--- title: "Hotjar Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra" description: "Is Hotjar the right Heatmap solution for you? Explore 545 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice." source_url: "https://www.capterra.com/p/163516/Hotjar/reviews/" page_type: "reviews" language: "en" --- Hotjar 4.6 (545) [View alternatives](https://www.capterra.com/p/163516/Hotjar/alternatives/) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated August 26th, 2026 # Reviews of Hotjar Ease of use 4.6 Customer Service 4.5 ## Pros and Cons in Reviews Peter C Regional Director of Business DevelopmentInformation Technology and Services, 1,001 - 5,000 employeesUsed the software for: 1-2 years. “Hotjar has provided us with such incredible insights about how prospects and customers actually interact with our website, which enable us to tailor our approach to them.“ June 26, 2026 Peter C Regional Director of Business DevelopmentInformation Technology and Services, 1,001 - 5,000 employeesUsed the software for: 1-2 years. “It does not operate as well when managing multiple websites as it does with a small number.“ June 26, 2026 Sarah F Marketing TechnologistEducation Management, 5,001 - 10,000 employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “The feedback tab function was handy and helpful for users to provide immediate feedback and actually helped us discover bugs and issues in our ecommerce site.“ May 15, 2026 SC Sean C MarketerMarketing and Advertising, 2 - 10 employeesUsed the software for: 6-12 months. “The freemium runs out pretty quickly, and I don't know how accurate the data is (it's hard to verify qualitative data)“ November 22, 2025 RC Radek C board memberEntertainment, 2 - 10 employeesUsed the software for: 1-2 years. “Hotjar offers strong Data Analysis and Monitoring tools like heatmaps and recordings.“ May 20, 2026 ZG Zohreh G Senior Product ResearcherHospitality, 201 - 500 employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “I find integrating with google analytics to interpret users' behaviour a bit confusing. and also I don't see a specific merit in using Hotjar's survey tool instead of other products built specifically for surveys.“ October 21, 2024 Dandu M AnalystMarketing and Advertising, 51 - 200 employeesUsed the software for: 1-2 years. “I am a CRO analyst and I liked this tool very much since it allows us to analyze user behavior with each and filter any specific category of users with each and accuracy.“ February 15, 2026 MI Mihail I Senior Product ManagerFinancial Services, 1,001 - 5,000 employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “After the product was acquired the price was instantly increased while the pricing tiers became extremely hard to follow which added additional friction and made me move to other tools and services.“ October 25, 2024 ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-25 of 545 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use Peter C. Regional Director of Business Development Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "A user friendly analytics platform" June 26, 2026 4.0 My overall experience has been interestingly good. We have gained much better insights about customer behaviour, identifying web friction points, and enhancing lead generation and retention strategies. Pros Hotjar has provided us with such incredible insights about how prospects and customers actually interact with our website, which enable us to tailor our approach to them. I like the Funnels feature more as it helps me to understand where potential clients step back during the conversion process. Cons It does not operate as well when managing multiple websites as it does with a small number. Moreover, it is working perfectly. Review Source RC Radek C. board member Entertainment Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Powerful Behavior Analytics Tool for Websites" May 20, 2026 4.0 Overall, Hotjar provides excellent Security and powerful Monitoring features. It is great for Data Analysis and understanding Conversion Funnels, despite some initial Learning Curve. Pros Hotjar offers strong Data Analysis and Monitoring tools like heatmaps and recordings. Survey Creation is easy, and it gives great insight into Conversion Funnels and user behavior. Cons Hotjar has a Learning Curve for beginners and can feel complex at first. Pricing is not ideal for small teams, affecting Value for Money at higher usage levels. Switched from [Google Optimize](https://www.capterra.com/p/246659/Google-Optimize/) Its no longer supported, it was best app for such things but it was disabled. Review Source AG Annie G. Marketing Manager Alternative Medicine Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Useful Heatmapping Tool" June 4, 2025 3.0 Overall, hotjar was a useful tool in gathering information and analysis of website performance, and perhaps there are more features I don't know about. Pros It gave fairly accurate heat mapping and information regarding user behavior on our website. It was also easy to use. Cons Limits on how many pages it would scan, would love more comprehensive data and analytics, as well as reporting. Review Source Sarah F. Marketing Technologist Education Management Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Hotjar worked great for us until the pricing model changed" May 15, 2026 4.0 Hotjar was easy to set up on our domains and to get running right away. Key features were heatmaps and clickmaps. We also utilized the recording feature which helped us uncover at least one bug in the checkout process. They assign a user frustration score to the recordings, allowing you to sort the most negative experience first and see the user's recording to investigate issues. We were disappointed when their pricing model changed to require more investment to cover the same number of domains. Pros