As a behavior analytics tool, Hotjar is popular because it’s easy to use and combines heatmaps, recordings, and feedback in one place.
But many teams find it drags down site performance and skyrockets in price as traffic grows. Other tools offer similar insights with fewer of the drawbacks.
It’s worth looking at alternatives to ensure that you’re not just optimizing Hotjar’s bottom line.
Why People Seek Hotjar Alternatives
Hotjar is useful for understanding how users behave on your site, what they need, and how they feel. No doubt about it.
If all you have is Google Analytics, Hotjar is going to give you a much deeper, nuanced picture of customer engagement metrics and what they mean.
And you’re not going to have to hire a developer to babysit Hotjar. Marketing teams, founders, and UX designers can jump right in.
But behavior analytics tools are a buyers’ market. You have a lot of options, the best of which don’t have the murky pricing tiers or risk slowing down your site.
Yes, there are ways to speed up your website that can mitigate the impact of Hotjar, and you can probably puzzle out what it’s going to cost (until your traffic grows).
As I said, there are a lot of options on the market. But I’m narrowing it down to the top three: Crazy Egg, Fullstory, and Mouseflow.
Alternative #1: Crazy Egg
I’m writing for Crazy Egg. So, you’re probably thinking I had to put them on this list. Maybe I did. But the dozens of other articles that put Crazy Egg on their list didn’t have to. I’m not wrong to put us as one of the best Hotjar alternatives, and neither are they.
Like Hotjar, Crazy Egg gives you a user-friendly suite of analytics, optimization, and feedback tools; everything you need to improve the user experience on your website.
Website heatmaps let you see where visitors interact with your site so you can optimize page design and drive more conversions. Along with traditional hot/cold heatmaps that visualize engagement, Crazy Egg provides clickmaps, scrollmaps, overlay reports.
Each one gives you a different way to analyze user behavior. I like how you can filter clicks to see how different segments interact with a page, helping you understand traffic behavior across different sources, device types, browsers, and more.
This is super valuable. For example, traffic from search engines is different from what comes via social media, and Crazy Egg gives you the tools to analyze it. It’s possible to set this up in Hotjar, but off-the-shelf, Crazy Egg lets you segment traffic by 15 dimensions.
Another big advantage with Crazy Egg is the built-in A/B testing, which lets you run experiments to validate the improvements you make to your site. With Hotjar, you have to integrate a third-party tool to do this.
Also similar to Hotjar, Crazy Egg offers a free forever plan, but it’s very different. Whereas Hotjar’s freemium option is a little taste of what you can do with the full platform, Crazy Egg’s free plan functions as a standalone tool for understanding your website traffic.
Think of it as an alternative for Google Analytics 4 (the latest tool Google has destroyed via overcomplication). In addition to web analytics and goal tracking, you get a simple survey tool to collect real feedback from website users.
That means, for $0, you can find out what your visitors are doing, whether they are converting (or not), and how they feel about your site.
With paid plans, you get heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, and errors tracking. There’s a good amount of overlap with Hotjar, but there are also some really valuable tools built into Crazy Egg that you would have to bolt on to Hotjar.
Ultimately, Crazy Egg is a flexible, user-friendly solution, and the in-depth data segmentation options are beyond what Hotjar can do. Learn more about the differences between these two popular tools in our head-to-head comparison of Hotjar vs. Crazy Egg.
Pricing and Plans: I appreciate how transparent the pricing is, and I can’t get over how solid the free forever plan is. Premium plans are billed annually, so prepare for that. But you get a free 30-day trial with each plan which is more than enough time to figure out if it’s for you. How the paid plans break down:
- Starter = $29/mo
- Plus = $99/mo
- Pro = $249/mo
- Enterprise = $499/mo.
Alternative #2: Fullstory
Fullstory is a “Digital Experience Intelligence” platform that focuses on the end-to-end digital user experience, measuring and analyzing user interactions with all of your digital channels.
You can watch what your users are doing in real time with their behavioral insights tool. Being able to monitor a user’s entire history with your website is a plus. They also have a unique feature called Top Opportunities, that automatically analyzes session recordings and shows you the greatest opportunities to improve your website’s UX.
What was most interesting to me was that they say they don’t use screen recorders because they could slow down your site performance and put user privacy in jeopardy, and instead use heatmaps and session replay to give you a full view of user behavior.
Also worth mentioning is Fullstory’s comprehensive quantitative analytics capabilities, including funnel analysis. Keep in mind too that they can be used to analyze mobile apps as well as websites.
My issue with Fullstory is that it’s designed for enterprise businesses. They typically operate in multiple markets and offer a wide range of products and services.
So, a solution that measures and analyzes user interactions across all digital channels is good for them. But a solution that’s truly for enterprises isn’t for small and mid-size businesses with smaller teams and less complexity. They don’t need such a high-level solution. They need something flexible, and easy to use and set up, like Crazy Egg.
