Have you ever thought about how users navigate your website? Are they finding what they need, or looking for? Do they need help finding particular CTAs? Why did they abandon the carts? Understanding user behavior is essential for optimizing your website and boosting conversions.

Hotjar is a user behavior analytics tool that uses heatmap tools and session recordings to show how visitors interact with your website. While it applies a behavior-based approach to website analytics, it has limitations. For instance, it can increase loading times and doesn’t work for mobile apps. These are some of the reasons marketers need alternatives to Hotjar.  

We found the five best Hotjar alternatives, which can help you find the perfect user analytics tool and optimize your website for success.

TL;DR

Why User Behavior Analytics Matters?

Understanding how visitors interact with your website is crucial for improving their experience. User behavior analytics helps you identify irregular patterns, which might indicate areas of conflict and concern. Additionally, offering clear feedback options allows visitors to share their thoughts directly. By monitoring this feedback, you can gain valuable insights to optimize your website and enhance customer satisfaction. The following image shows the reason why one should invest in user behavior analytics;

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What is Hotjar? How Does It Work?

Hotjar helps UX designers and E-commerce businesses understand their users. Hotjar is a one-stop solution for user experience analytics with powerful tools like session recordings, heat maps, live surveys, and feedback forms. Hotjar helps you see exactly how users navigate your website. Hotjar’s session recordings give you an idea of users’ complete journey on your website, while the heatmap tool gives you a bird’s eye view of each click, scroll, and movement through which you can identify the areas of confusion and optimize your website accordingly to increase user engagement.

Moreover, Hotjar goes beyond user behavior by capturing user voices. Surveys and feedback forms allow you to collect user feedback directly. This helps you understand their needs, uncover objections, and identify growth opportunities. By addressing these insights, you can create a website that functions smoothly and resonates with your target audience, ultimately leading to more satisfied users.

What Are The Main Features Of Hotjar?

With Hotjar, you can understand how users interact with your website and gather their feedback all in one place. This helps you improve conversions and make your website a better visitor experience.

Here are the key features of Hotjar:

1. Heatmaps
2. Scroll maps
3. Session recordings
4. User testing and surveys
5. Form optimization
6. Behavioral tracking

What Is The Price Of Hotjar?

Hotjar provides a free plan. For its paid plans, there are three options you can choose from: observe, ask, and engage packages.

Observe Plan (Yearly Plan)

Heatmaps and Recordings

Ask Plan (Yearly Plan)

Surveys and Feedback

Engage Plan (Yearly Plan)

User Interviews

Hotjar Pros And Cons

As you know, a coin has two sides. Hotjar has some dark sides, too. Here are some pros and cons of the Hotjar that you should know;

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Top Hotjar Alternatives In 2024

Hotjar is known for tracking website analytics. However, its shortcomings have led product teams to use other Hotjar alternatives that provide in-depth analytics, such as riyo.ai, FullSession, Fullstory, CrazyEgg, and others.

I have broken them into categories, explaining how these tools perform web analysis.

1. riyo.ai

riyo.ai is a unique digital experience analytics platform designed to help businesses with deep insights into user behavior and website interaction. By leveraging advanced analytics, riyo.ai specializes in capturing and analyzing user actions such as mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls using heatmap tools. It also gives a complete user navigation journey through session recording.

riyo.ai goes beyond primary data collection. It offers a comprehensive suite that captures user behavior and delivers in-depth website analytics. This enables businesses to observe users and optimize their websites to reduce cart abandonment or other pain points directly affecting their sales.

Who Uses It?

riyo.ai is one of the excellent and budget-friendly options for e-commerce companies, SaaS providers, marketing teams, support teams, product teams, digital agencies, SEO experts, educational institutions, finance companies, web designers, and UX designers. They can gain valuable insights into user behavior and customer journeys.

What Are Features riyo.ai Provides?

Behavioral Analytics

riyo.ai gives in-depth insights into how visitors interact with your website by providing heatmaps, session recordings, and real-time analytics. It highlights the pain points of the websites and a complete user journey that helps you optimize your website and increase conversions.

Session Recording & Replay

Session recording helps you track a complete user journey on your website. Moreover, session replay allows you to replay individual visitor sessions to pinpoint moments of frustration or confusion, identify areas of high engagement, and gain valuable insights into user behavior.

Heatmaps

Capture each click, scroll, and mouse moment of users on your website Heatmaps provide a clear picture of how users interact with your site, allowing you to optimize page layouts, calls to action, and overall user experience.

Realtime user analytics

You can track live views of who is on your website, what pages they browse, and what actions they take. This real-time intelligence allows you to engage with high-value visitors proactively, answer questions, and potentially convert them into leads or customers.

Live Chats

riyo.ai provides real-time conversations with website visitors through integrated live chat functionality. Address concerns, answer questions, and provide instant support to increase customer satisfaction and conversions.

Form Analytics

Analyze how visitors interact with your website forms. See which fields are most and least used, identify areas of abandonment, and optimize your forms for higher conversion rates. This will give you valuable insights into what information visitors will share and tailor your forms accordingly.

Tiggers

Set up automated actions based on specific CTAs. For instance, trigger a live chat message when a visitor spends a certain amount of time on a particular page, indicating they might need assistance. This allows for a more personalized and targeted approach to website visitor engagement.