We used hotjar for several years for our web performance tracking, on-page quick NPS surveys, and to measure user engagement on pages. It's a lighweight web experience tools that complies easy to understand scroll maps and click maps. The feedback tab function was handy and helpful for users to provide immediate feedback and actually helped us discover bugs and issues in our ecommerce site. Cons The cost is way too high to scale up for an enterprise company. We were grandfathered in to a lower price point that eventually expired, so we moved away to a more scalable solution (VWO insights). Otherwise we probably would have stuck with Hotjar as it fulfilled all of our needs. Alternatives considered [Contentsquare](https://www.capterra.com/p/161591/ContentSquare/)[Crazy Egg](https://www.capterra.com/p/163520/Crazy-Egg/)[Fullstory](https://www.capterra.com/p/153721/FullStory/)[Mouseflow](https://www.capterra.com/p/163517/Mouseflow/)[VWO Insights](https://www.capterra.com/p/181518/VWO/) Reason for choosing Hotjar Hotjar had the best features for cost, but when their pricing model changed, it was too much of an investment so we switched to VWO which scaled better for our enterprise company. Review Source NF Niccolo F. Cofounder, CTO Automotive Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Our go-to tool for heatmaps, and User behaviour recording, but it is very expensive to get all the features" May 2, 2025 4.0 We use Hotjar mainly for user experience analysis. Heatmaps and user recordings is our go to tool. We've used it on all projects, different websites etc. recordings are good, but we sometimes get overwhelmend by "useless" recordings, where users just idle on a page. Always sort by relevance. Also, free version is very limited, and first paid tier is already very expensive. Pros Hotjar is a great tool for insights on user behaviour. It makes you understand where's the biggest blockers in your UX, where the customers are going, what they're reading, where they're clicking etc. You can easily understand if some parts of your website are useless, or if they're good and grab attention. It also gives you insights on how much time users stay on each page, so that you know what's driving them around and for how long. Cons There's no real big cons in the product itself. However, we use the free version and it does the job in a fantastic way, but it's very limited: -The basic price above free is quite expensive. -You cannot see trends and data for free. just heatmaps and recordings -You're very limited to 35 recording/day on free plan Also, in the recording sections, you can easily get overwhelmed by not-relevant recordings, where users just idle. Alternatives considered [Mixpanel](https://www.capterra.com/p/158740/Mixpanel/) Reason for choosing Hotjar We use mixpanel for our apps, but hotjar is much easier and quicker to implement on normal websites Review Source Theresa F. CRO Program Manager Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Good tool to include in your CRO toolbox" February 28, 2025 4.0 I've used hotjar for many years, along with a few of their competitors. I like that this is one more data point for creating hypotheses for A/B tests. However, I don't make changes to the website based on the Hotjar findings alone since I don't totally trust the maps. I use judgment and combine these findings with data from other other tools as well as best practices and theory. Pros Hotjar helps to identify patterns in user behavior to uncover problems with UX and conversions. I use scrollmaps and heatmaps the most, and compare them by device since Hotjar will show the different maps on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Other features that I don't use as much but my clients and colleagues do are session recordings and polls. I rarely use session recordings as I find them time consuming, even after narrowing my choices with filters. And I use the polls sparingly when I have a specific question I need to dig into. A lot of clients don't want the intrusion to distract their site's users on a regular basis though. Cons I sometimes question the accuracy of the reports. And if the page has a popup, modal, overlay, etc, that can be problematic. Mega menus also appear to be a blindspot. Switched from [Crazy Egg](https://www.capterra.com/p/163520/Crazy-Egg/)[Microsoft Clarity](https://www.capterra.com/p/236349/Microsoft-Clarity/)[Lucky Orange](https://www.capterra.com/p/150695/Lucky-Orange/) My employer has an agency account. But I sometimes have clients who have Microsoft Clarity, so I still use that too. Review Source BJ Bartosz J. Head of Technology Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "High quality assistant to make data-driven decisions" December 18, 2024 4.0 Very wide known tool in an advertising & marketing market. Used as a one source of truth in our company as well. We use it almost every day to check traffic quality and make data-driven changes Pros \- easy to set up surveys to rate & get feedback from users - weekly stats in email notifications - very helpful insights to A/B test websites! (the most important to me, when launching mvp version of a web based application was: top pages and recordings from them; top console errors; av. session duration; top exit pages (to see when users drop off) Cons pricing. Clarity from Microsoft has most of the high priority features & it's for free (but doesn't have this awesome surveys!) Alternatives considered [Microsoft Clarity](https://www.capterra.com/p/236349/Microsoft-Clarity/) Reason for choosing Hotjar We use both, HotJar and Clarity used in different areas (surveys in HotJar, and traffic analisys in Clarity) Review Source VR Verified Reviewer PPC Analyst Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Best of it's kind. " August 11, 2026 5.0 a must-have tool for any CRO pros out there. Hotjar