If you’re looking for a Hotjar free alternative that fits your needs—you’ve come to the right place.
I bet you realize the importance of website optimization! When considering a reliable tool for website analytics and optimization Hotjar has proven to be the favorite of website owners. However, to a lot of new and rising businesses, Hotjar may not be the most affordable and useful solution.
Founded in 2014, Hotjar is a website optimization and behavior analytics software for marketers and user experience pros. Likely the reason behinds its amazing demand is that if offers a huge variety of necessary features. Also users find it very easy to install and use.
Hotjar offers two main tools: analysis and feedback. Firstly, Analysis tools are designed for letting you observe and measure the user behavior. Also, it enables you to see the actual activity of users on your site.
Secondly, Hotjar offers a powerful targeting and tracking management through features including Heatmaps, Visitor recordings, Session replay, Conversion funnel, etc. In fact, it targets visitors based on device, URLs, or custom javascript triggers and blocks IPs so you can exclude yourself, your team, and your clients for a more relevant tracking process.
Consequently, it also offers features like form analysis, feedback, opinion polls, survey, and a lot more. These feedback tools are developed to help you listen to what your users say.
Finally, Hotjar also offers integration with popular platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, and HubSpot, among others. In addition to these, Hotjar offers a lot of other options for instance multi-device support, export and save, multi-language etc.
Hence, being the choice of many marketers.
That being said, Hotjar has certain drawbacks too. It does not include a lot of analytic tools that might be necessary for businesses. A lot of new marketers find hotjar to be very complicated and difficult to use. And one big issue with Hotjar for a lot of new businesses might be that hotjar is not free. Some marketers may need analytics tools that are cheaper and are easier to use.
So, we have found out 5 Hotjar free alternatives that might suit you just right!
There are a lot of Hotjar alternatives available online. Some of them are very useful. And while a lot of them offer features similar to Hotjar, others present a very different insight.
We understand that this might be overwhelming. In order to reduce your confusion, we have narrowed down the search to the top 5 Hotjar free alternatives where we have covered free and free versions of freemium plans. So, you can find the right tool for you and your team and enjoy the benefits for free!
Let’s dive into a detailed discussion and see what these alternatives have to offer to us, shall we?
Our top pick is Yandex Metrica . It is a web analytics tool offered by the Russian web search engine Yandex. Metrica is a free tool offered to both small and large scale businesses as well as enterprises to track and understand their online audience and their traffic trends and thus help in business growth.
It includes most of the basic features of Hotjar for instance targeting, heatmaps, session replay, form analytics and a lot more. In fact, these easy to use features often claimed to be even better than Hotjar makes it the best hotjar free alternative.
Yandex, contrary to Hotjar offers features like Filter out spam, control bot traffic, ad blockage user and much more. Also, it allows you to target traffic in real-time and attain extensive user data and in-depth details of user journey.
Similarly, Session replay allow you to record and see every user activity and how they engage with your website for example - clicks, scrolling, mouse movements, keystrokes etc. This allows you to identify road blocks, blind spots and improve them.
Moreover, Metrica offer user controlled sampling and also it lets you track and save data for an unlimited time - for free of cost!
Finally, apart from all these features, Yandex metrica also offers you integration with a lot of other websites to improve your user experience. Besides, you can also personalise and customise reports and surveys to get insights, add or delete metrics and dimensions, compare audience segments, and even switch attribution models. And the best part is the you can do all of it in one page.
Yandex Metrica is one of the best web analytics tool in the world, and it is free. It can definitely be your first choice as a hotjar alternative.
Rating: 4.7 on G2
Although Smartlook is a freemium tool, it offers a website optimisation platform with almost all the necessary features in its free plan -making it the suitable hotjar alternative.
Similar to Hotjar, it allows you to have a strong targeting and insight of your visitors behaviour and also allows you to get to the bottom of every reason. Smartlook offers a powerful event tracking feature that lets you keep track of all the events on your websites automatically.
