You don’t need to be a marketing expert to know that user experience matters. And in an age when giants such as Facebook, Uber, or even Tinder set high UX standards, all businesses have to go the extra mile to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Luckily, there is no shortage of tools that can help with this. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or marketer, you’ve probably heard of Hotjar. It’s a very popular tool that often gets featured in articles about UI/UX.  

But maybe you’re looking for something simpler, cheaper, or with a different set of features. Today, we’ll show you some of the very best Hotjar alternatives out there.

Survicate

It’s hard to call ourselves a Hotjar alternative because we feel like Survicate and Hotjar are complementary tools. So much so that we even have a Hotjar integration through Zapier. But hear us out—there are a few things that Survicate does that make it a great choice for feedback collection and analysis.

For one, you can use a variety of survey formats with Survicate to get qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers. The tool comes with over 125 survey templates ready to use, but you can create your own polls from scratch. All of them are fully customizable so you can fully adhere to your brand style guide. Hotjar does have a few survey types, but not as many as Survicate.

In short, you can use Survicate to create:

• NPS surveys
• CES surveys
• Customer feedback surveys
• Cart abandonment surveys
• Easy to set and run Microsurveys
• And many, many others

And while Hotjar is limited to your website and mobile app, Survicate goes much further. It allows you to distribute surveys through emails or links, letting you collect feedback from various platforms.

When it comes to pricing, Survicate has a generous freemium plan which comes with one active survey, unlimited responses and all survey features available on the platform for a week. Importantly, the package also provides integrations with a wide range of sales and marketing tools, including Hotjar. If you decide to go for any of the paid plans, prices start at $89 per month.

Sounds interesting? Sign up for your free trial today!

UXCam

The major difference between Hotjar and UXCam is its intended use. While Hotjar can be used for websites and mobile apps, UXCam primarily focuses on mobile apps. According to the company, there are over 37,000 mobile apps today running its software.

The feature set seems pretty comparable, too. You get session replays, allowing you to take a glance at an entire user session or zero in on specific parts of the user flow. You can run event analytics to find out which events in your funnel are causing issues.

Screen flow analytics let you see how users navigate different parts of your app so you can easily spot where they are dropping off. Importantly, the heatmap feature is also available on UXCam.

The tool offers insights about gestures such as unresponsive taps, rage gestures, and the first and last touch on a screen. Some micro gestures you can see in the app include single and double taps, swipes, long presses, and more.

A free trial gives you 10,000 monthly sessions and features such as event analytics, user analytics, and tagless autocapture. As for the paid plans, there is no publicly available pricing, and you’ll have to request a quote.

Smartlook

When it comes to competing on features, Smartlook is probably the most similar to Hotjar among all the other entries on this list. The core features, including session recordings, heatmaps, events, and funnels, are all there. And all of them work across different devices.

With the session recording feature, you get a few useful filters out of the box to help you uncover the sessions that really matter. These include the visited URL, session duration as well as the device and operating system used. 

The heatmaps work in a similar way to Hotjar’s, and there are three different types of them:

• Click heatmaps
• Movement heatmaps
• Scroll heatmaps

Couple this with the filters mentioned above, and you get an efficient way to capture just the feedback you need without anything else that might get in the way. However, Smartlook lacks the survey feature available in Hotjar.

The product offers a free trial, but with just 1,500 sessions available, you won’t get much data. And the data that you do get won’t be stored for too long, as the retention period is just one month. Paid plans start at $39 per month, giving you access to 5,000 sessions and 10 heatmaps, stored for one month. 

Overall, Smartlook is a competitive offer, but you really have to spend more ($111 per month for the Business plan) to get the most out of this app. 

FullStory

On paper, FullStory should be just like Hotjar, but better. It comes with a very similar set of features, including session replays, heatmaps, funnels, and conversions.

Privacy is a huge part of FullStory’s offer. The company stresses that all the data you collect through the app is absolutely legal and you’re not capturing any passwords or other sensitive information. One of the ways to accomplish this is by using something called tagless autocapture which gets ahold of all the touchpoints a visitor has with your website or mobile app.

