Hotjar
Hotjar is a comprehensive website analytics and user feedback platform that combines heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys to help you understand how visitors interact with your site and why.
Smartlook
Smartlook is a visual analytics platform that combines session recordings and event tracking to help you understand exactly how users interact with your websites and mobile applications.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | Hotjar | Smartlook |
|---|---|---|
| Website | hotjar.com | smartlook.com |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Freemium |
| Starting Price | Free | Free |
| FREE Trial | ✓ 15 days free trial | ✓ 30 days free trial |
| Free Plan | ✓ Has free plan | ✓ Has free plan |
| Product Demo | ✓ Request demo here | ✓ Request demo here |
| Deployment | ||
| Integrations | ||
| Target Users | ||
| Target Industries | ||
| Customer Count | 0 | 0 |
| Founded Year | 2014 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | St Julian's, Malta | Brno, Czech Republic |
Overview
Hotjar
Hotjar gives you a clear picture of how people actually use your website, going beyond standard numbers and graphs. You can watch real session recordings to see where users get stuck and use heatmaps to visualize where they click, move, and scroll. This helps you identify friction points in your user journey and discover which parts of your pages attract the most attention.
You can also gather direct feedback through on-site surveys and feedback widgets to understand the 'why' behind user behavior. Whether you are a solo founder or part of a large product team, the platform helps you make data-driven decisions to improve conversion rates and user satisfaction. It offers a generous free-forever plan for small sites and scales with your traffic as you grow.
Smartlook
Smartlook helps you eliminate the guesswork behind user behavior on your website or mobile app. By combining high-quality session recordings with powerful event tracking, you can see exactly where users get stuck, which features they ignore, and why they drop off before converting. It provides a complete visual history of every user's journey, allowing you to watch replays of actual browsing sessions to identify bugs or UX friction points in real-time.
You can build conversion funnels to track specific user paths and use heatmaps to see where people click most often. The platform is designed for product managers, developers, and UX researchers who need to move beyond basic pageview metrics to understand the 'why' behind user actions. Whether you are debugging a mobile app or optimizing a checkout flow, it gives you the visual evidence needed to make data-driven improvements.
Overview
Hotjar Features
- Visual Heatmaps See where your users click, move, and scroll so you can identify which content captures their attention most.
- Session Recordings Watch real-time playbacks of users navigating your site to find bugs and understand why they drop off.
- On-Site Surveys Create targeted surveys that appear at the perfect moment to ask users about their experience and pain points.
- Feedback Widgets Add a simple tab to your site so visitors can give you instant visual feedback on specific elements.
- User Interviews Recruit and host moderated research sessions with your actual users to get deep qualitative insights into their needs.
- Funnel Analysis Track exactly where users leave your conversion path and watch recordings of those specific sessions to fix issues.
Smartlook Features
- Session Recordings. Watch high-quality replays of every user session to see exactly how people navigate your website or mobile app.
- Event Tracking. Track specific actions like button clicks or form submissions automatically without needing to write custom code for every event.
- Conversion Funnels. Build multi-step funnels to identify the exact moment users drop off and watch recordings of those specific sessions.
- Heatmaps. Visualize where users click, move, and scroll most frequently to understand which elements of your page grab the most attention.
- Mobile App Analytics. Analyze user behavior on iOS and Android apps with specialized wireframe rendering that protects user privacy while showing interactions.
- Crash Reports. Link session recordings directly to app crashes so you can see the exact steps a user took before the error occurred.
Pricing Comparison
Hotjar Pricing
- Up to 35 daily sessions
- Unlimited heatmaps
- Automatic data capture
- Create up to 3 surveys
- Create up to 3 feedback widgets
- Everything in Basic, plus:
- Up to 100 daily sessions
- Filter and segment data
- Events API for custom tracking
- Identify specific user attributes
- Unlimited surveys and widgets
Smartlook Pricing
- 1,500 monthly sessions
- 1 month data retention
- 3 heatmaps
- 2 funnels
- Basic event tracking
- Everything in Free, plus:
- 5,000 monthly sessions
- 3 months data retention
- 10 heatmaps
- 10 funnels
- REST API access
Pros & Cons
Hotjar
Pros
- Extremely easy to set up with a single tracking code
- Visual heatmaps make data easy to explain to stakeholders
- Generous free plan for small websites and startups
- Session recordings provide immediate clarity on technical bugs
Cons
- Can slightly impact site speed if not configured correctly
- Data sampling on lower tiers may miss some sessions
- Pricing can scale quickly for high-traffic websites
Smartlook
Pros
- Easy setup with a single snippet of code
- Seamless integration between recordings and funnels
- Excellent mobile app session replay capabilities
- Generous 30-day trial for testing premium features
Cons
- Session limits can be reached quickly on high-traffic sites
- Data retention is limited on lower-priced tiers
- Slight learning curve for advanced event filtering