Hotjar is a popular UX analytics tool that helps businesses understand how users interact with their websites. Thanks to heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback tools, you can analyze user behavior, remove friction, and create better customer experiences.
While Hotjar is widely used, what might work for other teams might not suit your needs. There are analytics platforms that arguably outperform Hotjar, especially when it comes to AI recommendations, tracking behavior in mobile apps, and the level of security.
In this article, we’ll provide a roundup of the best Hotjar alternatives, highlighting their key features and offering side-by-side comparisons. This will save you a lot of research time and help you make an informed decision on the best solution for your business.
Why look for Hotjar alternatives?
Hotjar is a powerful tool, but your business goals and budget might require something different. The good news is, most tools offer a free plan. This means you can go through this guide, understand the pros and cons of different product analytics, and then make a shortlist of the ones you like.
Our advice is to take these tools for a test drive and explore how advanced their analytics are, what functionalities they offer, and the quality of their user experience.
Pro-tip: Join the ranks of the world's top companies like Notion, PayPal, and HelloFresh that use Sprig to collect and analyze user experience data at scale to build best-in-class products that people love. Here's a look at the Sprig Dashboard:
The Sprig Dashboard shows you a real-time feed of AI-generated summaries from all studies—Replays, Heatmaps, Surveys, and Feedback—to help you prioritize the top optimizations across your product.Hotjar strengths and limitations
In general, Hotjar is praised for its ease of use, the quality of insights available in the heatmap tool, and the conversion funnel analysis feature. Setting up event tracking is relatively simple with Google Tag Manager. With user session recordings, you can discover a lot of optimization opportunities. Additionally, it’s possible to create customizable on-site surveys and polls to collect customer feedback on the spot.
On the downside, Hotjar is rather expensive for businesses with larger user bases. Its pricing increased throughout the years, making certain features that were available on lower-tier plans more exclusive.
In 2023, the company changed its pricing model and stopped offering bundled deals. If you have a well-established website, you’ll quickly hit the daily active user limit. This makes the value for money questionable. Additionally, according to G2 reviews, Hotjar's integration options with other marketing and analytics tools are a bit limited.
Key criteria for evaluating alternatives
When evaluating Hotjar alternatives, you should look at key features such as heatmaps, session recordings, customer feedback tools, conversion funnels, and behavior analytics. It's also important to consider:
- Ease of use: User interface and learning curve
- Integration: Compatibility with other tools and platforms
- Pricing: Cost-effectiveness and value for money
- Support and resources: Availability of customer support and educational materials
Once you understand the pros and cons of each analytics tool, you’ll be able to find the one that best meets your business needs.
The 6 leading Hotjar competitors at a glance
Let’s take a look at the best options and see how they compare feature-wise. After a high-level overview, we’ll take a deep dive into each Hotjar alternative.
Features |
Hotjar |
Sprig |
Mouseflow |
FullStory |
Lucky Orange |
Crazy Egg |
User Testing |
AI analysis |
❌ |
✅ |
❌ |
✅ |
❌ |
❌ |
✅ |
AI product recommendations |
❌ |
✅ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
Desktop session replay |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
Mobile app session replay |
❌ |
✅ |
❌ |
✅ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
Surveys |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
Heatmaps |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
Desktop session replay |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
Rage clicks |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
Scroll maps |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
Feedback widget |
✅ |
✅ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
❌ |
6 best Hotjar alternatives
Want to see each Hotjar alternative up close? Keep reading to discover key features, use cases, pricing, and who the tool is best for.
1. Sprig
Sprig is an intuitive all-in-one product experience platform, with a powerful AI layer across all functionalities.
Building user-centric products people love gets a lot easier with Sprig, which enables you to capture and analyze user experience data at scale via session replays, heatmaps, and feedback surveys. And using Sprig's AI analysis, you can simply ask anything about your product, let Sprig analyze and observe all of your collected user experience data, and then receive recommendations on what product optimizations to prioritize next. You’re just one question away from getting actionable insights—no need to spend hours manually digging through web and product analytics.
Sprig AI analyzes user behavior and sentiment data across your entire product experience to uncover opportunities in real-time.Key features
- Replays: Capture user behavior video clips with AI that analyzes and interprets everything for you
- Heatmaps: See how users interact with your product while AI does the analysis for you
- Surveys: Launch AI-generated Sprig surveys in your product in minutes, and watch AI analyze the results in real time
- Feedback: Capture user feedback in your product and get AI-powered product recommendations based on responses
- AI Analysis: Skip the manual analysis with industry-leading AI that surfaces product issues and opportunities in real time
- Integrations: Connect Sprig with your existing tools to easily share events, attributes, and insights with your team
Use cases
- Immediately find and fix friction in the user journey
- Understand product and user behavior at scale
- Get 3x more customer feedback with bite-sized prompts built directly into your product experience
- Streamline your conversion funnel with AI insights and recommendations
Pricing
- Free plan: Includes 5k monthly tracked users, 1 in-product study per month
- Starter plan: From $175 per month, starting with 2 in-product studies per month and 25K MTUs
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, suitable for organizations looking to scale their product development through advanced user insights
Best for
Product teams, UX researchers, and designers at mid-market, enterprise, and scaling companies.