takes heatmapping and tacks a ton of helpul insights through data measurement which can help design processes move much faster. Pros Clean and simple tool to see activity on your site. Great for getting a pulse on the busy parts (and the dead parts) of your pages. (and browsing paths of your vistiors). Cons Not a ton to critique at the moment. We've used crazy egg before and it's fine, but nothing compares to the simplicity of hot jar at the end of the day. Review Source OQ Orion Q. Head of Marketing Telecommunications Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Good first step to website insight" June 3, 2026 4.0 I have used this for years and always found it to be a useful and insightful tool but is not as smooth as others. Pros Easy to access information. Heat maps and session videos are very insightful. This gives even a beginner a quick idea as to what is and isn’t working on their sight and possible ‘sticking points’. But there is the ability to drill down further. Cons Although easy to use it is a bit ‘clunky’ and feels not up to date with other packages. I have used many iterations of hot jar over the years and I like to use it (my initial go to for website behaviour review) but it still feels less smooth to use than one would expect. Review Source David V. Lead Developer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "A Solid CRO tool" August 18, 2026 4.0 Overall, Hotjar provided us with great data and started us on the journey of more advanced conversion rate optimization techniques. Pros Hotjar provides solid insights into user interactions on your website and converts that into data you can use to increase conversion rate optimization. Cons We did notice a significant site speed issue when using Hotjar on several of our websites and that ultimately led us to use a different product. Review Source BG Bharat G. VP, Enginnering Information Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Hotjar for UI/UX monitoring" December 23, 2024 4.0 Decent experience, customer support is also helpful. Pros Ease of implementation and its alerts features. Cons Screen recording is not perfect, many of our dom interactions were not recorded leading to us identify them as bugs. Took us some time to get used to it. Review Source NB Nabil B. Director Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Super in-depth website analytics tool" October 29, 2024 5.0 Straightforward tool to get setup and running, helps sell changes internally using data (e.g. how visitors actually use our websites). Pros In-depth tools to monitor visitor usage on our website, helps provide data for us to make decisions! Cons Would love to see more automated insights on the products - sometimes you end up setting up a number of tools but never find the time to assess them. Review Source IS Ishwinder S. Fire brigade Non-Profit Organization Management Used the software for: I used a free trial ### "Hot jar application is best application " November 1, 2024 5.0 About hotjar experience well and good for real Pros About hot jar application look videos and create Cons In the hot jar application we can see feedback of videos Review Source Ratish K. Digital Marketing Analyst Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Hotjar Really Helped Us Leverage Our Business!" December 5, 2018 5.0 My overall experience has been good so far. Initially, we were worried about the user insights and heatmaps to test the pages/CTA'S for better campaigning of our products. But, as soon as we started utilizing the set of tools from Hotjar we are so happy that we are able to find a quick solution for problem that helps our business grow and provide our customers with a GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE! Pros Have been using Hotjar for more than a couple of years and is the opinion on the tool 1. Hotjar has a very simple and easily accessible dashboard that has Heatmaps, Visitor recordings, Funnels created, Active polls, Surveys, and Recruiters. 2. Heatmaps have really helped us understand the landing pages and test various parameters for many of our marketing/advertising campaigns. 3. Visitor recordings and monitoring are soo good that helped us understand and rectify the issues that users come across. This has really helped our engineering/technical team in identifying the bug and fixing it ASAP thus resolving our customer issues quickly. 4. Had some experience on using the funnels as well which gave us some ideas on how to better modify the landing pages and we were able to understand the content. 5. The polls part has also added value to our business by letting us know on what the visitors are missing on our website. 6. The pricing of this tool is reasonable that students, enthusiasts and start-up companies can easily afford it. We have started with Basic Free Forever plan and later upgraded to Plus plan once our website started getting some good amount of traffic. 7. Multiple filter feature saves our time in analyzing the important pages and metrics. 