Also Read: How riyo.ai Provides Behavioral Analytics With Unmatched Efficiency And Insight

How Is riyo.AI Different From Hotjar?

riyo.ai provides in-depth user behavior analytics through which you can capture the pain points that trigger visitors to cart abandonment and drop out negative reviews. With the help of riyo.ai, you can get user behavior and optimize your website accordingly.

Customer Support and Pricing

If you have any questions, you can connect to riyo.ai directly through live chat, connect directly to the expert team via email, or just submit the query form, and the team will contact you within 2 hours.

You can choose any paid plan from the following three options.

What Are The Benefits of Using riyo.ai?

2. FullStory

FullStory is a user behavior analytics tool that helps users overcome the struggle of knowing their reactions while navigating a particular website. It uses heatmaps and session reply tools to allow users to understand their complete journey and each click.  

This behavioral analytics software eliminates the blind spots in analytics data. It lets you understand how customers interact with web and mobile elements like buttons, form fields, hamburger menus, headers, etc.

Who Uses It?

FullStory is a handy option for product managers, eCommerce stores, cross-functional CX teams, marketers, engineering & support teams, etc. They can gain valuable insights into user behavior and customer journeys.

What Features FullStory Provides?

FullStory provides a wide range of features for analyzing behavioral data.

How Is FullStory different from Hotjar?

We agree! FullStory shares many similarities with Hotjar, such as heatmap tools and session recordings, but it has some unique features. For example, FullStory provides more in-depth conversion rate optimization and funnel analysis so users can identify where visitors drop off the funnel and optimize for higher conversions.

Moreover, FullStory is a good option for analyzing data for mobile apps and websites. Its session recording feature lets you filter events, skip periods of user inactivity, and identify what matters to your business.

Customer Support and Pricing

FullStory’s clients connect with them through live chat or Email if they face any issues.

Plans for every team and role

Professional services

Note: FullStory hasn’t disclosed the plan's prices; if you want to know them, you must contact their team via live chat or email or fill out a form through CTA.

Pros and Cons of FullStory

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3. CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is web optimization software that helps you understand the customer journey better, identify user struggles, and fix errors impacting your site’s conversions. With the help of CrazyEgg integration in your website, you can analyze web traffic, run experiments, and improve the user experience and your site’s performance.

Who Uses It?

CrazyEgg is best for eCommerce companies, product teams, digital agencies, and educational institutions to know the user’s journey and action analysis.

What Features Crazy Egg Provides?

How Is CrazyEgg different from Hotjar?

CrazyEgg is a traffic analysis tool that helps users evaluate their websites’ traffic and identify user problems affecting conversions. Unlike Hotjar, which prioritizes user feedback and surveys, CrazyEgg also provides A/B testing tools that allow users to run experiments and understand user actions.

Customer Support and Pricing

If you have any queries regarding CrazyEgg’s services, you can contact them by phone, email, chat, and CTAs in the FAQ section.

You can choose any plan from the following options;

(*All plans are billed annually)

Pros and Cons of CrazyEgg

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4. ClickTale

ClickTale is now ContentSquare, which provides digital experience analytics that helps you understand customer behavior, identify funnel falloffs, and use insights to improve the customer journey. ContentSquare allows you to visualize each step of the customer journey using filtering, segmentation, heatmaps, and session recording tools.

Who Uses It?

ContentSequare is a good choice for marketing teams, e-commerce, telecommunication, insurance, and finance companies.

What Features ContentSquare Provides?

How Is ContentSquare different from Hotjar?

ContentSquare provides qualitative and quantitative website analytics that help you understand the “why” and “how” of user actions. It also offers intuitive heat maps to learn more about user behavior.

Customer Support and Pricing

It provides support via FAQs and a knowledge base.

ContentSquare doesn’t provide transparent pricing on its website. You’d have to contact the sales team for a custom quote based on your needs.

Pros and Cons of ContentSquare

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5. FullSession

FullSession is a web optimization tool that analyzes customer behavioral data on websites and web apps. Its comprehensive quantitative analysis tools will enable you to identify where users experience setbacks as they interact with your website.

Who Uses It?

FullSession is preferable for product managers, marketing teams, web designers, UX researchers, and UX designers.

What Features FullSession Provides?

How is FullSession different from Hotjar?

FullSession helps you ask questions about the overall user experience to understand the ‘why’ behind the user behavior. However, it won’t affect the website’s loading speed.

Customer Support and Pricing

You can contact FullSession’s team via email and live chat.

You can choose a package from the following three options;

Pros and Cons of FullSession

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FAQs

What are the benefits of using a Hotjar alternative?

There are many lacking points of Hotjar that you should consider, such as;

1. You need to integrate your website with funnel analysis tools if you want funnel analytics data

2. It increases website loading time after integration

3. You can’t analyze user behavior on mobile apps

4. Its limited quantitive analytics features won’t allow you to get in-depth insights

You must choose the best alternative to Hotjar to overcome these missing points.

What is better than Hotjar?

We discussed all five Hotjar alternatives, and all are best in their unique way.

Is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

They don’t serve the same purpose. Moreover, they are two tools that should be combined to analyze your customers’ behavior in-depth.

Is Hotjar for free?

Hotjar provides a free plan you can use at no cost.