of downloads, session length, and retention rate.

Integration

Consider how well it integrates into your business infrastructure and workflow. The more software integration options, the better for richer user behavior insights.

Use UXCam for accurate mobile app experience insights

The five Hotjar alternatives in this feature offer lots of high-quality functionality for design decisions based on facts, stats, and trends. Hotjar is a well-established and trusted tool for behavior analytics and feedback data. However, it focuses on web and mobile site users, offers limited app integrations, and its Javascript causes slowness.

On the other hand, UXCam is best for a 360-degree understanding of user behavior for mobile apps. It provides many app integrations and uses lightweight SDK, so your app’s smooth UX and retention rate aren't impacted. 

UXCam is installed on 37,000 + of some of the largest mobile app brands. Consider starting your free trial today to learn how UXCam helps drive business objectives.

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