8. Being a member of the customer success team for a couple of SAAS products I analyzed and learned some good metrics that helped our business grow. 9. Hotjar can be used by any team member like Digital Marketers, Support Agent Cons Although I do not have any cons in my mind regarding this tool I would just like to suggest the Hotjar team to give us quick response for any queries/ issues by providing instant live chat option. Review Source MK Mowshori K. Researcher Education Management Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Hotjar is a platform for getting feedback from website visitors." September 18, 2022 5.0 Analysis tools include Heatmaps, Visitor Recording, Form Analytics, and Conversion Funnels, which let you watch and measure how our users act. Pros Seeing how our site's visitors use it helps me figure out how to improve the user experience. The recording features let me see what people actually see on my site, which helps me find any problems. Heat maps will show us what our site visitors do and what they are interested in. I can also improve our conversion funnels and forms by finding out what needs to be fixed or improved. I also noticed that I don't have to worry about paying for a plan that works for everyone but doesn't fit my needs. Instead, it has different plans for people, businesses, and government agencies. This makes sure that I only pay for the features I want. Personal users with low traffic can even get a free plan that lets them add as many users as they want forever. Meanwhile, businesses will pay based on how many times their pages are looked at every day. The agency plans, on the other hand, give you a single account that can be used for multiple client sites. Cons Prices could be better for new companies. Some things need to be worked on more. There should be ways to record multiple sessions at once in different parts of the site. Alternatives considered [FigPii](https://www.capterra.com/p/199975/FigPii/) Review Source Pedro A. Marketing & Growth Ops Financial Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Best tool to find bugs and pain points in your site" October 14, 2023 5.0 Pros \- Session Recordings - This really lets us know what are bugs and pain points in your site and having the timeline displaying tips were those actions were made is awsome (F.e, you can see in the timeline when the prospect is frustrated);- Heatmaps - This is very important to get an overall page knowing about what your prospects are clicking and looking Cons The analysis can be very qualitative. I wanted to see more numbers, especially with the revolution of AI Review Source BT Benjamin T. Head of Marketing Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 2+ years ### "The best heatmap software" March 11, 2024 5.0 Pros The best parts of Hotjar are the intuitive heatmaps, and visitor recordings, that offer deep insights into user behavior and user interaction based on real visitor data. Once you've implemented the tool - it's easy to of use to get all the data information from your users and visitors, to do research or to improve your website experience. Cons The only issue besides the learning curve could include the sampling limits on larger sites, which may prevent you from getting a complete picture of visitor behavior. Alternatives considered [Mouseflow](https://www.capterra.com/p/163517/Mouseflow/) Review Source Mithil P. Digital Marketing Director Consumer Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "An effective tool for monitor your website's content and more!" February 14, 2022 4.0 I have been using HotJar in all my website projects to monitor user browsing activity. Pros I like the fact that this platform is easy to use and has a freemium offering. This provides a great ROI for us. Cons Customer support and implementation guidebooks are not that great and can be better highlighted. Also, I don't see any notifications about product updates and the latest trends. Switched from [UserTesting](https://www.capterra.com/p/173755/UserTesting/) Price Review Source Lucas P. Creative Director Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Freemium level features offer great visitor insights" April 27, 2020 5.0 My primary use of HotJar is the click tracking and scroll depth features. I'll occasionally use the visitor recording feature. These reports alone provide invaluable information for my web clients to get an idea of how effective their sites are in generating conversions. The surprise benefits of the click tracking is that we can see where people are clicking on spots that are not actually intended to be and I can adjust the UI design to downplay those areas to create a better user experience. The scroll depth gives me a better handle on what important information is not being reached by visitors and helps me decide how to best move that information further up the page stack to ensure that visitors see what we need them to see. Pros Easy to deploy tracking script to sites Async loading doesn't impact user experience Reports are easy to read and can be shared with clients Free tier provides more-than-adequate reporting for most small businesses Cons I can't actually say anything bad about the pricing structure, the admin panel, or the product quality they deliver. If you're a small business looking to get insights about your visitors' habits, this is an awesome free tool. Review Source Response from ContentSquare May 1, 2020 Hi Lucas, Thanks very much for the comprehensive review. It's great to hear that you find Hotjar easy-to-use and you're getting valuable insights about your visitors' habits. I'd like to offer you a small thank you from Hotjar for taking the time to review our software - please reach out to me at mike.cullen@hotjar.com. Cheers, Mike from Hotjar VR Verified Reviewer Full Stack Engineer Real Estate Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Sheer brilliance at work" December 3, 2019 5.0 It is an amazing thing to watch the recordings of the user's that Hotjar captures and consolidates. Pros \- Can actually record user's sessions and accurately identify the same user who is using the site/app after a certain duration - The dashboard is seamless. - Allows categorization based on events and tags. Cons \- Sometimes, when trying to hide the private information of a customer, it went overboard and aggressively hid a lot of information which was part of the app itself and not the customer's data. This led us to not have an accurate depiction of the app state for the customer. Alternatives considered [Mixpanel](https://www.capterra.com/p/158740/Mixpanel/) Review Source Response from ContentSquare December 12, 2019 Hey there, thanks for the review! Super