Product analytics software is among the most important tools digital businesses use to optimize their offerings. However, with the emergence of new technology, many solutions may not provide the features your business needs to improve your products or help users. That’s why we’re reviewing two popular solutions, Hotjar and Amplitude, and providing an alternative that excels where these platforms fall short.
What is Hotjar?
Hotjar is an analytics and feedback software designed for website and app owners. The platform offers essential features like heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and user feedback collection, enabling a comprehensive understanding of user behavior. With its heatmap visualization and session recordings, Hotjar uncovers user interaction patterns and provides insights into areas for optimization. Its survey and feedback tools help gather direct user input, empowering businesses to make data-informed decisions that improve overall user experience.
What is Amplitude?
Amplitude is a product analytics platform tailored to understand user behavior within digital products. It provides sophisticated analytics, including real-time user interaction tracking, segmentation, and behavior analysis. The popular software focuses on cohort analysis, funnel visualization, and behavioral segmentation, allowing businesses to grasp trends, optimize features, and personalize user experiences.
Hotjar vs Amplitude: features comparison
Understanding the differences between two product analytics platforms is challenging. However, the best place to start is by comparing features.
Below, we delve into what components of Hotjar and Amplitude are the same and what sets them apart. You’ll notice that while both platforms collect essential user behavior data, Hotjar is a bit more hands-on with features like heat mapping. Conversely, Amplitude is more data-driven, focusing on reporting and organizing user behavior metrics.
Hotjar’s analytics, such as filtering, segmenting, and collecting frustration data are paywalled. Amplitude's behavior data is available on free plans but very limited. So, if you are looking for advanced analytics, you’ll have to pay, regardless of which software you choose.
Hotjar
- Heatmaps: Visualization tool to help you identify what page elements are getting attention and clicks, and which are being overlooked.
- Session recording: Record and watch user sessions on your website to track customer journeys while collecting essential events such as what pages a user visited, how their mouse moved across the page, what they clicked on, whether they showed signs of frustration like rage-clicking, etc.
- Surveys and interviews: Autogenerate surveys and autonomously recruit participants with Hotjar’s new AI-powered features.
- Filter and segment data (paid version only): View, sort, and act on user behavior data from a convenient, easy-to-understand dashboard.
Amplitude
- Analytics: Advanced product insights generated autonomously in easy-to-read reports and custom templates.
- Personalized experiments: Test, learn, and release new features using your product analytics, all from the same platform.
- Customer data platform(CDP): Optimize customer data and manage audiences for better models and more accurate results.
Hotjar vs Amplitude: use case comparison
Thousands of companies use Hotjar and Amplitude globally to help improve user experiences. Below are specific case studies with each software.
Hotjar
- LearnWorlds integrated heat mapping and session replays into their workflow, increasing conversion rates by 150%.
- Session recordings helped every.org build a new donation flow after reviewing “painful” user page visits.
- Credit card company re:member used Hotjar to redesign application forms, leading to a 43% increase in conversions.
Amplitude
- Spanish supermarket Mercadona increased basket sizes by better understanding customer behaviors.
- LingQ altered where users met the paywall for their language lesson app thanks to Amplitude CDP.
- Electronics reseller added a link on their app directing users to a value estimation questionnaire after finding they were getting lost looking to price their used devices.
Hotjar vs Amplitude: user reviews comparison
Now, let’s see what businesses like and dislike about Hotjar and Amplitude.
Hotjar
Hotjar has a 4.3/5-star rating on G2 based on 298 reviews.
Here’s what they like about the software:
- “Quick set up and start using Hotjar without needing any technical knowledge.”
- “Superb web analytics tool.”
- “Best heatmaps and behavior analytics tool.”
While there are far fewer negative reviews, it's valuable to hear from disgruntled users:
- “Great tool but could be better and hate the new pricing model.”
- “Great for short-term use.”
Amplitude
Amplitude has a 4.5/5-star rating based on 2,018 reviews, which leads us to believe that more users are choosing Amplitude as their product analytics tool.
Here’s some positive feedback:
- “Great tool for action tracking from a support standpoint.”
- “Most well-made tool for clickstream analytics.”
- “A complete analytics ecosystem developed with an agile and fast iteration in mind.”
On the flip side, some users have voiced these concerns:
- “Overly complex and non-user friendly.”
- “Built for product and engineering teams, not marketing.”
Hotjar vs Amplitude: pricing comparison
Each software offers a free version, but you won’t get access to all the necessary features. Take a look at how Hotjar and Amplitude are priced below to help you make your decision.
Hotjar
- Free: 35 tracked sessions/day, 20 responses/month, unlimited heatmaps, 3 surveys, 3 feedback widgets
- Plus ($32/month): 100 sessions/day, 20 responses/month, filter and segment data, events API
- Business ($80/month): 500 sessions/day, 20 responses/month, ID API, frustration and confusion signals, custom integrations
- Scale ($171/month): 500 sessions/day, 20 responses/month, funnels, trends, console error tracking, Hotjar API, dedicated customer success manager, priority support
Amplitude
- Free: Starter templates, limited product analytics, campaign reporting, unlimited feature flags
- Plus ($49/month): Unlimited product analytics, custom dashboards, behavior cohorts, advanced feature management, custom audiences
- Growth: Advanced behavior analysis, custom metrics, unlimited behavior cohorts, onboarding support, Customer success rep. Contact Hotjar for customer pricing.
Alternative to Hotjar and Amplitude: Fullview
You will undoubtedly better understand how users interact with your website or app using Hotjar or Amplitude. However, the additional features offered by Fullview help your product development team engage with users and fix problems. Here’s why Fullview is a better option.
- No downloads necessary: Fullview is up and running minutes after pasting in a few lines of code. Installation typically takes no more than 15 minutes and can also be done through Google Tag Manager.
- No sampling: Session replays do not sample user page visits. All user sessions are auto-recorded.
- Automated console log detection: Warnings, errors, and frustration are marked on the video progress bar so you can skip to events.
- Cobrowsing: Support agents and product developers can initiate calls with users within their app, take control and resolve support tickets. Hotjar and Amplitude do not offer cobrowsing.
- Simplified debugging: Console logs are recorded in session replays and cobrowsing to help diagnose bugs and troubleshoot problems.
- Usable free plan: Access 4 monthly cobrowsing calls and 1000 session replays.
- Cost-effective: Fullview costs $49/seat for cobrowsing and $79/month for 10,000 session replays.
- Customer ID-based: Unlike other options, Fullview doesn’t anonymize data, so you can see exactly which customer performs a session. This helps customer support teams get in touch with clients if they notice an issue.
- Live and historical replays: View live and past user sessions with Fullview.
- Powerful filtering and segmentation: Surface interesting sessions or pin filter combinations to your dashboard for increased accessibility. If you want to monitor enterprise users who encountered console errors during their session, for example, create a filter and a custom view and pin it to your dashboard.
- GDPR compliant: All data is stored on EU servers (US optional), ensuring 100% GDPR compliance.
Wrapping things up
Understanding your web or app users is an ongoing process that requires assistance from advanced software. While you will gain valuable behavioral insights with Hotjar and Amplitude, they fall short when it’s time to debug and troubleshoot.
Fullview offers your product development team the ability to connect and resolve issues. They’ll gain tools like session replay and console log reports to identify problems and cobrowsing to engage with users to make changes. So, if you want a comprehensive solution, we recommend Fullview over other product analytics platforms.
Sources used:
Sources last checked: 11-25-23
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