Again, the free version comes with necessary tools like heatmaps, funnels, and recordings in a limited amount, that allow you get a proper insight about your websites performance.
Also, it offers you to view and share visitor journey to get a deeper idea how your customers view your website. This allows you to identify engagement, roadblocks, blind spots and how to improve them. Moreover, Smartlook gives you the option to use their API, along other softwares to actually put a name to the user recordings and visitor behaviour.
Likewise, Smartlook also allows multi device usage support, notes and integration for easy use.
Here is how to use Smartlook to analyse and optimise your website -
Thus, it can be considered as one of the best hotjar free alternative for you.
Rating: 4.6 on G2
Mouseflow is another website optimisation and analytics tool that has a lot to offer in its free plan. If you are searching for a highly effective Hotjar free alternative, this is exactly what you need.
Firstly, Mouseflow offers very similar features to Hotjar’s including heatmaps, form analytics, session replay, feedback and funnels. It also allows you to segment your visitors by the operating system, traffic source, location and a lot more using filters and segments. Although these features can be used in a limited amount in the free version, it still gives you access. Using this website you can attain a detailed review and sampling using feedback options and interpret how to improve your website.
Second, Mouseflow offers you integrations with a lot of platforms including WordPress, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Shopify etc. making it more easy and flexibility for you .
Again, it also includes multi device support, download and export options and a lot more. Last but not the least, Mouseflow offers documentation and training to make it easy for you to understand how analytics and optimisation works.
To conclude, Mouseflow can definitely be your ideal Hotjar alternative.
If you are looking for Smart Conversion Optimisation, FreshMarketer might be just what you needed.
The free plan of FreshMarketer can be a really good analytics alternative for you given its features similar to Hotjar. FreshMarketer offers Funnel Analysis, Form Analysis, Feedback, Polls and a lot more analytics tools for you to get insights from.
Moreover, it offers you some unique tools like Contact and Lead management, Email builder, Email marketing and more. All these CRM tools can be really helpful in managing your website and your interaction with your customers.
Although features like heat maps and session replay are not included in the free plan, so you cannot get an in-depth analysis. But it still lets you track your visitor's journey to see and find out how they react and engage with your website.
So, if you are in search for a good feedback and analytics tool for you - this can be a good alternative to hotjar.
Like Yandex Metrica, Google Analytics is the web analytics tool offered by Google. Although it is very different from Hotjar, it offers a lot of free analytics features. It offers over 50 features different analytics features whereof them relate to collecting relevant and reliable data in Google Analytics. Others are more geared towards meaningful analysis and gathering insights for the business that will help you have a better insight and understanding of your website and how to improve its performance.
Google Analytics allows you to target and track users to measure and learn what happens on a page. It uses pageviews and events to do so. Through channel Grouping it allows you to view, analyze, and optimize your traffic. It also allows you to segment your users based on these data collected.
Google Analytics also lets you customize your own dimensions and at the same time provides you with the opportunity to create your own set of metrics. So you can attach useful, additional information to hit, session, user and product data that you can send to Google Analytics. Using the Google Analytics API is one of the smartest ways to efficiently work with your data.
Another important feature is that it offers real-time monitoring and reporting. It also offers Add ons for you to integrate and improve its usefulness. Google Analytics lets you integrate with other tools like AdWords, AdSense, Seach Console, etc to Optimise your website.
Apart from these, Google analytics offers a lot more benefits for free including - expressions, filters, site search, custom reports, etc. All these are really helpful in analyzing and improving your website to enhance your customer experience.
A lot of these tools are really helpful and although they cannot provide you with Seo details, it is a good analytics alternative to consider.
So, with so many tools and alternative websites available to you for free, there’s no reason to stick to Hotjar and spend your valuable money. You can choose one from the above list and get on to optimizing and analyzing your website for ensuring better customer experience and thus growth in business!
