Hotjar vs Fullstory - Feature Comparison & Best Alternative

Hotjar vs Fullstory - An overview

Hotjar and Fullstory are two leading user experience analytics tools, each with unique strengths tailored to different needs. For mobile app product managers, understanding these differences is crucial for selecting the right tool. Hotjar is renowned for its user-friendly interface and ease of setup, making it accessible even for those with limited technical expertise. It excels in providing visual insights through heatmaps, session recordings, and on-site surveys, which help identify user behavior patterns and areas for improvement. However, Hotjar's capabilities are primarily focused on web analytics and do not extend to mobile app behavior analysis. Fullstory, on the other hand, offers a more advanced and detailed approach to user behavior analytics. It supports both web and mobile app analytics, making it a versatile choice for product managers overseeing multi-platform products. Fullstory's session replay feature provides granular insights into user interactions, including rage clicks and error clicks, which are invaluable for diagnosing user frustration and technical issues.

In summary, while Hotjar is ideal for those seeking straightforward web analytics with a focus on user feedback, Fullstory is better suited for product managers needing detailed, cross-platform user behavior insights.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar helps you gain a deeper understanding of your users' experiences through heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys. It features a clean, modern UI with tons of data analytics features that make it easy for anyone (regardless of technical experience) to gather and interpret insights.

At the moment, Hotjar only supports websites and web apps.

Key features

• Heatmaps: Get a visual representation of where users click and scroll. This helps you understand what grabs their attention (and what doesn't).

• Session recordings: Watch how real users interact with your site. This can reveal usability issues, unexpected behaviors, or areas requiring clearer navigation.

• User feedback widgets: Ask website visitors what they think about pages or overall UX.

• Conversion funnels: Track where your visitors drop off in the buying process. Identifying these points allows you to make targeted improvements to enhance UX.

• Form analysis: Understand how users interact with your forms. See which fields take too long to fill out, are often left blank, or cause users to leave—crucial for improving form completion rates.

Pricing

Hotjar offers a range of pricing plans for all three of their product areas:

• Observe (free to $662+/month)

• Ask (free to$128+/month)

• Engage (free to $440+/month)

Pros and cons

Pros

• Easy-to-use dashboard and navigation.

• Both qualitative and quantitative insights help teams make data-driven decisions.

• Ability to tailor surveys and feedback widgets for different audience segments.

Cons

• Some users find the volume of data overwhelming.

• Power users sometimes find certain advanced features lacking.

• Some find the data lacks depth for complex analysis.

What is Fullstory?

Fullstory is a pretty comprehensive analytics and session replay tool for web and mobile. It has all kinds of useful features—from session replays to heatmaps, click maps, scroll maps, dashboards, and journey mapping.

It also offers AI insights that make interpretation quick and easy.

Key features

• Session replay: Reconstruct user sessions for a detailed view of their interactions, identifying friction points or unexpected behavior.

• Heatmaps: Highlight areas of high interaction and engagement to uncover what draws user attention.

• Event analytics: Track and analyze specific user events to evaluate feature usage and website performance.

• Search and segmentation: Advanced search and filtering to isolate user groups based on behavior or demographics.

• Alerts and insights: Automated alerts to notify teams of significant behavioral trends or anomalies.

Pricing

Fullstory offers various plans, including custom enterprise solutions tailored to large businesses needing more from their data. For accurate pricing info, you’ll need to contact sales for a quote.

Pros and cons

Pros

• Powerful analytics—great for troubleshooting.

• Deep behavioral analysis.

• Simple UI.

Cons

• The cost can be a barrier, particularly for small businesses.

• No publicly available pricing.

Best Hotjar and Fullstory alternative: UXCam

Now, let's talk about UXCam—a platform that's making waves as an alternative to Hotjar and Fullstory, especially for mobile app developers.

UXCam offers comprehensive insights into user behavior without compromising app performance or UX. It’s designed to significantly give developers and product teams what they need to enhance mobile user experience.

Key features

• Session recordings: Recreate user sessions to identify navigation issues and analyze behavioral patterns in detail.

• Heatmaps: Visualize how users interact with different app screens to see which elements attract the most attention.

• Crash logs: Automatically detect and log app crashes to diagnose and fix issues quickly.

• Funnels: Track conversion and drop-off rates through the app's critical user journeys to improve performance.

• Retention analysis: Gain insights into user retention and engagement to make informed decisions on retention strategies.

• User journey mapping: Visualize the user journey with screen flows and screen bursts.

Pricing

UXCam provides various pricing levels, including:

• Free (up to 3,000 monthly sessions)

• Growth (custom)

• Enterprise (custom)

Pros and cons

Pros

• Offers detailed behavioral insights for mobile apps.

• Effective crash detection and logging.

• No-code custom event tracking.

• Wide range of analytics features.

• Mobile-only—we build features specifically for mobile product teams.

Cons

• Mobile-only.

Hotjar vs. FullStory vs. UXCam: overview

Conclusion

Both Hotjar and Fullstory offer great tools for understanding user behavior, each with its own strengths. Hotjar is user-friendly and great for quick insights, while Fullstory offers powerful, in-depth analysis tools.

However, if you’re developing mobile apps and need deep, actionable insights, UXCam stands out. 

Get started with a free trial and see what UXCam can do.

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