2. Mouseflow
Mouseflow is a digital experience analytics platform that helps you understand your users and their customer journeys. For example, you can analyze user behavior to identify reasons for drop-offs and then use your findings to come up with a conversion rate optimization plan. This is rather useful for e-commerce companies.
Key features
- Replays: Watch user session recording to learn more about the way they interact with your website
- Heatmaps: Understand user interactions from up close by studying their clicks, movement, scroll depth, and more
- Surveys: Launch custom surveys to connect with users at the right time (e.g., when they click rage)
- Conversion funnels: Investigate why users drop off with funnel analytics
- Integrations: Connect Mouseflow with your e-commerce store, marketing tools, or existing analytics
Use cases
- E-commerce companies can analyze customer behavior to improve user experience, optimize for conversions, and consequently boost revenue
- Product teams can keep a pulse on their users to prioritize improving and building the right features
- You can immediately understand which form fields have high drop-offs (useful for companies that rely on long submission forms for lead qualification)
Pricing
- Free plan: Mouseflow doesn’t offer a free plan, but there is a 14-day free trial available
- Starter plan: $31/month, includes a limit of 5,000 sessions/month
- Growth plan: $109/month, includes a limit of 15,000 sessions/month
- Business plan: $219/month, includes a limit of 50,000 sessions/month
- Pro plan: $399/month, includes a limit of 150,000 sessions/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, supports 250,000+ sessions/month
Note: Annual discounts apply across all plans.
Best for
Small to medium businesses looking for detailed form analytics; it’s also slightly geared toward e-commerce businesses.
3. FullStory
FullStory is a behavior analytics platform that offers a holistic view of the user journey with heatmaps and session replays. It’s known for its advanced session replay capabilities: The platform indexes every user interaction within your website and lets you playback user sessions.
Key features
- AI-ready platform: While Fullstory doesn’t have a lot of AI-powered features, it does have AI session summaries (additionally, it offers data integrations so you can train your own AI and build predictive models)
- Replays: In contrast to Hotjar, Fullstory offers live recordings so you can watch how your users interact with your website in real time
- Heatmaps: Clicks and scroll depth get tracked, but movement and precise level of engagement don’t
- Surveys: Surveys and feedback tools are missing from Fullstory
- Conversion funnels: On top of typical funnel analytics, Fullstory allows you to see exactly how much money you are losing because of unresolved friction
- Integrations: Great integration support (e.g., Google BigQuery, Slack, Twilio Segment, Optimizely, Intercom)
Use cases
- Understand user behavior by analyzing session replays
- Detect and resolve technical issues by reviewing user sessions (e.g., discover what led to errors or crashes)
- Inform your product development plan by leveraging insights about user behavior
- Analyze user journeys to optimize conversion paths and validate your marketing plans
Pricing
- Free plan: Full story offers both a free plan and a 14-day free trial (up to 5,000 sessions)
- Business plan: Available on request
- Advanced plan: Available on request
- Enterprise plan: Available on request
Note: In addition to the above pricing plans, Fullstory offers a Data Direct plan for data science and analytics teams. You get structured, AI-ready data synced directly to your warehouse.
Best for
Teams focused on in-depth user behavior analytics and session replays for product and UX optimization.
4. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange is a web analytics tool that helps you understand the quality of your traffic. With event tracking, you can understand why your content isn't converting and the quality of your user experience. You can then act on these insights to optimize for conversions.
Key features
- Replays: Watch real-time recordings of user interactions on your site and study through individual visitor profiles
- Heatmaps: Study clicks and scrolls around forms, popups, and menus with dynamic heatmapping (each user gets tracked, not just a sample)
- Surveys: Get real user feedback about your product or website
- Conversion funnels: Analyze completion rates, drop-offs, and time to convert
- Integrations: All users, regardless of the pricing plan, have access to supported integrations (e.g., Google Analytics, Shopify, WordPress)
Use cases
- Identify UX issues and areas where users struggle (e.g., confusing navigation or ineffective calls-to-action)
- Analyze conversion funnels to see where users drop off in the buying process, and use A/B testing to try out different solutions
- Reduce form abandonment with form analytics and improve retention
- Use live chat to answer questions instantly, guide users through their journey, and prevent them from bouncing off your site
Pricing
- Free: Includes 100 monthly sessions
- Build: $39/month, includes 5,000 monthly sessions
- Grow: $79/month, includes 15,000 monthly sessions
- Expand: $179/month, includes 45,000 monthly sessions
- Scale: $749/month, includes 300,000 monthly sessions
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Note: Annual discount of 20% applies across all plans. The main difference between offered paid plans reflects in available data storage and the number of monthly sessions included.