Pricing and Plans: Another thing I don’t like is the lack of transparency with pricing. They don’t share any prices on their website. You have to contact them for pricing details, but you do get a demo when you do. Here’s what they say about each plan:
- Data Direct: “For data science and analytics teams to build predictive models or use data for GenAI and LLMs.”
- Business: “For teams that need total cross-functional clarity into their digital portfolio.”
- Advanced: “For companies that need deep product analytics and qualitative insights to grow with agility.”
- Enterprise: “For organizations that need to discover trends, plan roadmaps, and improve funnels at scale.”
Alternative #3: Mouseflow
Mouseflow is a behavior analytics platform and website optimization tool that helps you understand and improve user experience and conversion rates on your website. I like how they’re focused on helping you find out the why behind the numbers and data.
It’s close to a one-to-one replacement for Hotjar. And I say close because it doesn’t have A/B testing and a few other small features, but it can take over the heat mapping, session replay, and funnel analysis.
They’ve got a robust analytics ecosystem that’s actually really impressive. It includes session replay, where you can rewatch the behavior of different audience segments. You can figure out where visitors are converting, getting stuck, and dropping off on your website with their conversion funnel optimization tool.
Their website heatmaps record 100% of your traffic by default, instead of sampling only a part of it. One of my favorite features is the user feedback tool that catches customers in critical moments, like when they’re rage-clicking, and gives you instant feedback.
Pricing and Plans: Their pricing is a little more complicated than I’d like it to be because the prices change based on how many sessions they track a month for you. But they do seem to have an option for everybody and they offer a 14-day free trial. You can pay monthly or annually for each of the following plans:
Essential: For individuals and small teams. (prices for paying annually)
- Essential Free– $0/mo for 500 sessions
- Essential Starter– $31/mo for 5,000 sessions
- Essential Growth– $109/mo for 15,000 sessions
Advanced: For growing teams and organizations. (Prices for paying annually)
- Advanced Business– $219/mo for 50,000 sessions
- Advanced Pro– $399/mo for 150,000 sessions
Enterprise: For large enterprises. Contact sales for pricing.
I want to make a note here about how limiting these plans are. If you get any real traffic to your website, you’re not even going to look at the essential plans. 15,000 sessions a month is nothing.
So, then you go down to the advanced plans, and you’re looking at $399 a month for 150,000 sessions, and even that is low for sites that get good traffic. At the end of the day, the costs can get out of control. For me, it’s a no-brainer. It’s much cheaper to go with Crazy Egg. You get 500,000 tracked pageviews /mo with their pro plan at $249/mo.
How to Choose One of the Three Hotjar Alternatives
Each of these Hotjar alternatives supports individuals and businesses who want to better understand the behavior of visitors on their website. They all have their pros and cons and can get the job done when it comes to analytics. So, how do you choose one?
Here are my thoughts:
- If you simply want a better idea of what’s happening on your site, where conversions are coming from, and the ability to get user feedback, install the free forever version of Crazy Egg.
- If you’re an enterprise and need a high-level solution that can help you with user and web analytics across all your digital platforms, go with Fullstory.
- If you just started your website and it doesn’t get a whole lot of real traffic yet, or you need to go with a free plan for now, get Mouseflow.
Also, take advantage of free trials and demos. You get to actually use the features, get a feel for the interface, and see whether your team is taking to the platform or not.
Remember, Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial with all of their plans, Mouseflow offers a 14-day free trial, and Fullstory will give you a demo when you reach out to them about pricing details. You could even throw Hotjar into the mix and try their free plan for a while to see how it stacks up to these alternatives.
Are These Alternatives Better Than Hotjar?
A lot of you may have come to this article not just for the alternatives, but for whether or not these platforms are better than Hotjar. Because what’s the point of trying something else if Hotjar beats them out no matter what?
My honest answer is that Crazy Egg is definitely better than Hotjar because of the in-depth data segmentation options and the prices are unmatched for what you get with each plan.
Yes, I’m a bit biased, but I believe how much data you can collect and what you can do with it, and affordability are important enough to really matter to people looking for a behavior analytics and website optimization tool.
You could still go with Hotjar if you want to build a custom plan. But honestly, it’s not worth the hassle of putting it all together yourself. Crazy Egg has straightforward plans that have everything you need to improve the user experience.
Full-story could be an option if you’re a large enterprise. Mouseflow could fit if you need a decent free plan for a website that doesn’t get real traffic.
But still, I think Crazy Egg makes sense in both of these situations because it’s a scalable solution that can support an enterprise. And you’re likely here because your website does get real traffic. So, a solution that doesn’t help you with that real traffic doesn’t make sense.
At the end of the day, I’m standing behind the fact that Crazy Egg is better than Hotjar, Fullstory, and Mouseflow.
