Hotjar vs Visual Website Optimizer: Which Is The Better Web Analytics (2024)

Web analytics are essential digital data tools that allow businesses to collect, report, and analyze their website data. Using web analytics in your business can be instrumental in crafting effective marketing strategies, enhancing user experience, and ultimately improving your bottom line. So, when it comes to finding the right tool for your business, which one is best?

Hotjar and Visual Website Optimizer are two popular options that often come to mind. Both tools offer unique features and functionalities, making it challenging to decide which one is better for your specific needs. In this article, we will compare Hotjar vs Visual Website Optimizer to help you make an informed decision.

What Is Visual Website Optimizer?

Visual Website Optimizer is a comprehensive experimentation platform that helps businesses analyze, optimize, and personalize their websites, apps, and features. With features like testing, behavior analytics, and personalization, it offers a simple user interface, secure solutions, usage-based billing, and resources such as a library, blog, success stories, and in-depth guides.

What Is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a powerful tool for website analytics and user behavior analysis. It offers features like heatmaps, user recordings, surveys, and feedback polls to help businesses understand how users interact with their websites. It provides valuable insights to optimize user experiences and improve conversion rates.

Visual Website Optimizer vs. Hotjar: Features Comparison

In the following section, we'll compare the features offered by Visual Website Optimizer and Hotjar. Both platforms are pretty different in terms of what they offer, so let's dive in to see which one comes out on top.

Visual Website Optimizer

• Web Insights: Visual Website Optimizer provides in-depth insights into visitor behavior across your website, allowing you to understand how users interact with different pages and elements.
• Mobile App Insights: With Visual Website Optimizer, you can analyze user behavior within your mobile app to enhance the in-app experience. This feature helps you understand how users navigate through your app and identify areas for improvement.
• Session Recordings: Visual Website Optimizer allows you to record and replay user sessions, giving you a firsthand view of how visitors interact with your website or app. This feature helps you uncover usability issues and optimize user experiences.
• Heatmaps: Heatmaps visually represent user interaction data, showing hotspots and cold spots on your website or app. With Visual Website Optimizer, you can easily identify which areas of your site are getting the most attention and make data-driven decisions to improve engagement.
• Funnel Analysis: Visual Website Optimizer enables funnel analysis, which allows you to track and measure user behavior throughout specific conversion funnels. This feature helps you identify bottlenecks and optimize the conversion process.

Hotjar

• Funnels: Hotjar provides funnel analysis, allowing you to track and analyze user behavior within specific conversion funnels. This feature helps you identify drop-off points and optimize your conversion process.
• Heatmaps: Hotjar offers heatmaps that visually represent user interaction data, showing you which areas of your website or app receive the most attention. This allows you to make data-driven decisions to improve engagement and usability.
• New AI features: Hotjar has introduced new AI-powered features that provide advanced insights into user behavior. These features leverage machine learning to analyze user interactions and provide actionable recommendations for improving conversions.
• Recordings: Hotjar allows you to record and replay user sessions, giving you valuable insights into how visitors navigate and interact with your website or app. This feature helps you identify usability issues and optimize the user experience.
• Feedback: Hotjar enables you to collect feedback from your users through various channels, including on-site feedback widgets, polls, and surveys. This allows you to understand your users' needs, preferences, and pain points, helping you make informed decisions.

Visual Website Optimizer vs. Hotjar: use case comparison

In this section, we'll cover what types of businesses should use Hotjar and Visual Website Optimizer. Visual Website Optimizer is a versatile tool for optimizing websites, improving conversions, and driving engagement. Hotjar benefits various teams within an organization, helping with marketing, product development, user experience design, and research.

Visual Website Optimizer

VWO is a versatile tool for e-commerce, SAAS, e-learning, media/publication, and enterprises. It optimizes websites, improves conversions, drives user adoption, enhances engagement, maximizes revenue, and continuously optimizes for better performance and ROI.

Hotjar

Hotjar benefits various teams within an organization. Marketing teams optimize strategies and convert visitors with confidence. Product teams build a customer-centric culture with insights to improve products. Growing companies of 100+ scale operations effectively. Product managers create products users love by understanding their preferences. UX designers resonate with users through user behavior analytics. Researchers uncover valuable insights through user interactions and feedback.