to hear you're getting a lot of value from Hotjar :) Following up your feedback on suppressing page elements... have you already checked this resource on suppression? https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012439167-How-to-Suppress-Elements-and-Images-from-Data Hope that's helpful - it shouldn't be the case that the stuff you want to be able to see gets suppressed as well. If we can help please let us know! The team is available at support@hotjar.com. Thanks again, Alex from the Hotjar team MV Magdalena V. Consultant Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Comprehensive analytics " August 2, 2024 5.0 Combines qual and quant data, allowing businesses for experimentation and ultimately, optimisation. Excellent tool, highly recommend. Pros Initially used it as part of green field platform launch - really helped us understand user behavior (via heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels), which is always useful, but particularly crucial this early on in the product lifecycle. Integration and use can be done by most non-techies, which gave us time and space to focus our engineers where it really mattered. Surveys are also available (though should be used sparingly as we quickly learned too many can also be annoying for the customer :d). Cons not really a con, but performance is something to consider when integrating Review Source mL mook L. senior software engineer Retail Used the software for: 2+ years ### "capture the live user usage of your web product, and analyse the user experience " March 23, 2020 5.0 good experience, but i hope this dose not eat much of end users internet and hope it dos not reduces the web performance Pros It capture a video of the user screen who is using the web product which is integrated with hotjar and store's it in clean directory structure it also stores meta data information of the user session which is really help full in analytics good documentation Cons the captured data back up is maintained only for 90 days, it wold be better if they provide a permanent storage plan and the meta data collected are in file formate and they also stay for 90 days, we had to write scripts to dump these data in to sql tables for further analysation it wold be better if they provide a simple API to do this they do provide a good documentation for this dumping proses Review Source Response from ContentSquare April 14, 2020 Hi Mook, Thanks for taking the time to review Hotjar. We're happy to hear that you are finding Hotjar useful. I would interested to hear more about the data retention issues you experienced - Hotjar retains data for 365 days from the date the data is captured. We do not have any plans with 90-day data retention, so it would be good to dig deeper into your issue. You can reach me at mike.cullen@hotjar.com if you'd like to discuss further. I'd also like to offer you a little something as a thank you for your review. Cheers, Mike Ali B. CEO Marketing and Advertising Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Hotjar Wows Our Clients" November 12, 2022 5.0 We have several clients successfully using Hotjar and love it! Pros Hotjar integrates well with CRMs to track behaviors. We have Hotjar integrated to Hubspot for a few of our clients. We ran an ad campaign for hiring and our clients were able to determine how high the intent of an applicant was based on the time spent on their site. This determined interview priority! Our clients were amazed by the data they could see! Cons Honestly, we love Hotjar! Once we implemented it once, it became easy to use on other sites! Review Source CP Ciprian P. Founder Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "An awesome user research and feedback tool" January 4, 2020 5.0 Pros An awesome user research and feedback tool with the most used features readily available. A clean look and a professional UX makes it my favourite tool. The free plan also has enough views/actions/events, allowing it for a good round of testing before going fully paid. Cons I'd like more popup options, something similar to GetSiteControl. Alternatives considered [Privy](https://www.capterra.com/p/146537/List-growth-tools/) Review Source Response from ContentSquare January 14, 2020 Hi Ciprian, Thanks for taking the time to review Hotjar. It's great to hear that you're getting a lot of value out of it. If you would like to give us more detail about what pop-up options you'd like to see, you can do so under 'Suggest a Feature' from within your Hotjar account and our product team will pick it up. Also, if you reach out to me directly \[mike.cullen@hotjar.com\], I'd like to send you a little something as a thank you for taking the time to review us. Mike Crystal I. Marketing Content Developer Insurance Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Watch, Change, Improve, Repeat" May 31, 2017 5.0 Pros Stumbled across Hotjar after paying way too much with another company. Hotjar is the best thing on the market for price, hands-down. It is easy to use, easy to set up, and you can be recording users, generating heat maps, and collecting polls from day one. We used Hotjar primarily for recordings and polls. Recordings are crisp, easy to watch, and I love that you can add notes to the video WHILE you are watching. And then save those notes for other people on your team to see later. The polls feature is great. Many options for when the poll launches. Hotjar makes it easy to analyze your data, or export it and analyze it on your own. Cons The only downside is that Hotjar cannot record what happens inside an iframe. Such a bummer if you really need to see how your users interact. Review Source Similar Products Featured ## Send me user reviews about this product ### Fill out the form and we'll send a list of the top-rated software based on real user reviews directly to your inbox.