Hotjar

Behavior analytics tool

Visit Website
  • PriceFree-$213/mo
  • Founded2014
  • HQSaint Julian's Malta
  • Employees350+

About Hotjar

Product experience insights with heatmaps recordings surveys and feedback for understanding user behavior.

Key Features

  • Click, move, and scroll heatmaps per page
  • Session recordings with console and error tracking
  • Conversion funnels with recording playback of drop-offs
  • Surveys, feedback widgets, and interview recruiting
  • Frustration signals: rage clicks and u-turns
  • Filtering by traffic source, device, and behavior
  • Slack, Jira, and analytics integrations
  • AI-generated survey questions and insight summaries

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Fastest path from “metric dropped” to “here is why”
  • Generous free plan with recordings included
  • Heatmaps communicate findings to stakeholders instantly
  • Feedback tools built into the same tag
  • Easy setup — one script, no engineering project

Cons

  • Sampling limits on lower tiers can miss key sessions
  • Costs climb quickly with traffic volume
  • Not a full product-analytics replacement
  • Recordings require careful privacy configuration

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Hotjar used for?
Hotjar shows how visitors actually use your website through heatmaps, session recordings, funnels, and feedback surveys. Teams use it to find usability problems, understand conversion drop-offs, and validate design changes with visual evidence.
Is Hotjar free?
Yes — the Basic plan is free forever with up to 35 daily sessions, including heatmaps and recordings. Paid plans from about $32/month raise session volume and unlock funnels, frustration signals, and advanced filtering.
Is Hotjar GDPR compliant?
Hotjar is GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001 certified, suppresses keystrokes, and masks sensitive fields by default. Site owners must still configure masking for personal data, obtain proper consent, and disclose recording in their privacy policy.
Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity — why pay?
Clarity is free with unlimited sessions, making it the default choice for pure recordings and heatmaps. Hotjar earns its price with integrated surveys, funnels, interview recruiting, and a more polished analysis workflow — a complete CRO toolkit rather than a viewer.
Does Hotjar slow down websites?
Hotjar loads asynchronously and typically adds negligible perceived load time. Its script weight is comparable to other analytics tags; test with your performance monitoring, but it rarely affects Core Web Vitals meaningfully.

Reviews

0.0

0 reviews

Write a review


Similar Tools

Best For

Hotjar is best for product managers, UX designers, and conversion optimizers who need to see why users behave the way analytics says they do — through heatmaps, session recordings, and on-page feedback rather than raw numbers.

Use Cases

Watching session recordings to find where users get stuck
Heatmaps revealing what visitors click, move, and ignore
Funnel analysis locating drop-off points
On-site surveys and feedback widgets capturing user sentiment
Validating page redesigns before and after launch

Pricing Details

Hotjar’s free Basic plan covers 35 daily sessions with heatmaps and recordings — real value for small sites. Plus starts about $32/month, Business about $80, scaling by daily session volume, with funnels and frustration signals in higher tiers. Surveys and interviews price separately. Traffic-heavy sites should budget carefully.

Security & Trust

Hotjar is GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001 certified, auto-suppresses keystroke data, and masks sensitive fields by default in recordings. You must still configure masking for personal data your pages display and disclose usage in your privacy policy — recording compliance is a shared responsibility.

Alternatives To Consider

Microsoft Clarity is completely free with unlimited recordings and heatmaps — the obvious first stop. FullStory and LogRocket serve engineering-heavy teams with deeper diagnostics, while Mouseflow competes feature-for-feature. Pair any of them with GA4 or Mixpanel, which handle the quantitative side Hotjar doesn’t.

Editorial Verdict

Hotjar made behavior analytics mainstream, and its integrated feedback tools still justify it for CRO teams. But Microsoft Clarity giving away recordings free changed this market — start with Clarity, and pay for Hotjar when you need its funnels, surveys, and polish in one workflow.

Sources & Review Notes

Last reviewed: July 26, 2026