The heatmap function works fairly well, and even though the color scheme is a bit different than Hotjar’s, the principle is the same. You can get detailed insights from the heatmaps alone; however, FullStory suggests trying out the session replay tool in addition to heatmaps to uncover specific problems.

FullStory doesn’t reveal its pricing on the website. However, there is a 14-day free trial available.

Overall, it’s a very capable tool, and the only major downside that we can think of is the lack of transparent pricing.

LiveSession

Another Hotjar alternative with very similar features and use cases, but also with one twist. LiveSession was built to help two specific audiences: SaaS companies looking to improve their customer acquisition and retention and ecommerce business owners looking to reduce cart abandonment and get more revenue.

When it comes to SaaS audiences, LiveSession has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it unique among the entries on this list. 

The one that stands out the most is alerts. You can set custom event alerts in the SaaS subscription process. For example, if LiveSession sees that a customer is about to make a purchase and they get stuck at the checkout, it will notify you on Slack.

It also allows you to create an entire user journey within the app that you can visualize in your dashboard. Based on customers’ activities, you can also give them an engagement score. Coupled with, for instance, survey data from an NPS survey, it will provide an accurate idea of who your customers are and how to help them.

There is a free plan, but it’s not overly generous as it gives you 1,000 sessions per month. Paid plans start at $65 per month, and you get 5,000 sessions for the price.

Refiner

Heatmaps are just one part of Hotjar’s set of features; the tool also comes with very handy microsurveys. This is also the case with Refiner. 

The reason is simple—it focuses on a niche audience. Refiner offers microsurveys for SaaS products, helping product teams ask the right questions at the right time. Besides, it works just as well with the web as mobile apps on iOS and Android.

Adjusting the surveys to match your website and app design in Refiner is a breeze as the editor is pretty intuitive. There are also plenty of templates for the usual survey types, including NPS, CSAT, CES, and product-market fit.

In comparison to Hotjar, even Refiner’s cheapest plan, which comes in at $79 per month for 5,000 users, is not that cheap. This sounds like a solid deal if you’re after this kind of product, but bear in mind that tracking user events is not included in this plan. The package that does come with this feature will set you back $199 per month.

In short, Refiner is similar to Hotjar, but it was created for a very niche audience. For a usual Hotjar user, it’s a bit overpriced, but for SaaS product teams, it’s a great tool.

CrazyEgg

There are two important things you should know about CrazyEgg. One, it was cofounded by the marketing mogul Neil Patel in 2006, making it the oldest tool on this list. Two, this is the company that coined the term “heatmap” as well as the original heatmap technology.

In fact, the heatmap is the most basic element in this tool. You start with it and then move on to the scrollmap report, which shows where customers begin and stop scrolling, pointing to the ideal spot for a CTA.

The “confetti report” does the same but with individual clicks, so you know who’s clicking on what based on their location, device, previous activity on the website, and more. Then there is the overlay report, breaking down clicks and actions based on page elements. Last but not least, the list report gives you a list of page elements that receive clicks and scrolls.

To go one step beyond the heatmap, you can take a look at the session recording, an option that works very well in CrazyEgg, as expected.

You can try out this tool for free and if you decide to go for a paid plan, it starts form $29 per month for up to 30,000 tracked pageviews, 25 snapshots (heatmaps), and 3,000 session recordings. Out of all the direct competitors to Hotjar, this one probably offers the best bang for your buck.

Wrapping up

Hotjar might be the best-known session recording and heatmap app out there, but it is far from being the only one, or even the best one. All the tools mentioned in the list are worthy contenders for the king of the heatmap throne, and it’s up to you to figure out which one works best for you given your individual needs and budget. 

And while you’re thinking about it, don’t forget to try Survicate for free. While we don’t offer heatmaps, we have an amazing array of surveys that let you capture feedback from your customer effortlessly. Sign up for your free trial today! Also, you can foster your decision making by checking our newest ranking of best website satisfaction tools.

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