Visual Website Optimizer vs. Hotjar: user reviews comparison

In this section, we'll cover user reviews for both Visual Website Optimizer and Hotjar. Both tools have a solid rating, with Visual Website Optimizer scoring 4.3/5 and Hotjar scoring 4.3/5 on G2 Crowd.

Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer has a 4.3 rating out of 5-star rating based on 589 independent reviews.

Users talk about how they enjoy how the tool is easy to use and how great it is for creating A/B tests and surveys. Additionally, users really appreciate the support that the VWO team gives whenever they experience an issue or have a question. Negative reviews mention that while VWO testing offers a robust suite of tools and valuable features, there are occasional glitches observed during testing.

Hotjar

Hotjar has a 4.3 out of 5-star rating based on 298 independent reviews.

Users talk about how its a user-friendly tool, which helps designers to improve the user experience of their application. Additionally, it records user sessions, which helps to understand how users navigate and interact with your website. It also has a feature to generate heatmaps, which highlights the area of web pages where the user clicks, moves, and scrolls the most. Negative reviews mention that while Hotjar offers a free plan, it comes with limitations on the number of daily page views, snapshots, and recordings. Small businesses with high website traffic may need to upgrade to a paid plan to access the full capabilities of Hotjar.

Visual Website Optimizer vs. Hotjar: pricing comparison

In this section, we'll compare the pricing plans offered by Visual Website Optimizer and Hotjar.

Visual Website Optimizer pricing

Visual Website Optimizer offers a forever free plan that includes abilities like A/B testing, unlimited concurrent experiments, visual editor, split URL testing, and multi-page campaigns. Paid packages start at $392 per month.

Hotjar pricing

Hotjar offers a free plan that includes basic features like heatmaps, form analytics, and feedback widgets. Paid packages start at $32 per month.

Alternative to Hotjar and Visual Website Optimizer: Fullview

Are you on the lookout for a session replay solution that prioritizes the security, reliability, and affordability of your technical support and product development team? If so, explore Fullview as a compelling alternative to Hotjar and Visual Website Optimizer, meticulously designed to streamline your technical support processes.

• GDPR Compliance: Fullview stands out for its complete adherence to GDPR regulations, distinguishing itself from Hotjar and Visual Website Optimizer. User data is securely housed on EU servers, with the flexibility of opting for US storage, and sensitive data is automatically concealed. Tailor-made data blurring options cater to specific censorship needs.
• User-Focused Session Replays: Fullview's session replays zero in on user identity, guaranteeing that data remains individualized and non-anonymous. This proves particularly advantageous for customer support and product teams addressing unique user concerns within their web app.
• Expanded Functionality: Going beyond mere session replays, Fullview extends its capabilities with cobrowsing and console logs. Upon receiving a support ticket, dive into the pertinent session recording, observe user screen dynamics, and partake in a cobrowsing call for issue resolution. Detailed console information, spanning user journey, page views, frustration signals, console errors, device particulars, and more, facilitates efficient troubleshooting.
• Economical Plans: Fullview offers a forever free plan, inclusive of four cobrowsing sessions per month for each agent and 1000 monthly session replay recordings. This outpaces the offerings of Hotjar and Visual Website Optimizer on their respective free plans. For enhanced features, options like unlimited integrations, cobrowsing calls, and 10,000+ monthly session replays are accessible, starting at a mere $49 per seat.
• Effortless Setup: Fullview requires no downloads and prides itself on a straightforward installation process, accomplished by copying a few lines of code into your app, taking no more than 15 minutes.
• Seamless Integration: Fullview integrates seamlessly with widely used customer support software, including Zendesk, Intercom, and Salesforce. This facilitates the viewing of session replays and initiation of cobrowsing calls directly from a support ticket, with relevant session replays conveniently pinned for quick reference.

Sources used:

• Visual Website Optimizer homepage
• Hotjar homepage
• Hotjar G2 ratings
• Visual Website Optimizer G2 ratings

Sources last checked on: November 21st, 2023