Best for
Small to mid-sized businesses and agencies that need a more interactive tool for user behavior analysis, and appreciate the ability to measure live interactions.
5. Crazy Egg
Similarly to Lucky Orange, Crazy Egg is a website analytics tool that helps you improve your user experience and see what’s wrong with your website. For example, if you own a SaaS website, it’s important to attract the right people and build a meaningful customer journey for each website visitor.
Key features
- Replays: Watch recordings of actual visitors using your website to understand which parts of the website they engage the most or what frustrates them
- Heatmaps: Crazy Egg takes snapshots of your webpages and automatically creates five different reports (heatmap, scroll map, confetti report, overlay report, and list report)
- Surveys: Get real user feedback, measure customer satisfaction (NPS score), and learn more about missed opportunities
- Goals: Define website goals, see who’s converting, and run A/B tests against your goals to test different ideas
- Integrations: Crazy Egg has some integration support (e.g., Segment, Zapier) but you can leverage their API to connect to tools that matter to you
Use cases
- Understand what your website visitors want and deliver on their expectations
- Test different versions of a webpage to see which one performs better in terms of conversions, clicks, or other metrics
- Make informed web design changes by sharing heatmaps and user behavior insights with design and development teams
- Optimize your website from a technical standpoint (e.g., page speed, page errors, issues with interlinks and user navigation)
Pricing
- Plus: $99/month, with 50,000 tracked pageviews per month
- Pro: $249/month, with 500,000 tracked pageviews per month
- Enterprise: $499/month, with 1,000,000 tracked pageviews per month
Note: All plans are billed annually. Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial.
Best for
Startups, digital marketers, and eCommerce businesses that value experimenting and A/B testing on the website.
6. UserTesting
UserTesting is a customer feedback platform that helps you continuously gather user insights so you can build better experiences. UserTesting markets itself as the “human insights platform”, underlining the ability to see, hear, and understand real users as they react to your existing product, design, or prototypes.
Key features
- User feedback: UserTesting gathers feedback from eligible customers so that you can continuously improve your website experience
- Recruitment pool: Recruit customers that match your ICP so that you get insights that truly matter
- Surveys: Collect insights not only through surveys but also video interviews, video snippets, photo submissions, and texts and notes
- Integrations: Available integrations with team collaboration and design tools (e.g., Slack, Teams, Jira, Figma, Miro)
Use cases
- Validate product ideas with continuous, in-depth customer feedback
- Unlike Hotjar, which focuses on heatmaps and session recordings, UserTesting provides direct user interactions with video narratives
- UserTesting is ideal for UX teams because you’re gathering feedback not only from website analytics, but directly from users (e.g., you get a more detailed user interaction feedback than Hotjar)
Pricing
- UserTesting has an Essential, Advanced, and Ultimate pricing plan. However, pricing is available only upon request.
Best for
User researchers, UX designers, and product developers who seek in-depth qualitative customer feedback.
It’s time to choose the best Hotjar alternative
We analyzed the top six alternatives out there, explained the nuances, and emphasized who could benefit from each tool. Choosing the best Hotjar alternative comes down to precisely identifying your business needs and understanding the tradeoffs when choosing one option over another.
The usability of the tool has to tick all the boxes for your product team. If the tool markets as advanced analytics but gives you data instead of insights, we’d advise you to reconsider. The entire point of any analytics solution is to empower your team and inform your next business decision.
Make sure you choose an option that allows you to find and fix where your users get stuck, and understand product behavior at scale. With the help of AI, you can understand user behavior and sentiment data across your entire product experience. These insights can then lead your retention and conversion strategies, and guide your future product roadmap.
Many of the world's leading companies — like Coinbase, Dropbox, Wayfair, and Classpass — choose Sprig to power their digital experience management programs. Book a demo today to see Sprig in action.
Frequently asked questions about Hotjar alternatives
What are Hotjar alternatives for mobile apps?
The most popular Hotjar alternatives for mobile apps are Firebase Analytics, UXCam, and Smartlook. These tools offer in-depth user analytics, heatmaps, and session recordings, specifically designed for mobile platforms.
What are some free Hotjar alternatives?
Although limited in terms of features, free Hotjar alternatives include Microsoft Clarity, Matomo, and Zoho PageSense. You get access to basic functionalities like heatmaps, session recordings, and user behavior analytics without cost. Tools like Sprig offer a free plan with unlimited account seats but with a limit to the number of monthly tracked users.
What are some open source Hotjar alternatives?
Open source Hotjar alternatives include Matomo, Plausible, Go Access, and PostHog. These tools allow complete control over user data. You also get customizable features like heatmaps, session recordings, and analytics.